A common challenge for young businesses or ones that haven’t marketed in a long time is having inconsistent revenue. One month is up and the next is down. The uncertainty of how much your business will make can be stressful and scary. What’s described below can be modified for seasonal businesses. When sales and revenue are inconsistent, planning for the future and hiring can feel uncertain. To solve this problem, there are three important aspects.
To get your sales and revenue to be predictable, the first aspect to put in place is an effective marketing process to get your business known by more people and to generate leads whom you can make sales offers to. To create an effective marketing process, you will need to know your target market, where to find them, and their needs and wants. To determine the effectiveness of the marketing process you need to track statistics such as the costs, number of people reached, number of leads who are interested, number of sales offers, and number of sales closed. As you test it different marketing and sales processes keep using the ones that are effective and modify or discard the ineffective ones.
The second aspect is about consistency. Many businesses start and stop their marketing and sales efforts instead of making them consistent activities. Consistently running your marketing and sales processes will produce consistent sales results. Putting in place routines and schedules will keep the activities consistent.
The third part is to make your results predictable. Determine the amount of work, resources, time, and costs to run your marketing and sales processes on a daily, weekly, or monthly time period. Running the marketing and sales processes for that amount of time produces a certain amount of results, on average. For example the marketing and sales statistics were measured for several months and it was found that it required 1 person to spend 3 hours and costs $250 per week to produce an average of 4 sales for a total of $4,000 in revenue. Because the statistics were tracked over time, these ratios are predictable. If this business wanted to double the revenue to $8,000 per week, it’s plausible that it would require 6 hours of work and cost $500. When the processes and results are predictable, you will have control of your marketing sales to increase or decrease your revenue as you choose.