Skilled Migrant Professionals February 2015 | Page 27

For example, if you measure how many leads
you are getting from each advertising source,
you’ll start to see which ads work best and
which are the worst. Simply cutting the worst
performers and putting that money into the best
can have a dramatic increase in the leads produced. Yet you’d never know to do that if you
didn’t track the numbers daily.
Get your most important numbers and make
them the dashboard of your business – then
watch them often as you drive your business
forward.

Step 4: Improve sales conversion
This is the one area in which most businesses
can experience the greatest amount of growth.
The reasons include:
• It’s usually a no-cost improvement in the
business. It simply requires you to change the
way you do things.
• The average conversion rate is much lower
than most business owners think.
• Increasing from 25% to 35% is not that difficult and that would result in a 40% increase
in sales!
Break down each step your prospect goes
through in order to buy from you, from seeing
your advertisement through to payment. Examine the conversion of each step and find the
weakest link (where you are losing most of the
leads) and focus on improving that. Then always
keep repeating this process of finding the weakest link in your sales process.
Remember, the higher a ticket your item is,
the more steps you will have in the sales process.
A pizza shop is going to have one major step –
handling the phone call. But selling a boat will
have a number of steps to take a prospect from
being curious to being serious.

Step 5: Know your costs
For a period of one month, pay for every single item in your business yourself. Actually see
each invoice and pay each one yourself. You’ll
immediately start asking questions like: What
is this? Do w