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While most are just hoping for survival others still dare to ask the question; Can You REALLY Grow Your Business in This Economy?

The answer is YES, slowly maybe, but YES you can grow your business even in this economy!

How?

By focusing all your efforts on the only three ways you can ever grow a business.

Most people overcomplicate marketing with talk of image, brand, feel, look, style, and culture. These are all important, relevant factors if you are a multinational company and all are of little importance if you are not! What is important is the simple fact that there are only three ways to grow your business.

1. Increase the number of clients, customers, members, players, guests. This is where most businesses focus their effort, although its very often the hardest of the three ways to increase income.  Large growth in number of customers usually comes from a change in pricing or a change in marketing strategy.

PRICE Dropping price to increase volume usually increases volume but very often not by the amount needed to increase profits. In fact usually the very opposite happens, profits shrink or disappear entirely!

MARKETING STRATEGY - When we changed one partners prime marketing media from print advertising to targeted direct mail, we were able to add over half a million dollars in income year one and over a million the second with a small decrease in spending!

In another case simply tripling a partners e-mail database has resulted in 52% increase in play this year!

With a new partner this year we just started an out bound telemarketing effort to re sell x- members that resulted in 56 sales and 60 trial memberships in just six weeks!

2. Increase the average transaction value. How can you get customers to buy more of what you sell each time they call, visit, or click? If ten people stand at the counter to buy a green fee for $55, the 80/20 rule says that if all were offered the chance to buy six or seven green fees for, say, the price of ?ve, two people would do it, increasing your transactional value by over 53%!

Simple, but most customers rarely receive the offer. While the customer is standing right in front of them, daily-fee golf clubs sell one round instead of ?ve. Shoe stores dont add socks or polish to a sale. Hotels sell that nights stay in the summer without trying to sell a return stay in the fall, and so it goes. Theres no cost other than the few moments of time and some basic sales training to make the offer:

"Mr. and Mrs. Jones, have you ever had the pleasure of being up here in Vermont when the leaves are changing? Its stunningly beautiful. Our fall packages just came out this week but they sell out very fast. Would you like me to reserve yours while you are here today?"

We have increased one Partners monthly revenue by over $100,000 a month this year by offer two HIGHER priced options!

3.  Increase the frequency of repurchase (or the length of time they stay as a customer).  How do you get customers to buy more often to get more residual value out of each client?

A) Train your staff how to sell!

B) Contact the customer more often and in different ways

C) Use residual income models with auto billing

D) Add a loyalty component (not a discount!)

In numerous cases a simple change of marketing strategy, can turn a struggling business into an extremely pro?table enterprise, even in this economy!

There are a thousand things you can do in the name of marketing. Focus on exploring these three, in detail, ?rst!