Breakout: Three Ways Small Businesses Can Snap A Cold Streak

If you’ve been in business more than five years, you’ve almost certainly dealt with it: revenues are growing, business is booming, and suddenly it all levels off. Anything can cause it—market saturation, new competition, multiple banks failing and threatening consumers with a new depression. This is one of the rare situations in life that it pays to treat the symptom instead of the sickness—what are you able to do about the economy? Is there a solution to market saturation other than finding a new market? Focusing on making your business immune to the problems at hand will yield far more results than trying to make the problems go away.

Increase Sales To Existing Customers
Even in a saturated market, it’s almost impossible to shut yourself out of resales—service industries especially have a simple route to this, as it’s only a matter of convincing customers that use your service once a year to use it every six months. Think of it this way—if 20% of your present clients bought from you twice as often, a 100,000 business is pulling in an extra 20K each year with no marketing costs and no new infrastructure.

Offer New Products And Services
Even if you’ve already made the leap in re-selling, you can always boost your sales by rolling out a new product. Your company already has a reputation that we hope is good, and you can use that to add credibility to a foray to a related product, service, or industry. Clean carpets? Start cleaning the couch, too. Mow lawns? Get into landscaping. Train clients? Start offering nice products to match your expertise

Refocus and Retrain On Core Competencies
This is more important than anything else—if you’ve built the processes in your business properly, go back and trace over them again. And again. And again. Have a sales force? Re-train them on their scripts and then have a criticism seminar in a week. Technical experts? Get some continuing education for them. When’s the last time you reviewed your presentation? You get the picture. Ace your core competencies, and almost any funk will go away.