The image above is from InfusionSoft.
It’s an illustration of what they call “The Perfect Customer Lifecycle.”
And I’m going to show how it represents your opportunity to grow your business by as much as 1,608% — or more — even if you don’t use InfusionSoft.
I’ll break down each area for growth in a moment, but first I want to share a lesson on…
The Simple Mathematics of Exponential Business Growth!
No doubt when I mentioned to you that this picture would show you how you could grow a business by 1,608%, you thought I was nuts!
That’s the kind of marketing promises that sets most folks BS meter off.
But if you’ll wait to pass judgment until the end of this article, I think you’ll find that this promise makes sense — and in some cases, may be conservative.
You see, to simply think you’re going to grow a business by double — or 17X — can feel like a whole lot.
But are there areas in your business — in your sales and marketing processes, in particular — that can grow by 10%? 25%? 50%? No doubt those seem more reasonable.
In that image above, the customer lifecycle of nearly every business type on the planet is broken down into seven distinct steps.
And because these are fairly linear steps, improvement in each alone would translate to improvement in the revenues of the business.
That is to say, if you were to attract 10% more traffic to the business and everything else were to remain the same, the business’s revenue would grow by 10%. That’s nothing special by itself.
It’s when you start to improve multiple areas of the business though, that things get really interesting. Where the math starts to go from geometric (1+1+1+1+1+1+1=7) to exponential (1+1+1+1+1+1+1=17). Bear with me for a moment while I explain.
You see, if you increase traffic by 10%, you’re getting 10% more leads, 10% more prospects, 10% more sales, 10% more happy customers, 10% more upsells, and 10% more referrals.
But what if simultaneously with increasing the traffic… You also increased the percentage of website visitors who became leads by 10%… AND the number of leads you turned into realistic prospects for your product?
Because each step would compound on the ones before, you’re not looking at 30% growth, but 33.1% growth.
Increase ALL seven steps by 10%, and you’re not looking at 70% growth. You’re looking at 94.9% growth.
Almost any business is a leaky enough bucket that with a little effort, the holes could be plugged and the seven areas above could be improved by 10%.
But what if you could improve all seven areas by 25%? Well, you’d have just grown your business by 376.8%!
And if you were to really buckle down and focus on improving each of the seven areas by 50% — becoming half again more effective at each — you’d actually grow the business by 17X! That’s 1,608.6% growth, generated just by getting 50% better at these 7 things.
That’s the simple mathematics of exponential business growth.
So let’s look at what you might do to increase each area by 10 to 50%, or more…
Attract Traffic
What are you doing right now to drive traffic to your business? Is there opportunity to do more of that, that you haven’t taken advantage of yet? Are there different traffic sources you’re not yet using? What media does your target market consume that you’re not in yet? Can you increase your traffic by going bigger in the media you’re already in? By running different offers? How could you improve the performance of your outside advertising?
Capture Leads
What can you make available to members of your target market that would compel them to give you their contact information? Can you give more to make your lead generation offer more enticing? Can you target the desire of your target market better to make your offer more enticing? Can the messaging of your lead capture mechanism be improved to increase conversion? Can you make it easier for the right people to give you their information?
Nurture Prospects
What marketing system do you have in place to help move your prospects closer to the sale? What steps of that marketing system can be improved to make it more effective? What holes are there in the system — what questions do prospects still have that must be answered by a person, that could and should be answered with effective marketing? Can you add additional touches to your prospect nurturing system to increase conversion? Can you add additional media to your system to increase conversion?
Convert Sales
Can you make your offer a better fit for your prospect? Can you add more value to your offer? Have you taken on all risk of the transaction, so that the prospect is guaranteed to be satisfied or be out nothing? Can you make it easier for the prospect to get started? Can you increase sales by offering a trial of your product or service? Can you do more to eliminate objections that may be preventing sales? Can you make it clearer what problem your offer solves? Can you make the promise of your offer clearer? Can you do a better job of showing your prospect that they can trust you to solve their problem and fulfill your promises?
Deliver & Satisfy
What is your current refund rate and how might that be decreased? Are there unhappy customers that are not requesting refunds, and can the percentage be decreased? What else can be done to over-deliver on your marketing and selling promises? What can be done after the sale to reinforce to the customer that they made the right decision? How can you drive consumption of the product, to make sure the customer gets full value from their purchase? What are you doing to thank a customer for their business, and let them know that you truly value them?
Upsell Customers
What else does a customer want as a natural extension of the product they just bought? Are there ongoing needs or wants the customer has that you can better meet? Who are the 20% of your customers who’d happily pay 10X more for the right offer, and how are you giving them that opportunity? Who are the 4% of your customers who’d happily pay 100X more for the right offer, and how are you giving them that opportunity? Is there anything that is sold by a competitive or complimentary business that happy customers would prefer to buy from you, if you were to arrange the right terms? How long and with what regularity are you contacting customers after they’ve done business with you, with additional offers — and can the length or frequency be increased?
Get Referrals
How can you let customers know that you value referrals and word of mouth about your business? How are you actively encouraging happy customers to refer you to their friends and associates? When you ask for referrals, are you doing a good job of stating specifically what type of clients you’d like more of, so they know who within their network would be best to refer to you? Do you have an active and ongoing system in place for stimulating referrals? What could be done to better track referrals? Do you have a program in place to reward customers when they refer — if not, would one be appropriate?
This is just the beginning, but you can see how asking these questions could quickly stimulate 10%, 25%, even 50% growth in each area…
There’s seldom a business that couldn’t be improved by asking these questions. And they’re well worth asking — and using the answers as a way to map out how to grow your business in each area.
And considering that the result could be growth of 94.9% to 1,608.6% — you’re looking at a pretty huge payoff for what could be started with a few hours’ work.
Now that’s a breakthrough!
Yours for bigger breakthroughs,
Roy Furr
Editor, Breakthrough Marketing Secrets
