Common revenue stumbling blocks and how to avoid them

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Here are some of the most common barriers to revenue that we encounter as we help our clients. Are you making one of these mistakes?

Your company name doesn't tell them what you sell. We call our company Zhivago Marketing Partners for this very reason. It would have been just as easy to call it Zhivago & Company or something similar - but that would not have answered the first, most basic question: "What does this company sell?"

If you're just starting out, make sure your name clearly indicates the type of product you sell.

If you've already invested too much in your non-specific name to change it now, then add a tagline to your logo that says what you sell. Keep it short - no more than five words. Tell them what you sell, using the words people would use to find you.

It's too difficult to find you. Do you know the most common search term people use to find you? Is every page of your site optimized for that term? Are you constantly creating new content that supports that term and topic? Do you have a blog or customer discussion forum that comes up when people type in your most popular search terms? For example, type "how to make money in a recession" into Google, and our recent blog article by that title - a search term that has been used more lately - comes up fourth in Google search results.

Do you continually appear in the pages of your most appropriate print publications - in advertising and editorial?

Your website doesn't immediately spell out what you can do for them. The first thing on our home page says, "I can help you increase your revenue." That's my promise, my brand. The rest of the site explains how I do that. It answers the questions people have when they are thinking of hiring someone like me.

What is your promise? What do you do for your customers? Have you asked them what they appreciate about what you do? Are you making that promise, right up front, clearly and concisely, when they come to your site? Do you go on to describe how you are going to keep that promise - and demonstrate it by giving them information they can use?

Even if someone doesn't buy from you today, if they just "get" your promise the minute they come to your site, and you give them some useful information, they will mentally file it away for later reference. I've had people call me for help who remember, in detail, an article from years ago. They noted that I could solve a particular kind of problem, and thought of me when they were confronted with that type of problem.

If they do want to buy today, your promise should convince them that they've come to the right place.

You may think you know the promise you should make, but a simple example will show far off most companies are. Let's say you sell picture frames online. Your online selling copy stresses the high-quality finishes you apply to the wooden frames, and the fact that you can custom-cut frames to order. But no where on your site can a potential customer find answers to her most pressing questions:

• How well do the corners fit together?

   

   

• How easy is it to insert the picture into the frame?

   

   

• How easy is it to hang the picture after it's framed?

   

   

These are the issues that matter most to customers, and yet they are not addressed on the common picture frame websites, including those that come up first in Google paid listings: eFrame.net, ArtToFrames.com, and PictureFrames.com.

This last site, which comes up first in the non-paid results when you type in "custom picture frames," does the best job of answering these questions, although mostly in a non-direct way. Corners are shown in the numerous "up close" frame selection pictures, and a "hanging kit" section sort of addresses the picture inserting and picture hanging questions. But even this site, which is highly sophisticated, doesn't answer these important questions in an obvious and straightforward way.

You are not communicating that you have a solution to your customer's problem. Let's say you're smart or lucky, and your product or service addresses your customers' most pressing concerns. Are you communicating this fact to them effectively?

This is one of the most common problems I find when I look for ways companies can increase their revenues. They actually have solutions to customer problems, but they don't make it clear that they provide those solutions. Their descriptions of the solutions are so generic and unspecific that customers never get the message. You could invent and sell the most important product of the decade, but if your copy doesn't help the customer see how the product will help them, your brilliant product will never realize its full revenue potential.

Things are constantly changing. Are you providing value in the current environment? Every day, your industry is changing a little bit. A year from now it will have changed a lot. Are you keeping pace, or just rushing around meeting your deadlines and missing the bigger picture?

For example, there are big changes occurring right now in the web industry. Freelance website designers have been providing crummy customer service to their entrepreneurial clients for years. Those clients had no other choice. Now new tools are making it easier for those clients to take more control over their web content, make changes to their web content, and use fairly decent templates for their websites. Arrogant website designers are going to look around one day and realize that their river of revenue has dried up.

A lot of companies are also blind to how the increase in choices has affected their customers' buying decisions. If you don't make it easy to find you and buy from you, someone else will - and that person is just a click away.

I see so many CEOs who still think that they can continue operating in the "old" way. They think their salespeople can take 3 days to respond to an email someone sends in via their website, or that they can take more than 24 hours to return a call. Not true. The pace of business has changed. Emails should be responded to within hours and phone calls in less than an hour.

Just looking at your current "response rhythm" - and making improvements to that - could make a big difference in your revenues. When someone is trying to make a purchase on the web, they don't want to wait three days for you to respond to a web form request. They want to solve their problem NOW.

If you don't solve their problem now, they will simply jump over to a competitor who will. The company that makes it easy for buyers to complete their transaction in the shortest amount of time is the company that is going to end up with the most revenue - in any market.