I have spent the past 26 years helping online businesses increase revenue.
Clients have ranged from celebrities to billion dollar companies, one-man bands, and even an actual “pet psychic.”
It has been quite a ride.
Here are some of the most important things I’ve learned along the way.
1. A business is nothing but a sales process.
A sales process is just the means by which you turn somebody into a customer.
An attorney’s could be: “Have you been injured?” Call us for a free consultation. Then there’s the intake process to see if they have a case or not (qualifying) and then there’s the consultation.
A SaaS business typically starts with an ad or content that drives people to a sales page.
The sales page drives people to a two-step ordering process. First, it gets your name and email. Then it gets your credit card info for the trial.
If you take the trial and don’t cancel, you’re a customer.
A higher priced info business or service business uses ads and content to drive people to a webinar registration page.
Then there’s a process to get them to show up. The webinar’s job is to get them to make an appointment with a sales person.
You get the idea.
Every business does something to get customers.
That “something” is a sales process, and that sales process breaks down into stages.
Think of the sales process as a machine. The stages are the moving parts that make the machine work.
2. Your business is not as complicated as you think it is.
Every sales process is the same couple of ingredients used in a different order.
Don’t let the illusion of complexity fool you.
When something stops working, complexity tells you the whole thing is broken.
And that the only fix is to rebuild everything.
Which is expensive, slow, and almost always unnecessary.
3. The business itself is rarely broken.
Usually, it’s just one part of the sales process that needs to be changed.
I once had a client ready to abandon a multi-million-dollar market because revenue had collapsed.
They had a webinar-based sales process. Traffic was fine, people were showing up to the webinars, and they were getting appointments.
It turned out they swapped out their old webinar for a new one with a different topic.
The new topic attracted broke people instead of buyers. The fix was to change it back.
4. Most people won’t do what you want them to do.
Most people who hit a sales page won’t go to the order form.
Most people who start to order won’t actually complete their order.
None of that is failure.
All of it is normal, and it can almost instantly be improved with simple follow-up.
5. Beware of assumptions.
One of my clients spends just under $780,000 per month on ads that offer a free trial.
They assumed all traffic sources were equal, and judged their ad performance on cost-per-trial.
After some digging, we realized that traffic from one ad channel got cheap trials. But those trials didn’t turn into paying customers at the rate they assumed.
That one channel was spending far more than it generated.
Simply turning those ads off saved $314,027.89 per month.
6. Look for the GOO.
That is a term I made up. It stands for “A Glaringly Obvious Observation. Or Omission.”
Lay out every number for every stage in your sales process side by side and there is usually one thing missing, or one thing that is glaringly, embarrassingly bad.
It’s typically one singular thing.
If you don’t know the numbers for each step, you are successful in spite of yourself.
This isn’t a bad thing. It means you’ve become successful based purely on talent and hard work.
But you’ll find that you become much more successful when you know the numbers.
7. Take the thing that worked and do it again. Then automate it.
Go back and look at your last 12 months of revenue.
Find your biggest month.
See what you did.
Do more of that.
I had a client that was doing very well but wanted to do better.
We found a promotion from 10 months ago that worked extremely well.
I had them re-deploy it immediately and it brought in an extra $121,944 in revenue.
Then we turned it into an automated part of the sales process so all new leads would get the same promotion.
Doing this cost exactly zero extra dollars.
The majority of clients have always been too busy running the business to notice these things.
This is OK and it is normal.
Sometimes you just need some help seeing the forest through the trees.
(Results like these are not typical and are not a promise of what you’ll do. They’re examples of what happens in businesses that already have assets and traffic.)
