Entrepreneurs Circle Certified Coach

I was just reading my recent copy of The Circular (Issue 168, page 27) from the Entrepreneur’s Circle and had to chuckle at this smart little growth hack.

Nick Jenkins who founded Moonpig.com was telling EC members how he had grown his business from  £2.5M to £45M.

He was looking to scale and had discounted TV advertising as too expensive. But he noticed one of his competitors was using TV.

So in a nutshell by placing a regular order for a greetings card from the competitor and recording the order number he was able to get a good estimate on the number of sales they were doing. (Because most companies accounting systems use a sequential ordering number.)

And from this and making informed assumptions he was able to work back that the average cost per customer was £10, which was the magic number. And so this gave him to confidence to throw £50,000 into a TV advert. And the rest as they say is history.

This is just one example how over the past 5 years the EC has made me a smarter entrepreneur and positively impacted on my business growth – try for yourself and take a look at The Entrepreneurs Circle, they even do a free trial.

I received this flyer through the door today from the local conservative councillor in the run up to the May local elections. I thought this was rather creative – it got my attention.

It looks like one of those cards that the courier leaves when he was unable to deliver a package – who is going to ignore that? this is sure to get picked up and get attention.

If door drops are part of your marketing arsenal then may be you should test one that looks like a “we tried to deliver” card.

Link to download full design.

 

So how do you follow up effectively to increase sales?

If you are just starting out in business then you can probably easily follow-up with low numbers of enquiries and customers manually using spreadsheets, notes, Outlook/ Gmail. Plus it keeps the costs down as you go through the start-up phase. To do anything more sophisticated at this point is a distraction from getting your first customers and testing your business model.

Now, once you start to gain traction then the number of enquiries and customers will increase and following up will start to take more and more of your time. Sales opportunities will start to “fall between the cracks” as you are just too busy to do everything. And this is the point where business owners start to add systems to help with keeping in touch with enquiries and customers. One key tool they will acquire is an email platform, as email marketing works very well. So it will probably be something like MailChimp. Aweber, Constant Contact or one of many others. And this will work to a certain point.

And finally, the business reaches a point where they have many sales enquiries and customers. The business will have built up a whole “technology stack” of tools that simply do not talk to each other. We call this Multi-System Chaos.

 

You will know when you have Multi-System Chaos when non of your separate systems will talk to one another and you simply cannot do the marketing that you now need to do in order to grow your business.

And this is the point that you realise you need a more sophisticated tool that gives you an all in one marketing solution to increase sales. So what are the options?

If you are looking for an enterprise-level solution then you could be looking at SalesForce and  HubSpot. These start with a free solution but in order to do serious marketing, you will be looking at multiple thousands of pounds per month in fees. Plus set up charges. These I believe are very good solutions, but I have no experience of them myself.

If you are looking for a comprehensive small business marketing and sales automation solution then you would be advised to look at ActiveCampaign or HighLevel (check out HighLevel Agency – MarketerM8). Both of these are excellent solutions for smaller businesses with a small business price tag. I have used both solutions with clients and which one would be best for you really depends on your particular requirements.

If you are looking for a cheap/ free solution then you could look at SugarCRM or ZohoCRM. But when I have looked at the free solutions they either have very limited functionality or you will have to spend money in order to customise it enough to do the job for you. So not really “free” by the time you have it up and running.

 

If you found yourself gravitating to the comprehensive small business marketing and sales automation solution then choosing the right solution to increase sales for your business can be daunting – each software has pros and cons and the key to success is to select the solution which best fits your requirements. I would be delighted to have a quick chat where I could help guide you to the right solution for your business (even if it is a solution that I am not the right person to assist you with)

 

Feel free to schedule a 20-minute Discovery Call where we can have a chat.