June 11, 2011

Top 10 Ways to Double your Revenue Every Year

  1. YOU are the head of sales. Through training, motivation, and a hunger for learning make yourself as CEO/founder the head of sales. Nobody will every articulate your message with the vision and clarity you can. Nobody will ever know your product as well as you do.
  2. Love to sell. Teach yourself how to love selling.  You are solving somebody’s problems through your solutions.  What’s not to love?
  3. Make doubling revenue a strategic goal. Set the goal and work backwards on figuring out how to achieve it.
  4. Put the resources and tactics in place to ensure that the strategy succeeds. Break the goal down into small, discrete, manageable tasks that can be tracked and reported on each week.  Don’t just hold sales calls every week and let the results fall where they may.
  5. Expect mistakes in sales hires. These are the HARDEST hires you will make.
  6. Focus as much on growing accounts as you do on getting new accounts. Which means you also need to focus on delivering a delightful customer experience.
  7. Every employee is a salesperson. Your company is experience by your customer much more through your non-sales employees than through you.  How they dress, behave, talk, and generally carry themselves is a reflection on you and your company.  Don’t shy away from the hard and necessary discussions with your employees.  Send them all through sales training if you have to.
  8. As you grow bigger think about inorganic growth as part of your growth plans. Too many companies only think of sales growth as coming through organic activities.  Big companies don’t think that way.  Corporate and business development includes both inorganic and organic growth.  Which also means you need to think about capital needs about 12-18 months before you need the capital.  Have great relationships with your banker.  Invest as much time with them as with your best customer.
  9. Pat yourself on the back even if you miss your goal by 25%. Hey, you’ve still grown by 75%.  And what’s bad about that? If, instead you set your goal of growing by 25% and beat that by 25% you’ve only grown 37.5%.  Set a big hairy audacious goal.
  10. Are you happy? If you’re not and doubling every year is not your deal, set your own path.