Breaking it down.
Understanding the few numbers needed for business growth
While our businesses our flooded with facts and figures, few things truly move the needle within the business. Once you’re clear on the revenue the business needs, it’s important to determine the few metrics that matter most.
By finding the 1–3 numbers that matter most, you can use the other information to track progress against the main numbers. In a retail business, two factors typically move the needle: cost per order and number of orders. If you can continually increase the amount each customer spends per order and the number orders per day, your business will continue to grow. The focus and strategies of the business should be pointed in that direction.
Once you know the core numbers for your business, a clarifying question brings new data and information into focus, “Can I use this to impact my key metrics?”
In our business, while it’s exciting to watch web traffic grow, we’ve never seen a correlation between site visitors and sales. Rather than spending countless hours refreshing Google Analytics, we’ve directed our focus to improving the client experience because we know the impact that has on our equivalent of cost per order and orders per year.
Once we truly broke it down, we discovered that the below list includes the easiest ways for us to grow the business. The list is in order of simplest and most effective.
- Increase Effectiveness. Before we try to drive new business, we want to make sure to optimize the most of work already won. When we work starter and more streamlined, morale increases and margins are better.
- Extensions and Add-ons. When we craft a remarkable experience, current customers and clients desire to keep working. We should always be earning the opportunity to keep working on active projects.
- Repeat Customers. Engaging those we already know, like, and trust means less on-boarding and educating.
- Referrals. The natural consequence of doing great work is that satisfied customers tell others. Those are opportunities that our team doesn’t have to go find, rather they come to us.
For us, there is a place for Inbound and Outbound Sales though we’ve when we consider the levers that have the greatest impact on our business, they don’t come close.
