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Top leaders reveal the secrets to sustainable sales growth.
What you really want is a monopoly. When someone needs your products and services, you want them to come to you and only you. This would result in a one-hundred-percent market share. Since that’s not a possibility for most of us, the next best thing is to become irresistible to your prospective customers. Irresistibility is the goal of every entrepreneur, and it’s the free-market path to prosperity.
Here are some strategies that have produced enviable revenue growth. Can you use any of them to become the go-to source in your market?
1. Make it Impossible for Your Customers to Fail. Dotloop provides a comprehensive cloud-based platform that helps real estate agents get deals done. According to users, it’s a great system. But that’s not the main reason behind its irresistibility for 1,300,000 customers. Nor does it fully explain an annual growth rate approaching three hundred percent. “Our success comes from an absolute commitment to making every customer successful in that critical first ninety days of our relationship,” explains Austin Allison, Dotloop CEO. “We have dedicated teams who create customer excitement, lay out proven steps to success, provide training, and reward or hold accountable our customers as needed to move them forward.” Metro Brokers, a client of Dotloop with over 1,900 agents, has seen adoption rates of the Dotloop platform rise above eighty percent in just four months. “Our agents have been able to get into contract with buyers and sellers in the first meeting. No paper contracts, no faxes, no ink signatures—Dotloop has made it easy for us to grow our business, and almost impossible to fail. Our agents love this,” says Metro Brokers COO Craig McClelland. What can you do to make sure failure is not a possibility for your customers?
3. Take Advantage of Technology. Want to grow your sales to $150M in four years? You’ll probably need to embrace leading-edge technology in order to do it. Airpush, a mobile ad network, now targeting customers on 120,000 apps, is showing the world how they hit those numbers. Matt Shaw is Chief Revenue Officer for Airpush. His work history includes stints at Yahoo, YouTube, and Google. “We’re looking for even more growth once we expand onto the IOS platform,” states Shaw. “Our growth so far has been funded internally, with no venture capital.” Clearly, this level of profit-infused growth wouldn’t be possible without digital products and cyber strategies. How can you take full advantage of available technologies to grow your business?
4. Beat Your Competitors to the Punch. Any company that can see far enough into the future to know the direction in which their industry is going will gain a strategic advantage over its competitors. When this happens it almost always produces instant irresistibility. Ready Set Rocket is a full-service digital ad agency that is ahead of contemporaries still stuck in print-heavy practices. Aaron Harvey, Co-founder and Creative Director, describes how this has played out in the advertising world. “The big challenge in advertising has always been to accurately convey the breadth of the offering while distilling it down to a single message. Digital tools can support that.” Harvey continues, “If organizations are smart they integrate corporate marketing to elevate the brand. Then there can be more granular messages that the sales people can run with. Nothing accomplishes these goals better than digital media.” Where will your industry be in five years, and how can you get there first?
5. Reinvent Your Company. Greyhound recently celebrated its 100th birthday, but you’d never know the company was that old by riding one of its buses today. Dave Leach, President and CEO, is clear about how to bring about large-scale change. “You must stay connected with the customer at all times through the change process, but your ability to deliver comes from employees. They must be completely engaged or you will fail.” Today, Greyhound provides a completely updated customer experience, with more convenient routes and new buses, now equipped with WiFi, and outlets for recharging mobile devices. With more than 6100 employees and $1 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2014, Greyhound is a big ship that is difficult to steer. Transporting passengers between 42,000 city pairs everyday (more routes than all airlines combined) is no small task. Reinvention has kept the company relevant and appealing to short-haul travelers. What about your company could be reinvented in order to become irresistible?
6. Go Green. A green upgrade to a well-known product can become a major force for sales growth. Consider the urinal. Adding up the costs of plumbing, installation, water usage, and maintenance, the old urinal is quite expensive, not to mention environmentally unfriendly. Falcon Waterfree Technologies is changing all that with a waterless version that pays for itself in about nine months. CEO Simon Davis reports, “Falcon Waterfree Technologies has saved 20 billion gallons of water over the last ten years.” By my calculations, that’s enough H2O to fill 1,000,000 swimming pools. “And our product offers better hygiene because there’s no flush handle to touch,” adds Davis. Falcon has used the benefits of cost-effectiveness, cleanliness, ease of installation, and greenness to place more than 400,000 units worldwide—distributed through Sloan Valve Company.
Another green company that is changing the business landscape (pun intended) is Forest Grass, an artificial turf manufacturer. Brian Zeng, CEO, extols the virtues of his product. “We like it when our clients report their savings in water usage or mowing expenses, especially in draught areas.” Last year Forest Grass sold 3,000,000 square meters of artificial grass—all made from recycled plastic. Does your company have bragging rights in the go-green genre?
There are plenty of other ways to create irresistibility. Which of them are most important to your target market? Figure that out and you may find a new path to prosperity.
