How to Increase Sales: What Works in an Owner-Led Business

How to increase sales: start with the people who already know you. Go back to existing and past customers with something new, fix the stage of your sales process where you lose the most people, ask for referrals once you’ve earned them, stop discounting to win work, and measure every step so you know what’s working. Only then spend more on marketing.

Most owners do it the other way round. Sales dip, so they turn the marketing tap on. More leads go into the same leaky process, and the business pays more to lose the same deals.

There are only three ways to grow sales

Sales trainer Andy Bounds put it simply when he came on the Mentor Business Podcast. There are three things to get good at:

1. Get the opportunity. More conversations with people who might buy.
2. Win the opportunity. Turn more of those conversations into orders.
3. Turn one sale into two. Sell more to the customers you’ve already won.

And you can either do more activity or do better activity. Get twice as good at each of the three and sales fly without you working twice as hard.

1. Go back to existing customers first

Warm beats cold. The easiest sales you’ll ever make are to people who already like you and know you deliver.

Andy’s approach is one every owner can copy this week. Contact everyone who bought from you last year, and the bigger customers from two or three years ago, and use the word new: you’ve seen something new in their sector, or you’ve got something new that might help, and if they’ve got five minutes you’d like to tell them about it. Do the same with past customers who have moved to a new employer. Most people say yes to a short conversation with someone they already trust.

That’s cheaper and faster than any campaign, and it’s the step most owners skip.

2. Fix conversion before you buy more leads

Why would you turn the marketing tap on if your sales are weak? Count what happens to enquiries each month: how many become a proper conversation, how many get a proposal, how many buy. The step with the biggest drop is where the money is.

Usually it’s one of three things:

• Slow replies. Leads go cold waiting for the owner to get back to them.
• No follow-up. Proposals go out and nobody chases them to a decision.
• Selling, not solving. The conversation is about you and your product, not their problem.

My guide to sales funnel stages shows how to find the leak, and how to improve sales skills covers the conversation itself.

3. Sell the outcome, and build certainty

People don’t buy what you do. They buy how they’re better off afterwards. Andy calls this the “afters”: before you talk about your company, find out where the customer wants to be a year from now and why they don’t think they’ll get there on their own. Then build certainty by showing you’ve done it before, for someone like them. Then ask for the decision.

My doctorate points the same way. In a survey of 85 people in UK franchised advisory practices, most of them owners, psychological capital won more clients through engagement in the work, while its effect through instilling hope in clients was negative on revenue band. It’s one sector, so treat it as a pointer rather than proof, but the message fits what I see: belief doesn’t win clients, engaged work does. Selling the dream isn’t the same as delivering it.

4. Turn word of mouth into a system

Ask almost any owner where their best customers come from and they’ll say word of mouth. Then ask what their word-of-mouth strategy is. Most don’t have one.

Treat it like any other marketing channel:

• Earn it first. Referrals only come when you’ve delivered what you said you would. You can’t ask someone who hasn’t had results yet.
• Ask, and keep asking. Agree when you’ll ask: at the end of a project, after a result, at a review.
• Say thank you properly. Work out what a new customer costs you through paid marketing, and reward the person who sends you one. Many will tell you not to be daft, and that’s fine. Thank them anyway.
• Know where it won’t work. In some businesses your customers compete with each other, so asking for referrals means asking them to send you their competitors. Know which of your markets that applies to.

5. Stop racing to the bottom on price

Discounting to win work isn’t increasing sales. It’s buying them. Somewhere down the line the business has to make that money back, and it usually comes out of your margin, your team’s time or your own pay.

Revenue is vanity; profit is sanity. Before you chase more sales, check that the sales you have are worth having. Some customers cost you more to serve than they pay. Grade your customers on margin, how easy they are to work with and whether they pay on time, and put your selling effort into finding more of the best ones.

You can’t get money from companies that don’t have money, either. Go where the money is.

6. Use more than one channel, and measure each

No single strategy carries a business. Referrals, existing customers, the phone, events, LinkedIn, email, your website: each one does a bit, and together they compound. But every one needs measuring, or you’ll keep paying for the ones that don’t work because they feel busy.

Posting is not prospecting, and likes don’t pay the wage bill. Track enquiries and orders by source, every month.

7. Make it work without you

If every sale still depends on the owner, sales are capped by your diary. Write down how you sell, train someone else to do it, review the numbers with them each week, and pay for the outcomes you want, including margin and repeat business. That’s how sales keep growing when you step back.

What to read next

• Sales funnel stages, to find where you’re losing sales.
• How to improve sales skills, yours and your team’s.
• Sales KPIs worth tracking every week.
• How to write a sales pitch that sounds like a conversation.
• Cold calling tips for when warm leads run out.

If sales still depend on you, that’s the kind of thing I work on with owners. You can see how I work and what it costs.