Nine Drivers of Upside Leverage & Exponential Business Growth - Driver #1

Let’s talk about upside leverage!

I’m talking about how you get an activity, an investment, an opportunity, and an effort of people or creative intellectual capital to produce for you and your business at a much higher, bigger, better, more profitable yield or result than it otherwise would. Also, what mechanisms, vehicles, and elements are the highest upside leverage producing “drivers” of business growth…of exponential business growth, I know.

Let’s explore, explain and illustrate the answers. Because there are nine drivers of upside leverage and exponential business growth, I’ve identified and refined my understanding of these drivers over the course of the last several years, analysis and research I’ve done. I analyzed and examined how the highest performing businesses were driving their growth, profitability and competitive superiority.

So let’s look at what those drivers are, and let’s examine how those drivers directly relate to your business efforts, activities and opportunities.

MARKETING

I have long said that in your marketing you have the greatest upside leverage environment imaginable. Why? Simple. It costs you the same fixed effort, expense, time and opportunity cost to…

…Have a sales person in the field making calls, whether he or she secures five appointments a day, ten appointments, fifteen…It costs you the same fixed amount whether that sales man or woman closes one out of ten people contacted, one out of five, one out of three or one out of two.

…It costs you the same fixed opportunity cost, effort and expense to run an ad whether the ad pulls one response, ten responses, or one hundred ten….it costs you the same to generate those responses whether you close 2%, 10%, or 65%…it costs you the same to close those people whether they buy a $100 unit of sale, $500 unit of sale or $1,000 unit of sale.

….It costs you the same to send a sales letter or a direct mailing package out whether it pulls 0.5% response, 1% response, or 6% response. It costs you the same if they’re lead generating responses, whether they convert 2%, 10% or 22%. It costs you the same to participate in a trade show and have a display booth whether the booth attracts 10, 100 or 500 people an hour. It costs you the same to secure these leads at the booth whether you close none of them or you close 1 out of a 100, 1 out of 25 or 1 out of 10.

I can go on and on, but you can see if you can get ads that were pulling “x” to pull “2x”…if you can get people who were selling 1 out of 7 prospects to sell 1 out of 3. The sales leverage available to you is profound. If you can get sales letters that were pulling 0.5% to pull 4%…if you can people who were buying $250 to now buy $400…if you can get people who were buying once a year to buy once a quarter or once a month…if you can get people who weren’t referring anyone to you to start referring five new customers each a year…the combined effect of that kind of marketing leverage is exponential growth. That’s exactly how you increase your business, your revenue, your sales, your profits, your wealth, and your net worth by factors of ten times or more. That really is.

So marketing is one of your first and best upside leverages in business. And if you don’t recognize it and harness the extraordinary impact and value that marketing holds for you, it’s shameful.

How do you do it?

It’s actually quite simple. First thing you do is you do an internal marketing audit and inventory. You identify all the marketing activities, processes, and elements going on and then you start looking at the best performing ways to improve upon it. How do you find them? There are three approaches:

1.) Look within your organization and see who else does what you want to do better. Model, codify and replicate the highest performing people in your company doing various selling or marketing processes. And get everyone else in the organization to start applying it or adding its best elements to their previous method.

2.) Go outside your company. Look at other enterprises in the same field outside your market (or even in your market) that have better ways of marketing, of selling, of lead generating, of conversion, of re-selling and of up-selling?and borrow their success processes. 3.) Go outside your industry, to related industries, and look at their best practices. Look at the spectrum of opportunities out there that other people have found, uncovered, discovered, refined and are using each and every day with massive success?to either identify prospects, sell direct, run ads that pull great response, make better sales presentations, get appointments, or attract people to trade shows.

Watch for my next article highlighting Driver #2,