How to Increase Your Profits in Any Economic Climate

A great number of people who come to me for marketing help have numerous complaints: "I have no time to grow my business, I'm not the selling type and I really hate marketing." Or worse, “Customers have stopped buying, there’s a down turn in our industry, we’re cutting our costs and trying to keep our heads above water.”Often they're expecting me to wave a magic wand that will give them the ultimate marketing strategy and save the day.

That wand is available but it's not what they expect to hear.
The first dose of medicine is this information: Your concept of your business and the marketing of it is completely backwards. Marketing and growing a business isn't an ordeal to be endured. Marketing is about finding great profitable customers. Making sure that when you attract these customers they invest as much as they can, in as many products and services that you sell. Finally once you’ve generated these customers you build a relationship and nurture them so they keep coming back again and again for as long as possible. This is the true purpose of any business. By fulfilling that purpose it’s the goal of your business to generate an abundance of profit to create opportunities for its owners and shareholders to add value to their lifestyles.

You need to change your point of view first.

What do I mean?
After talking to thousands of business owners over the years I found that there are 4 challenges holding business owners back from creating their opportunities and achieving their goals of being successful, no matter what the economic climate is. First is:

Change, If you look at the most successful business in Australia today, both large and small, they are constantly innovating in the way they do business in other words they’re always looking at ways to do things differently. As the old saying goes keep doing the same things over and over again and you’re guaranteed of achieving the same results.
Ask yourself the question how many lead generation strategies have I got in place to attract profitable customers, if the answer is one or none then you’re definitely headed for some quiet times in the very near future.

Here are 4 cost-effective strategies to attract more customers today.
1. Go back to your existing customers and offer them the benefits of trying some other products and services they might be interested in.
2. Direct mail or email your database with an incentive to buy now.
3. Introduce yourself to the businesses around you and offer them incentives to become customers, remember there are acres of diamonds in your back yard.
4. Pull out all your quotes and proposals from the last 12 months and ask your prospects if they’ve purchased the goods and services you quoted for. If they haven’t ask them if they’d like to go ahead and purchase now you’ll be surprised at how many people will say yes.

Second challenge is:

Time, most people in business say” I’m to busy to market or I haven’t got any time to grow my business”. Here’s an incite in to time studies that have been done on businesses to measure productivity and time efficiency and they found that up to 85% of time was invested in non productive and non income generating activity. This is due to most people being reactive rather than pro-active with the challenges that they face every day. You have a choice on how you control the effectiveness of your time. Imagine what would happen if you invested only 10% of your time focussing on developing and growing your business.

7 time management strategies to dramatically improve your productivity,

1. Plan your day before it starts
2. Be clear about your objectives
3. List only 6 of the most important things to do daily
4. Allocate the amount of time to complete each item on your list.
5. Plan when in the day you’ll do each item.
6. Do the most important things first.
7. Make an appointment with yourself to invest at least, half an hour per day to be devoted to business development or income generating activities.
Remember “Most people aim at nothing and hit it with amazing accuracy”. Make the time for your life and your opportunities now.

Third challenge is:

Money, negative cashflow is a major issue with most businesses in Australia today. This is due to the focus being on the lack of income rather than creating an abundance of capital. Let me explain, most businesses have a bill mentality, that is they only focus on making enough money to pay their bills rather than creating a profitable return on their efforts. This is constantly proven as we always manage to just cover our expenses from month to month. If you want a positive cashflow you’ll want to focus your attention towards implementing profitable income generating activity.

4 strategies to improve your cashflow:
1. Set profitable weekly, monthly and yearly sales targets; share those targets with all your team members responsible for making the sales in your business.
2. Improve the selling skills of your sales people, regularly educate them on the benefits of your products and services and teach them relationship skills, so they develop better rapport with customers. Remember people buy from people they like.
3. Implement cross selling and up selling strategies to increase the average dollar sale your customers invest in.
4. Reduce the discounting of your products and services and increase your prices to improve your margins. Sell on value not on price this will have a dramatic impact on your bottom line net profit.

The last challenge is the biggest killer of all in business:

Procrastination, the ultimate driving force in human behavior is 1. The desire for ultimate pleasure and 2. The desire to avoid pain. “ We will do far more to avoid a pain than we will do to gain a pleasure.” The fastest way to eliminate procrastination from your life is, when you feel you’re about to procrastinate, just put it off for another time. Seriously the idea is to change the way you approach things. “ At any moment in time, what ever you focus your attention on is what is most real to you.”

So when you find yourself putting something off, ask yourself the following two questions.

1. How not changing your behavior will be more painful than changing it? So if you don’t deal with the task at hand, what will be the ultimate price you’ll have to pay?
2. How changing will bring you measurable and immediate pleasure? If you already gotten it done, how would your life be better? How much more joy would you have?
3. Develop a habit of saying I want to instead of I have to.

Earlier on I called these, challenges that most businesses face, they’re really the excuses that most people use to explain why things aren’t working for them. “85% of success is dependent on your attitude” It’s time to create a mindset of abundance and continual prosperity in your life and your business. All it takes is one small strategy at a time and you’ll build a business and a life that you truly desire.


John Logar helps organisations achieve more than they thought possible through consulting, coaching, keynote presentations, seminars and training in the areas of leadership, values, team performance, marketing and risk management. John has addressed and consulted to over 1,000 organisations in commerce, government and not-for-profit. For FREE sales and marketing resources and downloads go to http://johnlogar.blogspot.com