By MARK RIFFEY for the Flathead Beacon
In every town, there’s a place where new business hides. If you can’t find its hiding place, your business is likely to struggle.
Most of the time, that struggle is rooted in the inability to dependably produce predictable, month to month revenue.
Without predictable month to month revenue, businesses close, scale down or at the least, fail to reach their potential to support their owner, their family, their employees’ families and their community.
Revenue consistency problems influence a business owner’s decision making because their decisions end up being driven by cash flow. Decisions based on sales you made last week (much less yesterday) rarely fit into a long-term strategic plan.
Predicting revenue isn’t all that difficult. You simply have to check the Sales Thermometer.
What’s a Sales Thermometer?
Imagine that there’s a thermometer on the front door of businesses and homes that told you to pull in and sell something to someone because they had developed a need or a want that *had* to be fulfilled.
Armed with a town full of sales thermometers, you’d have all the new business you’ve ever wanted and wouldn’t waste a bit of time chasing around town after people who didn’t want or need what you sell.
Instead, you’d simply drive through town, check the thermometer and stop at the places where the temperature was the highest.
On days when you need a little extra revenue, you might get up a little earlier and drive around a little later so you could check more thermometers.
Once you took care of the places with the hottest temperatures, you could retrace your steps, scan for the next highest set of temperatures and take care of those sales.
As the sales thermometer readings change on other homes and businesses, you’d see them during your travels so you could pick up on the newest opportunities for new business – simply by being observant.
Scaling
There is a downside to this sales thermometer thing. It has some scalability issues.
For example, you can only drive so far in a day and every customer who takes an hour of your time consumes an hour that you can’t use to check other thermometers. That will eventually force you (subconsciously at least) to stop and work with only the hottest thermometers.
If only there was a way to automatically check the hottest thermometers without spending all that time driving around.
Fortunately, there is.
Getting new business isn’t a joke
While talk of a sales thermometer seems like a bit of a fantasy or even a joke, your business’ inability to consistently produce new business from existing and new clients is no joke at all.
If your business struggles with that, the problem isn’t the lack of a thermometer. The problem is that you aren’t reading it.
The sales thermometer is the information you should already have about your clients and prospects. The thermometer’s temperature is driven by behavior and interaction, both yours and that of your prospects and clients.
Those behaviors are like a patient’s symptoms. Monitoring and acting on them in a predictable, repeatable, systematic way is what gets your business to the point where you *can* produce consistent, predictable month to month revenue.
Random revenue from new business is an indication that you’re not watching and acting on these symptoms on a consistent basis. We all know we need to do these things, but sometimes we get sidetracked by the crisis-of-the-day.
While they should be acted on individually for each prospect or client, these symptoms should also be grouped together (aggregated) to help you monitor the health of your business and your market.
Things that drive up temperatures
What causes rising temperatures?
- Interaction behavior changes. You should know when someone is paying more attention than a typical prospect. Do you have a way to detect this?
- Sales cycle behavior changes. You know how long it takes to close a sale. Is that timeline changing? Are certain prospects skipping steps in the process? Is their path-to-purchase pace is faster than normal? If so, does your internal behavior toward those prospects change to suit their timeline?
- Purchasing behavior changes. For example, customers who are buying more (or less) often than they normally do. Even if you’re tracking sales on paper, you can monitor this .
Are you monitoring the sales thermometer?
Want to learn more about Mark or ask him to write about a strategic, operations or marketing problem? See Mark’s site, contact him on Twitter, or email him at mriffey@flatheadbeacon.com.
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Want to learn more about Mark or ask him to write about a strategic, operations or marketing problem? See Mark’s site, contact him on Twitter, or email him atmriffey@flatheadbeacon.com. Check out the Flathead Beacon archive of all of Mark’s blogs.