The Secret to Consistent Sales Growth

On April 1st, 2022, I will celebrate 30 years as the Owner & Founder of Graphic Connections Goup.

I started this company at the age of 30. My entrepreneurial journey started at the age of 14. As a born entrepreneur, I’m always looking for the perfect product or service or for a new business opportunity. I love shows like Shark Tank or The Profit. In watching those shows, I’m always amazed at how many people have good ideas and products, but cannot execute what is needed to turn them into profitable enterprises.

In all my years as a business owner, I was generally successful in just about every business I started to some degree. But none of them were ever home runs. They were just solid, steady businesses with the same fundamental problem—no predictable system to generate sales.

I have been a student of Dan Kennedy and Gary Halbert for as far back as I can remember. If you don’t know, these two guys are two of the best marketing minds ever. I always knew what I needed to do, but never was able to find that perfect system. My sales mainly came the hard way; networking, cold calls, and pounding the pavement. It worked for me, but the problem was that is not scalable. Success using those methods requires highly motivated and above-average salespeople. Finding people like that is extremely difficult and almost impossible to do in large numbers if you want to grow big.

Dan Kennedy says: “For business growth to accelerate, the demand for your product must consistently exceed the supply. For that to happen, you must have reliable, predictable, consistent systems that affordably and efficiently provide abundant quantities of quality prospects/customers/clients.”

In simple terms, you need a “prospect/customer generating machine.”

In the last two years, my marketing team and I have finally been able to develop a system that consistently generates new prospects and clients for our company. What follows is the formula that we use. This formula can work for any business.

One problem I have had with my printing business is that we have such a wide variety of products and services, it is difficult to hone in on any one ideal prospect. We sell commercial printing, direct mail, design, ad specialties, apparel, signs, etc.; it’s too much. If you ever watched any of those TV shows such as Restaurant Impossible, where some superstar chef goes in and turns around a failing restaurant, one thing they always do is reduce a giant menu to a very small and simple menu. Do the same thing with your business and then get really good at that narrow scope. It wasn’t until we developed a specific niche that we could dial in a sales and marketing system. The bottom line is you can’t be all things all people, so stop trying. Instead, focus on a fairly narrow niche and then be better than any wof your competition.

Once you determine your niche, take a look at the customers you have in that niche and try to find common characteristics among them. Company size, location, how they buy (cell phones, desktop computers or in person?), Personality types, gender, age groups, etc., are common things to look at. Once you know what the ideal prospect looks like, then you can develop a marketing plan to attract that prospect.

This number is vital, and very few people ever do it. The lifetime value means how much money you expect to generate from your ideal customer on average, over the lifetime that that customer does business with you. To calculate this number, you have to know how many years a typical customer stays with you. This number is crucial because it will tell you how much money you can afford to spend to acquire a customer.

The next step is to figure out where you can either get a list or advertise to those ideal prospects. Lists are generally easy to find from a lot of different sources. Chances are your ideal prospect belongs to associations, attends events, or hangs out on specific social media platforms.

In today’s world, digital technology allows you to target specific people very easily. Use technology to your advantage. But don’t think that all you have to do is press a few buttons on the computer, and the magic happens. Use digital advertising, direct mail advertising, and human contact to make the biggest impact on your ideal prospect. A huge part of our marketing strategy is to attend industry events where our ideal prospects hang out. From those events, we can meet them in person and also establish a presence in the industry. We then follow along with direct mail, email, and telemarketing phone calls to stay in touch and get them to raise their hand with interest.

All the strategies mentioned above are important, but this one has been the most effective tool in allowing us to scale up. Essentially, we separate the appointment setting function from the sales closing function. Our sales reps spend most of the day on preset appointments over the phone. Our telemarketing team set up those appointments. The telemarketing team only calls prospects who have raised their hand as a result of advertising on social media, partner relationships, direct mail, or had been contacted at an event we attended. We have found over the years is that in sales, there are hunters, and there are closers. Most of the time, those two sets of skills do not exist in the same person. So we separate them. The hunters are on the phone as telemarketers setting up appointments. The closers then handle the appointments to close the sale.

Have a predetermined system to nurture existing customers/clients so that they keep coming back and ordering more.

This is also a huge factor in seeing steady sales growth. So many companies focus almost all their marketing efforts on finding new prospects and customers and then forget that there is gold in existing clients. We have a very comprehensive system to stay in front of our existing clients. This newsletter is one of those tools. We send it monthly in the mail. We don’t shortcut with an emailed PDF but send a physical piece of paper in the mail. We also send regular emails. We do videos. We send all new clients a “shock and awe” kit. This is a package that costs us roughly $25 that has some nice gifts that are useful to the clients. We send that as a thank you. Once a year, we send out calendars and custom notepads to every client. Plus, we have our sales team and telemarketing team occasionally make courtesy calls to see how clients are doing. All this activity keeps us top of mind with our clients so that when it does come time to order again, they think of us first and feel good about the relationship.

Yes, this effort costs a lot of money, but we feel it pays us back multiple-fold in increased customer retention. It is hard to grow if every time you gain a new customer, you lose one due to neglect.

This is the most exciting part. Because we have followed this strategic plan, we now know exactly what we need to do if we want to grow sales. We know how much it costs to acquire a new client. We simply turn up the flow of the system that is already working.

Every business is different, but the basic concept here will apply to most. Of course, if your business does not use salespeople, a lot of this might not make sense.