Tips to boost sales and profits

 Are you looking to accelerate the throttle of your sales engine?

I feel we all are, because as a business owner or entrepreneur we all want to grow our business and boost our profit.

So, since you are also looking for positive growth, let's discuss seven easy methods to grow sales and profit:

1. Find or create the correct product or service

Without the correct product or service, you're most probably going to have a tough time growing your business. Here I said probably as sometimes luck also matters and even the product which does not seem to be correct for the market, works wonders. However, this is very very rare and as a business owner, we should not depend on miracles.  So now let's discuss the right product or service strategy. The right product or service caters the specific customer segment(s) you want, and solves or fulfills a real need of theirs. Also, you need to ensure that the size of the customer segment is large enough to make your sales number high and with great expansion scope.

Moreover, the ideal product or service is sort of a consumable item that regularly needs to be replaced or upgraded unless you have a product or service that will have recurring sales. If your product or service does not have recurring sales, you should figure out how to create one.

By having a loyal customer base which comes back to you over and over again, you can confidently introduce related products, as satisfied your customers will be open to new products or services.

If you don't lack the resources to build a new market product yourself, you can consider partnering with another business which already makes the product you want looking or planning to sell. You can often ask them to create a variation of their existing product and private label it under your own brand. Here you can also ask them for some changes to float apart from the rest available products. 

2. Learn to sell better

Having the right product or service always doesn't help if its existence is not known by the targeted customers. Someone once observed that a highly successful writer isn't labeled a best-writing author and he or she is actually called a best-selling author! 

A marvelous product could stay forever on the shelves if not promoted or distributed  efficiently. That's where selling skills comes in. The numero uno piece of advice for new business owners is, before you learn to build a product or service, learn to sell. For selling, you can leverage online platforms like TradeMalaysia - www.trademalaysia.com and get global reach for your products. 

3. Improve your unique selling proposition (USP)

Having a strong unique selling proposition (USP) is one of the core elements of your business marketing plan. Your USP creates a unique identity  of your product or service from your competitors. It creates a demand for your product or service as an "unique, must have" item.

In fact, the core USP of Domino's Pizza is: "Fresh hot pizza delivered to your door in thirty minutes or less, guaranteed," has widely been credited as the reason for the company's worldwide success in a highly competitive and fairly commoditized business. 

Ideally you should come up with a great USP for your business like Domino's did. But at the very least, your products or services should have clear reasons why they should buy from you instead of your competitors.

4. Raise your prices

Entrepreneurs who start a business often implement a strategy to go low price, mistakenly assuming that customers will rush to their services or products if they see a rock bottom price.

However, the fact is the opposite is more likely to come true; low price often resembles low quality. When you have a great quality product or service you'll discover that people will be willing to pay more for it and you will earn more profit. And another point is if your profit margins are too low, that's another significant sign to increase your prices right away.

5. Do a better job of cross-selling and up-selling

We all know that McDonald's more than doubled its profits when its cashiers started asking "would you like fries with that?" This simple cross-selling request results in tons of new sales and revenue that the company otherwise would never have generated.

Similarly, McDonalds added "would you like to supersize that?" later which is a classic up-sell sentence. This too dramatically boosted the company's sales and profits.

Importantly, when you cross-sell and up-sell your product or service, you are not only creating more revenues and profits for yourself, but you are better completing your customers requirements with more satisfaction.

For example, if you are an owner of a hardware store and a customer is purchasing a hammer, you should be doing them a service to offer them the right nails for the job, and a better quality hammer, or an offer to buy a second hammer at a certain discount in case they ever lost the first one.

6. Establish yourself as an "authority"

Make sure everyone is aware of your authority and recognizes your professional expertise. Since our childhood wee all know what a "xerox" is, right? In 1959, Xerox launched its first plain paper photocopier; by 1961, the company had almost more than $50 million in revenue, by 1965 its revenues were crossing $500 million, and the rest is history – revenues were more than $22 billion last year!

Xerox- which was first a company name and then a trademark, and in popular vernacular became a noun of common usage, a lot of people are still using the word "Xerox" for photocopy, although Xerox fought this use of its name. You should do the same with your product. Ensure everyone has a mental picture of a great product or service when they speak your company name. Be a game changer with a game changer product or service. 

7. Figure out how to gain economies of scale

The ultimate key to making a great profit is scale. If you can't manufacture and sell a product on a large scale, then you won't generate huge profit.

Some ideas might be moderately profitable on a smaller scale, but can you sell 1,000 units with the same precision and scalability as the first 10 units? One of the important consideration while choosing a product for a business is scalability – the ability to replicate one sale with multiple sales.

If your current product or service isn't very scalable, you should figure out how to make it more scalable. Generally, by implementing the correct systems, you can accomplish this.

Follow these 7 tips to maximize your business revenues and profits, and keep your business thriving!