If You Want More Sales, Exploit the Numbers
Business is a numbers game, plain and simple. The more people who see your products and services the more sales you will make. Period. Consider this your mantra, more people equals more sales.
If your goal is 100 sales, and you know that 1% of everyone you talk to about your product buys it, the game becomes much easier. Just get your product in front of 10,000 people and you’ll make your 100 sales. This is essentially the law of large numbers. Over a large enough sample size your averages will play out.
Some of you might be saying “But how can I get my product in front of that many people?”. The answer: “How can you afford not to?”.
Think about it this way. On this planet there are literally millions of people who want what you sell. Whether it be a product, service, idea or some other intangible. There is a huge population of people just waiting to give you money. Problem is they don’t know about you, or by the time they find out they are already getting that product or service from one of your competitors.
So what does a small business owner do?
1. Know Your Market Cold!
Always remember that you are fighting for scarce consumer resource dollars, and you cannot afford to waste a dime on an audience that doesn’t want what you’re selling. Know your target market backwards and forwards. If you don’t know your customers, take the time to learn about them before you throw advertising money around.
2. Hustle
Once you know your market cold the next step is easy. You hustle your tail off to reach that market. You’re on the internet, emailing, making phone calls, and in the face of your target market constantly so that the law of large numbers begins to work in your favor. If you don’t make the contact you are not giving that potential customer an option to buy from you.
3. Evaluate and Redistribute
Evaluate what you’re doing and measure it against what you think the outcomes should be. If you believe you can get 10 sales per 1,000 contacts make sure once you touched those 1,000 people your actual results are consistent with your initial beliefs. A good way to benchmark is to look at your contact/sales ratio over the past year (estimate if you have to) and use that as a starting point. You’ll probably be using three or four advertising methods so be sure to measure the outcomes of each against your benchmark. Is one marketing method working substantially better than another? Redistribute your time and dollars away from what is not working and focus on what is.
What are you waiting for? Go make some contacts!!
photo credit: Roberdan
Headline: Christine&John
Totally true. I was taught the same thing and experienced the same results as a sales person back in the day. I also thought about the numbers as far as blogging success is concerned. Again, all true. At this point I am just not sure what the number and percentage is to make money but I am confident in saying that there are plenty of people to sell to.
@Dee
Once you know your average profit per customer the equation gets much easier. You’ll know what you have to spend in real dollars to touch X number of potential customers…and as long as you are comfortable in your estimation of conversion rate you will know if that form of advertising will be profitable.
Thanks for coming by,
Matt
When I was 17 I raised enough money to get to Australia by knocking on doors offering to engrave car registration numbers onto windscreens. (remember that?)
My strike rate was about 1 “yes” to every nine “no’s”. 100 doors a day is a lot of “no’s”.
The psychology that worked for me was that when I got a “no” I just said “great, that’s another one towards my target of nine.”
Nice post.
Another way to get your poduct in front of as many people as possible is to try FreeViral.com, a free traffic system. Worth a try
And get as many of your friends to stumble your pitch page, in fact, use all the social media to help get your product in front of as many people as possible.
@Stevieboy66
That is a great way to look at it. Keeps you from getting too discouraged as you start to see that getting the “no” is really making progress towards your “yes”.
Matt
@Webdesi3
Haven’t heard of FreeViral.com…will be checking it out. Thanks for passing the link onto us.
Matt
There are companies on the internet and on Ebay that offer to direct 10,000 or more human visitors to your site. I recently tried having 1500 visitors directed to my site and the hit counter showed the hits but not one visitor subscribed to my list despite a contest on the site. So perhaps they were robot visitors. Has anyone had any success with these web traffic offers?