How to Increase Your Company’s Revenue/Gross Income – Part 2

Welcome to this week’s LeadEtics® Consults Actionable Business Advice Series.

Now, let us take a look at how to increase our customer or client list.

First, let’s recap last week’s post; we stated the vital importance of consistent promotion to your most valuable, revenue-generating public: customers or clients. These are anyone who has bought anything from you.

We stressed that the promotion to this list must, of essence, be personal to the known individual conditions and characteristics of the client or customer.

Try not to use form letters; that is generalized letters addressed to everyone as in mass mailing. Form letters deliver less impact compared to a carefully written letter from a person to a person. This is a win action.

The fact that no business can have a large enough customer or client list stares at us personally. So, no matter how huge your customer or client list is, you must continue to work to increase that list, ad infinitum.

Today, we are going to look at one of the several (at least 3) ways to increase your customer or client list. Remember, a customer or client list is a list of people who have bought and paid for a service or product from you, and no one else. Therefore, what we must be saying is how you can make new customers or clients, right?

The first customer/client-making way we will consider is the creation of prospects or leads list. Prospects or leads are people with whom you, your marketing, sales, promotion staff, referral system, etc. have made contacts in the past. These people have yet to buy anything from you.

The first step to turning your leads/prospects into customers or clients is to extract the contents of the contacts from your files, and make a Prospect/Lead List, with details as follows.

1) Titles (Mr./Ms. etc.)
2) First names, Surnames, and middle names/initials (where applicable),
3) Physical addresses,
4) Email addresses,
5) Phone numbers,
6) Personal characteristics and other information you can remember (you need this to personalize the promotion to them).

Like the customer or client list, you need to continually update this list by adding new prospects, on a going concern basis.

You will only remove names from this list on three conditions: 1) when they become a customer or client, at which you transfer them to your customer or client list; 2) if they asked that you stop mailing them; and 3) when they were no more. Otherwise, guide this list with jealousy second only to the customer or client list because this is your second revenue-generating list.

Now, what do you promote to this vital prospective income-generation list?

1. A form or personal letter on the letterhead, a sales letter, a special sales promotion, a project proposal, a product or service brochure, etc. with contents that seek to:

a. Discover how they are faring, especially with the current condition of things in the world.
b. Introduce a product/s, or service/s, describing how it 1) solves a problem or 2) adds value to the person’s life, health, wealth, knowledge, ability, family, business, etc.
c. Encourage the prospect to make a buy decision.
d. Then, ask if there is/are anything they might need or want from you, other than the product/s or service/s promoted.
e. Showcase the positive experiences of one or two customers or clients who have used your product or service.
f. Acknowledge them for their prospective patronage.

2. This form or personal letter on the letterhead, a sales letter, a special sales promotion, a project proposal, a product or service brochure, etc. should be in paper form and mailed via courier or postal service. It has been proven consistently that this almost lost unique form of communication does magic to the rate of response and sales.

3. Next, follow this form or personal letter on the letterhead, a sales letter, a special sales promotion, a project proposal, a product or service brochure, etc. up with the email version of the same letter in a business week to those who did not respond.

4. Follow the email version up with a personal phone call in another business week to those who request more information or did not respond.

Like in promoting to your customer or client list, the key to success lies in the consistency of the promotion.

Don’t do the promotion step once and abandon it. It must be done week in and week out, consistently, no matter how the company is faring: too few customers or clients, too many customers or clients, too much workload, too little workload, fantastic or poor finance, and incredibly poor cash flow.

In conclusion, make sure there exists no factor that will prompt you to stop your consistent and continuous promotion to your customer or client and prospect lists. Once the prospect list is up and running, you now have 2 lists into which you are directing your weekly promotion actions.

Thank you, and best regards.

Babatunde Odutola
LeadEtics® Consults