A client of mine told me this morning that she will have hit a million dollars in revenue over the year, which will be a significant increase from the previous year.
And as I reflect on her journey to achieving this fantastic milestone, I had a big realisation.
Success comes in stages.
Sometimes when you’re working really really hard towards achieving a big goal, it’s so easy to get caught up in the little day to day stuff. Without even stopping to acknowledge how far you’ve come or to treat all those little things along the way as successes – and celebrate them.
But what can happen when you’re head down bum up like this, without slowing down and taking a moment to “smell the roses” so to speak, is that you can get so caught up in the hard slog that you lose sight of the end goal.
I like to think of any big project as a “U” shape, or like standing on one side of a cannon or gorge. From your original vantage point you can see the other side clearly (your end goal or your ultimate dream). Then you start climbing down the cliff and trekking across the gorge and it’s really bloody hard work. And from down the bottom of the gorge it’s very hard to see the top of the next cliff.
What is so very important is to look back and remind yourself of how far you’ve come.
Celebrate completing each step along the way to keep you motivated to stay your course. And to recognise each step along the way as a small success. Hence, success coming in layers.
And hey – I love cake! What better analogy is there than that?
But what drives that success? What are the stages we need to pass through to achieve big growth in a product-based business?
Learn the 5 critical steps to product sales success
#1: Product
To achieve big success in a product-based business, though, you MUST start with an awesome product. Significant consumer demand must already exist for your kind of product.
You would think this would go without saying in a product-based business… But I see it happen ALL THE TIME – people trying to reverse-engineer enough customer demand for their product.
It’s not enough to think, “I made this product for myself and I loved it, and then my family and friends wanted one too, so I decided to launch a business”…
Are there similar products on the market already? Are people actively googling for your kind of product? It could be a different product that provides a solution to the same problem even.
But there must be existing demand.
#2: Positioning
The next step you need to have in place is a valuable point of difference in your market.
If you make your own products – your product itself cannot be a carbon copy of something else that already exists.
If you are a retailer – your website and marketing cannot be exactly the same as your competitors.
You must differentiate your offering in a way that is valuable to your customers AND helps you to connect and engage with them.
#3: Audience
Without an audience to buy from you, you don’t really have a business… So it’s important to have strategies in place to grow your own audience consistently.
There are a few different aspects of audience-building:
- Building awareness of your product or brand within your ideal customer-base, through means such as traditional PR, working with Influencers, advertising, social media and so on.
- Increasing customer demand for your specific product. (It’s one thing for people to know you exist, and another entirely for them to want to buy it from you!)
- Growing your own database (such as your email list). A database is a hugely valuable asset in any business, and enables you to market consistently to a warm audience of customers and potential customers.
#4: Sales & Marketing
Once you have a captive audience, it’s time to mobilise them to buy. For this, you want to have strategies in place for consistent customer acquisition and retention (either online or wholesale, depending on your business model).
To drive consistent sales, your marketing calendar should involve strategies like:
- product launches,
- sale promotions,
- automated and newsletter-style email marketing, as well as
- traffic strategies like Facebook advertising.
#5: Team
Scaling a business to a million dollars and beyond is pretty hard to do alone, so you want to surround yourself with the right people to facilitate that growth.
The first roles I like to hire for in a product-based business are dispatch (whether hiring or outsourcing to a 3PL), and customer service. Depending on your skillset, you may also seek out help with marketing, IT and accounting.
Ultimately, you want to focus your own time and efforts on the things that will make the biggest difference to your growth, and employ others to do the low hourly-rate or repetitive jobs.
Plan your own recipe for product sales success
Map out your own ‘recipe for business success’ using my FREE Marketing Action Planner download. I developed and use this myself for all of my major campaigns and promotions.
