How to Increase Sales in your Business in 4 Steps
Jan 12, 2022
We can’t deny that the increase in the costs around the world makes it more difficult for small business owners and franchisees to operate their business, maintain their team, grow, and achieve their goal of time and financial freedom. That’s why knowing how to increase sales in your business, even in these uncertain times, is key to protecting your profitability.
To do so, you need to make some adjustments. This is critical not only because sales are the oxygen of every business, but also to have a healthy and prosperous company in the short, mid, and long term.
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Increase Sales in your Business with These Strategies
To boost your revenue you can increase the number of customers to grow your transaction count or have each customer pay you more either by increasing your prices or influencing their buying decisions improving, therefore, your average ticket.
Top-performing franchisees not only apply these key actions, but also have a very clear understanding of their business, industry, and units, and they are aware of their business average ticket, their average transaction count and their number of customers. That allows them to truly affect their revenue number.
Discover here what are the three most important numbers in your business.
You’ve got to go beyond the basic principles and look at your business in a different way so you can focus on doing the right actions that will result in increased sales. To help you with the task, here are four steps you can take:
- Know your numbers and where you stand
Do you know what is your transaction count for your business? How many customers buy from you every day, week, and month? What’s your average ticket? If you can’t answer these questions, that's where you need to start.
Once you obtain this information, you have to compare it to the numbers you had that same week in the previous year, although I recommend you review your 2019 data, since this was the last year we had some sort of normality.
The reason you need to look at the same week as the previous period is because of seasonality, which differs from one industry to another. Some companies may be busier in spring, others in the summer or on the fall, and they may have a peak season during the holidays.
Analyze this to see where you land. If you are down in sales over 2019, look for a reason. Is it the transaction count, meaning you don't have the same number of customers you used to have? Or is it your ticket? Are they not paying you what they used to in the past?
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- Identify the challenge
Are you facing an internal factor or an external one? You might be affected by external elements, like the neighborhood economy, a close competitor, or anything that is outside of your building. Internal factors happen within your business: an issue with your brand or image, a particular team member in that unit, or a lack of leadership.
- Design individual strategies
Once you determine what the challenge is, focus on attending to that particular factor. But remember that every unit is different. If you're a multi-unit franchisee, avoid looking at your business as a whole.
You have to understand how each store is being affected and how to solve that issue separately, rather than recurring to a single strategy for your enterprise.
- Review your historical data
Access to your library of all the offers, all the tactics, and all the opportunities that have worked for the organization in the past.
If you've been in business for over 12 months, you have at least a year of history of things that you have done and you can learn from that data and actions for inspiration to solve the challenges you are facing. If you don’t have this record, you are missing an opportunity, so start documenting now. Your future self will thank you.
Stop blaming and start acting!
Don’t blame your low sales on others. We need to look at things a whole different way. We must own our sales regardless of what the franchisor is doing and what's happening in the economy or with the politics.
Once you take control, you know what you have to do and what clear actions you’ll implement, you’ll go from thinking “I can't do anything” to a mentality of “How can I change this?”. This switch will help you find solutions.
But don’t get overwhelmed. Those solutions may not imply doing two, three, four or five things, or investing all kinds of dollars to affect your revenue. It could be one action that makes a difference, attacking the right thing so that you can have a boost in your sales.
To explore more about how to boost your revenue, reduce your costs, retain your team, or scale, register for our upcoming masterclass, where we go through all of the elements you need to look at as a business owner. If you want to own your business and take control of your results, visit MultiUnitMasterclass.com to review when our next session will be.
Hopefully, this makes you think of your business differently. It is not just sales that you need to impact in revenue. It goes down to your transaction count and your ticket, unit by unit, to be able to address the problems and do the actions that will make a true difference to increase the sales in your business.
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Reflections:
- How can you increase your transaction count?
- What can you do to boost your average ticket?
- How can you affect every one of your units?
- What can you do to go from the “can’t do anything?” mindset to the “How can I do it?” one?
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