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Marketing Strategies

Many business owners believe there are thousands of ways to grow their business, the truth is there are only three. Understanding these three ways can help business owners and marketing professionals to have a framework in which all of their other marketing efforts can fit under. In this article I will go over these three ways and in articles to follow I will go deeper into each one.

The first method is the most common method and that is to raise your gross sales. This means an increase in the number of units sold. When you look at traditional business this is where 90% of all the effort goes into improving the profits of a business. I'm not saying it's not important, but; it is the least effective return on investment of the three ways to grow your profits in any business.

The second and much easier way to grow your business is to increase the size of the transaction. Let's say we have a $2,500 average ticket price and we can raise it twenty percent to $3,0000. For most businesses the fixed costs exceed the variable costs, so the incremental difference in expense would be very little, leaving the majority of the gain to go directly to the bottom line.

The third way, and I personally believe the most important way to grow your business, is to increase the frequency of the purchase. For instance if your client currently purchases from you an average of once per year, let's bump that up to 1.2 times per year. This is a twenty percent increase in volume by just increasing the frequency of the purchase. We will go over in more detail several ways to affect each of these areas but for now let's take a look at what the impact is of these changes.

Let's take a company in the service industry that is grossing a million dollars in sale anually, their fixed overhead is four hundred thousand which covers admin, advertising, leases and general operating expenses. The variable expenses are $350,000 which covers sales commissions, allowances, returns, costs of goods, etc. This leaves the company with a $250,000 pre tax profit. Or a 25% net income after all expenses.

Taking our example above we are going to increase each area by 20%. Gross sales from above will go from $1,000,000 to $1,200,000 which represents 480 units sold at $2,500 average. The average ticket price we will increase by 20% which changes that from $2,500 to $3,000. So at three thousand per sale and four hundred and eighty sales the gross revenue increases to one million four hundred forty four thousand dollars. The frequency was the average client purchasing once per year, we are going to increase that by 20% to an average 1.2 times per year which increases our gross annual sales to $1,728,000.

Let's take a look at the impact increasing these three areas has on the businesses bottom line. I am using a business in the example, however; this directly applies to commission sales people as well. Consider the fix overhead to be $400,000. In most businesses the increase in sales will have very little to no affect on the fixed costs, however; let's say that a few more admin people are needed and possibly a larger facility was required so let's move fixed costs up by 25% to $500,000. We had variable costs of 35% in our example, these cost as a percentage of the sale should stay the same or if anything decrease with the volume. Let's leave the variable costs the same as a percentage of sales volume and we will use 35%. Our fixed costs now are $500,000 and our variable costs are $604,800 or 35% of $1,728,000.

This leaves us with a net profit of $623,200 instead of $250,000; that's a 250% or two and a half times increase in net profit to the businesses bottom line! That is the power of a simple increase of twenty percent in all three areas, it's exponential to the bottom line and every business has room to do it.

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Brandt Stohr is a small business marketing consultant who specializes in taking businesses to the next level. For free video's on marketing go to: Social Marketing or Brandt Stohr