Revenue Journal®

At any given time, in addition to my Fortune 100 and medium-sized company clients, I always have a couple of entrepreneurs on my client list. I enjoy helping startups, and increasing the revenues of existing small businesses.

Typically, someone who starts a business is an expert in a particular area. In other words, their core competency doesn't lie in marketing and sales. As a result, they are constantly searching for any trick or technique that will help them make more sales.

This search - and in some cases it is a desperate search - makes them easy prey for any halfway plausible idea. They are constantly reading articles and books, talking to friends, and listening to vendors selling ad space, website design, direct mail, and so on. I often get questions by email - "I just talked to So and So, and they said..." Or, "I just read an article that said..." The questions are always about doing a specific thing that will supposedly help their sales increase.

The truth is, it's never one thing. And it's never the thing that you just read or that someone just told you.

100% of the time, the answer is right in front of you. Yes, I said 100% of the time. Always. Here's how you find the answers you seek.

1. Your own product line. Stop and think about the way your business is set up now. What are you selling? What sells well? What hasn't been selling for a long time? Have you done anything about this? Have you tried to find out why some items are selling and others aren't? Have you called people who bought the items that don't sell well, and found out more about why they bought them, how they use them, and what they appreciate about them?
   

   It's easy to never get around to making these important inquiries. We all get so caught up in the day-to-day that we never stop and make these important changes.
   

2. Your own website and shopping cart. If you have products or services that are not selling well, it may be because your website (or whatever other method you use to sell) is not making it easy for the customer to buy. Maybe the process is too complex.
   

   For example, one entrepreneur I'm working with was "hiding" her products behind a "shoppe" link on her home page. Anyone looking for her products had to figure out where the products were before they could buy. The new site we've designed displays the product line categories - clearly - right on the home page.
   

3. Your own customers. For some reason, people are afraid to call their own customers and ask them questions about their preferences and their buying process, because:
   
   • They think customers will consider it an intrusion. Not true. Customers won't consider it an intrustion if you approach them with courtesy, listen carefully, and actually have a conversation (rather than simply surveying them).
     

   • They think customers won't talk to them. Wrong again. Even the busiest people love to talk about things they know a lot about. Someone who has spent several hours (or days or weeks) trying to make a buying decision will be more than happy to talk about their needs, preferences, and experiences.
     

   • They're afraid that customers may say something that they don't want to hear. Yes, it's true that customers can say negative things. But after hearing seven customers say that the same thing, you will have a sense of relief, not dread. You will know what really needs to be fixed. You will have discovered the worst. Plus, customers almost always have great ideas about how to fix the problem.
     

     One of the questions we like to ask is, "If you were the CEO of [the company] tomorrow, what's the first thing you would fix?" We get some imaginative and illuminating answers to that question, especially from the business managers and entrepreneurs. Nine times out of ten, they've even thought about that subject beforehand, and their advice is right on the mark.
     

4. Your competition. You can learn a lot from your competitors, if you look at what they're doing with an open mind. Do they send out an informative newsletter? Do they make it easy for the website visitor to obtain more information on a product line, and is that information organized by "type of problem"? Do they feature new products on their home page, in the same place each time?
   

   Have you ever asked a friend to be a "secret shopper" - to see how quickly your competitor responds to an inquiry? The company that responds quickly is far more likely to get the sale than the one that doesn't.
   

   As you examine your competition, don't dismiss their ideas and trivialize their implementation. We all tend to denegrate things we didn't think of first. I can't tell you how many times I've seen a business leader say, "Well, yes, that's a great idea. They do a good job of that," while never even considering that the good idea could be applied in his own business. What they're really thinking is, "If it's my idea, it's a good idea. If that jerk thought of it, something must be wrong with it."
   

Your friends have your best interests at heart, and some of them might give you some good advice. Vendors have experience that could help you. And there are plenty of courses out there where you can learn "how to write website copy that sells" or "how to optimize your site for search engines."

However, if your efforts are not guided by the realities of your product line, your website, your customers and your competition, you will waste a lot of money and time implementing random "great ideas" without fixing what is broken and without moving that revenue needle upwards.

In other words, if you blindly search for answers ("Maybe my website needs improvement - I'll take a copywriting class"), the changes you make are unlikely to boost your revenue. But if you have investigated properly, and you know that your website copy is a problem, you will go to the class knowing exactly what needs to be improved and why. And when you have applied what you have learned, your revenues will naturally increase.