Tis the Season of Self Help!

About the first of December through the first of February it seems that my email inbox gets loaded with every self help guru out there trying to convince me to lose weight, stop smoking, make more money, have a better sex life, be a better writer and on and on.  Of course they are all preying on the fact that we will be making our New Year's resolutions and we will need their help to make those resolutions happen.  By the first of February they stop bugging us because they figure everyone has already fallen off the band wagon.

In the spirit of those self help gurus I would like to offer some simple ideas to you for making your business successful this year no matter what the economic environment and you won't have to buy anything, go to any seminars or click through 50 page sales letters!  Although there have been thousands of business books written about making your business successful there still remains only 3 ways to grow your business; more customers, more sales from existing customers and larger sales from existing customers. As you look at how you will survive and thrive in these challenging times it is absolutely essential that you look at these three areas to make sure that you are doing everything in your sales and marketing efforts to grow all three of these areas. Top business consultant Jay Abraham calls this the "power parthenon strategy" and by focusing on growing each of these areas you geometrically you can grow your business exponentially. 

Of course in order to do that you need a game plan or script so that it happens each and every time the exact way you want it to happen. Your first step might be to analyze your existing customers to look at their buying trends and figuring out how you can get more and larger sales from them. When I work with my clients I am constantly encouraging them to analyze why people buy from them and what else could they be buying from them.  Once you have looked at your existing customers or clients then you need to determining what you need to do to bring in new customers or clients, as you have heard many times before it is much easier to get more business from existing customers than it is to find new ones however you need to make sure that you are using a variety of different marketing tools to get new clients. You should have at least 5 different methods or tools that you are implementing to find and get new clients. And make sure one of those is an active referral system that lets your existing customers bring new ones in the door. 

As you look toward surviving and thriving in a challenging 2009 focus on these three ways to grow your business and you will have success!  And if you want to lose weight, stop smoking or anything else the self help gurus are selling I wish you luck!