7 “Easy” Ways to Increase Sales

My 7 top tips:

1. Hire a great VP of Sales. Yes, I am a broken record here. But I’ve seen it 100+ times. Hire a great VP of Sales, and even if nothing else changes … she’ll increase the revenue per lead by 20–100%+. In one sales cycle or less. More here: How My VP, Sales Doubled Our Sales in 90 Days. And No, It Wasn’t…
2. Raise prices 20%. Pricing is not a science, even in B2C companies. Not really. Raise prices 20%. You can always also discount 20%-25% the next day. Discounting back to your old list price even if far better than discounting from your old list price.
3. Make sure you have monthly quotas, not quarterly ones. Quarterly ones take all the pressure off for the first 2 months of the quarter. Later, when you are huge, move to quarterly quotas. Not today. More here.
4. Ask your customers. Ask your larger customers what other services you could provide them. Your happiest, best customers will tell you. As will your grouchiest, but best customers, will tell you.
5. Fire your worst sales rep tomorrow (if he’s much worse than the rest). This doesn’t always work, but it usually does. Leads are precious. Imagine you have 100 leads per month, and you are splitting them among 3 reps. 1 of these reps has less than half the close rate of the other two. If you just fire the worst rep, and split the 100 leads 50/50 among the other two reps then voila … you revenue goes up 20%. In one month. Note be careful here, only do this if you have the data over several months to support it. It can take time to scale. But usually, most start-ups have a rep or two that close at a farlower rate than the others. Route those precious leads to she who can close them.
6. Align your website and product marketing on the higher end of the market. Fix your website today. Stop acting “cheaper”, “cuter”, “hipper”. Act more enterprise. Write the collateral. Anchor toward the high end of the market. Prospects will pay more for the more “enterprise” solution. At a minimum, they won’t beat you up for being too low-end.
7. Decrease churn. Less churn = more revenue … and many other benefits. So invest more here, in general — and especially if you don’t have any better ideas. Reach out to your customers more. NPS them. Have customer meet-ups. Get on a jet and go visit them. Hire more CSMs. Whatever it takes. Measure churn. And then drive it down. In the end, decreasing churn by $X a year is the same as selling $X a year more product. Maybe even better.

Also a great post here on some tactical ideas: https://www.saastr.com/how-we-in…