Get In Touch
“We need more sales”. This is a phrase often heard from business owners and entrepreneurs. Regardless of the size of their business. We hasten to inform you that the concept of “more sales” is not the key factor and driver in business.
What and where do you need to change to make your business profitable? Increasing which metric by X will result in 2X or more sales growth? If you want multiple growth, first identify the driver. And very rarely are the drivers of growth traffic to the site or leads received.
Let’s define the terms
What exactly is a key business driver? Let’s define the term. Business drivers are any internal or external element that has a significant impact on the business as a whole. Procurement prices, market trends, supply chain efficiency – these are all external drivers. Internal drivers can be time to market, equipment uptime, efficiency of technical or customer support.
Looking for patterns
There is no doubt that sales growth depends on many factors. In the retail sector, for example, it is primarily associated with major dates and holidays, with sales increasing during the Christmas period. Some electronics manufacturers follow the pattern of new iPhone releases. These types of patterns can help determine what drives the business and what to focus on.
You don’t want to “push” a product. No amount of sales scripts, super salesmen or gimmicks will help. If your product does not solve a customer problem, there is a 99.9% chance that no one will want to pay for it.
When starting a business or developing a niche, you need to find the problem (find it, not invent it) or give up on the idea. A lack of business principles or a ‘moral compass’ not only undermines trust, but inevitably leads to a loss of loyalty and affects the future of the business and the brand.
Assess your customer base
Analyse your customers and make sure you know where they come from, what their buying patterns are and which segments are the most profitable. This insight will help you identify the customer drivers for your business.
- Conduct regular questionnaires and surveys to understand what your customers value and what changes or additions they would expect.
- Create effective loyalty programmes by offering discounts, bonuses or exclusive offers to loyal customers.
- Send personalised offers based on preferences and purchase history.
- Provide high levels of service and resolve problems promptly.
Evaluate your people
Staff appraisals are another way of identifying what drives the business. The results of the sales team’s work are always visible and in demand. People get tired of tension, pushing KPIs and responsibility. Sooner or later, this all starts to affect productivity and quality of work. Sales scripts standardise the negotiation process and simplify the work. This is an example of an internal business driver.
Analysis and testing
An equally important growth driver is to constantly test and analyse the results of marketing campaigns. Use web analytics tools to evaluate the effectiveness of different strategies. Identify which channels deliver the highest ROI and focus your efforts there. Continuous optimisation of marketing approaches helps you adapt to changing market demands.
Drivers in dropshipping and Stelvel Ltd
Every business is unique and what works for one may not work for another’s strategy. So it’s not surprising that the key business drivers are quite different depending on the industry and the products offered. For example, Stelvel Ltd works with drop shippers – suppliers of electronics and equipment. In this business, growth is most often driven by factors such as equipment functionality, speed of service, supplier reliability, manufacturer’s brand name and warranty to the customer.
Stelvel helps partner companies identify the key growth drivers in their specific industry. We select the right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to analyse performance. A clear understanding of the underlying data and what drives the business is critical to developing a business strategy and building a financial model.