The Marketing support, strategies and techniques Steve Mills has developed are proven to increase our clients’ marketing potential and, as a result, their bottom line profit.
Steve's experience and expertise is not limited to ‘marketing’ as it is understood by many. His core expertise is providing sound business advice and working his clients to develop strategies and plans of action that will take them to wherever they want to be. Steve believes in:
Using house building as an analogy, the first and most important thing to put in place is a set of strong foundations. Logically, the taller the building, the stronger the foundations need to be. This is the principle he applies to marketing.
Steve help's our clients to build strong foundational marketing pillars. A marketing pillar is a lead or sales generating tool which can be measured and improved. For example: advertising, direct mail and telesales are all marketing pillars which can be used to increase your income and drive your business forward.
The more you want your business to grow, the more marketing pillars you need to build. In other words, you need to build multiple pillars to create multiple streams of income.
However, most businesses operate their marketing using only two or three pillars. This vastly limits their potential and puts huge strain on the pillars.
If your business operates with several marketing pillars, it is essential to measure how each of these is affecting your business. Amazingly, only a tiny percentage of the businesses we work with have ever bothered to ask themselves how they can optimise the pillars they currently use and how each of these pillars is performing for them.
Having marketing pillars and measuring their performance and effect upon your business is a key to successful business growth.
This is what Steve Mills specialises in and it is often the missing ingredient that many businesses have not even considered.
As a business, it is essential to optimise each of your current marketing pillars and then build additional marketing pillars in a tried and tested manner.
Therefore, the first thing to ask is ‘Are you getting the very best return from your current investment?’ We guarantee that you are not! There must be something - and in most cases, many things - that you can do to increase the effectiveness of your current marketing.
Let’s pretend that you are advertising quite successfully in a local newspaper and every time you run the advert, the phone rings about 20 times and you win 5 new orders as a result. Each order is worth £500 of profit to you and so every time you run the advert you win £2,500 worth of new business, plus the ongoing net worth of that customer. This is a profitable exercise for you and so you keep running the advert.
However, this advertising cannot be a real success if you never stop to ask yourself how you can improve upon the number of enquiries your advert is producing, for example: from 20 to 23. Consequently, you may also be able to improve upon the performance of these increased numbers of calls in terms of the conversion rate for these enquiries from say 25% to 30%. By doing this you increase your orders from 5 to 6.9. In other words from £2,500 to £3,450. Or an increase of 38%.
By measuring the success of the campaign and conversion rates, you have not just grown your business by a modest percentage, you have grown it significantly because these percentages and enquiries stack together month by month. The cumulative effect over the course of the year would be marked.
You need to ask yourself: how could I improve the performance of my advertising pillar in order to make my business more effective?
There are many ways, but as far as advertising is concerned here are a few tools to use.
Having a system will dramatically improve conversion rates. This should include knowing what you are going to say and how you are going to say it, making sure you know the answers to all of the objections you might receive when making sales calls and ensuring you follow up on all the enquiries you don’t currently convert.
Steve has a client who provides entertainment. They were receiving approximately 80 enquiries per month and converting approximately 40% of those. Before we started working with them, they would receive an enquiry and their office staff would ask a series of questions, provide a written quote and then the potential customer would either decide to buy or ‘go away to think about it’.
We provided sales training to their team, helped them to implement several objection handling strategies and then suggested that they followed up on the sales leads that they did not close during the initial meeting. The results were significant. They increased their conversion rates from 40% to over 65% resulting in an increase in their business of 25% over the course of a year which amounted to over £250,000 worth of additional business with no increase in their marketing costs.
When we did some research into why the increase in business had occurred, many customers told us “the reason we hired their services was that they were the only ones who bothered to follow up and this showed that they cared about our business”.
