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4 Ways to Grow Your Business—#1 Winning New Customers

First things first

1. Win new customers of the right type.

2. Increase the number of times they deal with you.

3. Increase your average sale or ‘transaction value.’

4. Improve the effectiveness and processes within your business to ensure achievement of the first 3!

Winning customers is where most business owners focus their marketing energy and it is where it all starts. Given that, then, it’s fitting to explore this area first! (Each of the others will be explored in turn.)

There are, without a doubt, hundreds upon hundreds of ways to win new customers. Here you’ll find a list of just some of those key strategies to do just that. 

‘Client acquisition’—that is, winning new customers—has been the focus of advertising and marketing for many years. To make it easier for you, we’ve broken this list of ideas into 5 major areas to help you win new customers and to itemize the topics you could be working through with the Business Growth Team at FVBK.

Advertising & letter writing

To improve your advertising and letter writing to win more new customers, target marketing rather than the ‘shotgun’ approach is important. That is, identifying your ideal customer or your ‘customer profile’ can make your marketing more efficient and more results-driven.

Here you’ll focus on targeting your marketing better to reach the potential customers you’re after. You’ll discover the value of aiming for a specific group of more responsive people—the right type of people for your product or service—instead of mass marketing, hoping against hope to hit the right targets.

Advertorials and direct response advertising rather than traditional advertising will also win more customers for you. Here’s what’s important in this area: writing headlines that really grab your readers, creating offers to entice people to you and win new business, guarantees, understanding the concept of ‘What’s In It—For Me?’ response devices, a call to action, and much more.

It is vital that all your advertising and marketing material talk about the benefits customers will receive rather than just the features of your products or services or your business. For example, people don’t want the drill they’re purchasing at the hardware store—they want the hole it can make for them! So be sure and stick to explaining the benefits of your products and services. That way, people will be able to identify the value in it.

You see, it’s important to educate to motivate customers to buy. If they don’t fully understand what’s in it for them, what benefits they can expect to gain and why one thing is better than another, they’ll fail to make the right decision.

Using testimonials, graphics, layout technique, specific fonts, and lettering will keep people reading and will help educate them about your business. 

Specific techniques should be applied to phone directory advertising. This is a different medium, and it requires some special attention to generate the best results possible.

Using a phone-mail-phone strategy—where you call to identify the right person to send a direct mail campaign to, send the campaign including key elements just mentioned, and then follow up by phone again—will always generate a greater response than a cold mailing.

Testing and measuring your advertising and direct mail techniques is mandatory to continually increase the response to your marketing. It could also save you thousands in lost dollars in mediums that just don’t work. Without monitoring and measuring, you won’t know if you’re winning or losing on your marketing investment. In fact, it really will be more like a gamble.

Unique Core Differentiators

People buy differences they perceive between one business and the next, between your business, for example, and your competitors. Unique Core Differentiators clearly show the differences to your potential customers.

In fact, they help potential customers understand the added value, expertise, or service you might offer in a succinct, saleable way.

There are 3 kinds of UCDs. The first is an actual UCD, something is genuinely unique about the way you do business. The second is perceived, that is, people perceive your business or products or services to be different than your competitors, even if they actually are not that different! And the third is a created UCD. Here, you create something different about your business—the way you serve people, the processes within your business, or how you actually serve customers.

Sales systems and techniques

Selling is not the mystery everybody thinks it is. Put simply, people buy from people they trust. It’s important to think of selling this way:

If a person inquires about something you do, they’re asking for help in solving a problem or a need they might have. If you fail to do everything possible to give customers enough reasons to buy from you, you’ve done them a DISSERVICE.

This is particularly true if you know very well that you do offer a good quality product or service and that you may well be better at what you do than your competitors.

Regardless, they still have to go out there and find someone to help them solve this problem or a need. They still have to spend time and money looking for that person—who, at the end of the day, may not offer the value you do. So letting someone leave your business, someone who’s already said they need help simply by being there, is a shame. And an expensive one!

Creating ways of selling, such as a sales system and selling tools and techniques for your business, will build that trust and the sales themselves. Better yet, your customers will walk away happy, having just found the solution they were looking for.

Mapping out sales forecasts is also crucial to increasing sales. You see, it’s much easier to get to where you’re going—if you know where that is! Sales forecasts help you find that direction and give you a solid path to follow!

Some other issues to consider are sales tools, documents that help educate your customers, cross-selling, upselling, and packaging products or services together. Conversion rates—the difference between the number of inquiries you receive and the number of sales you make—are like taking the sales pulse of your business. 

Follow-up systems are critical here, too. 80% of sales are made after the 5th contact. That makes it well worth your while to find out more about this area.

Body language can also be a tool or work against you in a sales situation. This should also be reviewed. 

Avoiding the word ‘quote’ could also increase your sales. Simply put, ‘quote’ = price. Because it’s not a good idea generally to have your potential customers focused on price, the word has to go!

Out of the box, different ideas, terrific tools to capture passing trade, and using merchandising techniques can also improve sales.

‘Professional selling’—creating the opportunity and the rapport, understanding the prospective customer’s real needs by asking detailed questions, selling on ‘purpose,’ talking in the customer’s language, gathering feedback at every step, making it easy for your customers to buy from you, empathizing with their concerns and reassuring the customer—are all crucial steps in the sales process.

The phone

The phone is one of the most wasted resources in business! Most people treat callers with disdain: ‘How dare you interrupt my busy day!’

And most just don’t know how to convert an inquiry over the phone to a sale. Worse yet, many just don’t have a clue about general phone manners. 

Some are afraid to use to the phone to follow up with potential customers or to generate new leads, not being sure what to say and so on. These issues MUST be addressed if you’re going to truly grow your business and leverage your marketing dollars.

The development of minimum performance standards over the phone and the use of phone scripts to handle both incoming and outgoing phone calls may alleviate some of that anxiety, increase conversions, and increase sales.

You see, most business owners are looking to improve their advertising or their direct mail, for example, so they can generate more inquiries. Unfortunately, because of poor phone techniques and a lack of team training, most businesses are not doing enough with the leads they’re already getting—so why go out and spend a fortune and generate more only to burn them on the other end of the phone line?

Conversely, improving phone handling and over-the-phone techniques is a pivotal area for increasing sales and profitability.

Other promotions

Issues like promotions schedules can help you win new customers. One of the keys to marketing is being constant and consistent. Promotions schedules help you maintain activity and so maintain sales to new customers.

Creating special events, holding value-added seminars and competitions could all assist in winning new customers.

Improving direct mail, catalogues, trade show exhibits, and strategies…TV and radio…and generating more free publicity through public relations—all these can also increase people’s positive exposure to your business.

Networking, having other businesses sell for you, winning leads from competitors, or tapping into buying lists from other companies can give you access to new customers you may not have otherwise reached.

Harnessing the power of ‘word of mouth’ by creating a referral system could, in fact, double your business for very little investment. You see, almost every business owner, perhaps yourself, too, feels that ‘word of mouth’—customers talking about you to others—is a huge source of business. And yet, most do not have a system in place to capture these referrals regularly. Most simply leave the customers to their own devices and hope for the best. 

Now imagine what would happen if every single customer you had was invited to refer at least one other possible customer to you? You could double your customer base. At the very worst, you’d increase the number of people referred to your business every day! Better yet, people who’ve been referred to you are, in fact, 4 times more likely to buy from you. You see, they already trust you because they trust the person who referred you!

Another very powerful tool here is establishing host-style arrangements, where you and a noncompeting business with the same type of customers complete ongoing, joint promotions to each other’s client bases. This means that you could access twice your client base of your ideal type of customers, not just anyone mind you, in a blink of the eye. And because these arrangements usually mean that the business is endorsing you to a customer, that customer is again 4 times more likely to buy from you.

Even on briefly reviewing these ideas, you’ll probably find many ways to win new business that you haven’t tried or, in some cases, haven’t even heard of—so try some of these ideas! It will also be critical to really learn, understand, and implement these ideas in full.

Your Action Plan: Win more new customers by reviewing these ideas in depth