Deciding an independent path to earn a living is a very courageous decision. However, moving ahead without a plan, or under the pressure of following the trend, will ultimately make you face disaster. In the past few years, we have seen many entrepreneurs succeed in their start-ups, which helps others gather the courage to take on the path.
Growing your home-based business into an empire takes more than courage though. In this article, we will be laying down the path and tools that will help you out with the initial struggle and also get those first 100 customers.
Let’s get recognized with the common methods that all entrepreneurs must practice.
1. Focus on the right things
The journey of an entrepreneur is very exciting, and sometimes you forget that putting every idea into action may lead to chaos and mismanagement of your home-based business resources. To achieve successful fruition of your ideas and actions, you must focus on the things you can do first by giving your best input.
For instance,
If you are providing services, focus on those which are your forte. Focus all your marketing and sales campaigns on one or two features of your services. That way you can create a niche for yourself and collect data regarding the demand for other services that may be in your arsenal.
Home-based business owners can easily focus on their business and succeed
Many times, home-based business owners complain about not being able to spend more quality time with their family members. You should focus on building a business that supports such a lifestyle. Are you looking to expand your home-based business every 12-months? Then, define your businesses’ process and objectives in such a manner and stay focused on completing them.
To create an empire out of your home-based business, you must plan well and stick to it, no matter what!
Never shift focus from your main product or service.
For instance.
Let’s presume you are a videographer who is running a home-based business and provides services for covering marriages, birthdays, corporate events, etc.
You might be thinking of expanding your business to more than videography. Maybe you want to offer photography too. Or you are planning to buy yourself a drone to shoot more aesthetic videos or photos.
● Never start offering additional services immediately, especially without proper planning.
● You must wait until your business has grown while offering your core services to your customer base.
● New possibilities always pose a threat as they distract and push the entrepreneur’s focus away from their main product or service.
2. Tune your customer base data
For the owners of a home-based business, cross-selling or upselling to their existing customers is one of the easiest ways to increase their revenue. Offering volume discounts, such as the “two-for-one” sales or when a new customer signs up for multiple services, help in attracting your customers.
Never get distracted by noise!
● Focus your attention to your loyal customers.
● After defining your customers, keep the level of service you provide to them at an all-time high.
● Entrepreneurs tend to jump around a lot to target the entire market, forgetting the niche audience that appeals to their product or service line.
Your customers can help you grow your business in many ways
Referrals are the main source of growing an audience for your business. If your loyal customers are helping you grow your business using referrals, then you must plan rewards for them.
● You can even offer a certain percentage of sales to your most loyal customers.
● Providing discounts on future services is also a way to show regard to your customers.
● Most happy customers are OK with referring their contacts to you only because of the after-sale services you provide to them.
3. Create a website for your home-based business
When you decided to start a home-based business, you must have given a lot of thought before giving up the idea to have a brick-and-mortar storefront. The cost you saved on the monthly maintenance and electricity bills can easily be diverted towards developing a dynamic website that allows you to capture the attention of your target audience and show yourself as a legit business.
Recommended reading: How to Choose the Right Colors for Your Small Business Website [Infographic]
Furthermore, it is easy to sell your product or service to anyone at any place, using a website. In earlier days, when the technology was scarce, the maintenance of websites used to be costly. The young entrepreneurs today do not have to worry about that extra cost.
Hire the best website designer that suits your website development budget and get your product and services to your customers in a few clicks.
4. Find the right strategic partner
Am sure you have read or heard about complementary goods and services! Working with businesses that specialize in a complementary product or service will help you get more clients in a shorter duration.
There’s always someone you can partner with!
● Are you manufacturing quality headphones or mobile accessories? Partner with a mobile manufacturing company.
● Are you selling lubricants? Partner with your local car dealers!
● Are you selling baked goods? Are your customers happy and content with your offerings? Partner with a local coffee shop!
● Are you a graphic designer? Offer a lower price in exchange for client referrals.
How can you find a strategic partner?
● Clearly define your target audience.
● Start looking for businesses that serve your target market with a product or service that compliments your businesses’ offering.
● Look for businesses that are a little larger than your business.
● More established businesses will have more customers, compared to you.
● Strictly conduct due diligence while partnering with businesses though.
● Keep the market reputation of the businesses you have selected in mind.
Let’s discuss some more ways entrepreneurs can grow their home-based business.
5. Build a sales funnel for your home-based business
The sales funnel is a multi-step, multi-modality process that moves prospective browsers into buyers. — Ryan Deiss, co-founder of Digital Marketer
A home-based business owner will be looking for ways that can help him grow his business quickly. A sales funnel helps business owners scale and grow their business quickly and easily.
Sales funnel comprises of the stages in the sales process your leads go through before they become paying customers. Create different funnels for the different sales process. It may be the “free-plus-shipping offer” or a “high purchase customer” funnel. Having multiple funnels allows concentrating on all your customers individually.
Qualify
● Qualifying leads accurately by establishing an effective sales process
● Determine if leads have the budget, need, authority and timeline to make a successful purchase
● Leads meeting the qualification criteria becomes potential opportunities
Meet
● Sales reps push the qualified leads for sales opportunity by setting up call, meeting or demo
● A crucial stage for impressing the leads with your best offerings
● Leads understand the features of your product or service and how it will benefit them
Propose
● Your sales reps work out the fine details of the meeting and establish a commitment towards the deal
● A proposal, terms of the contract, and other agreements are shared to finalize the deal
● The outcome may sway either way (a win or a loss)
Close
● Closing all opportunities in your pipeline is the last stage of your sales funnel
● Prospects either turn into paying customers or simply leave the pipeline (lost opportunities)
● If you win the deal, it is moved to the won stage in your sales pipeline
● After winning the deal, customer onboarding takes place
It is essential to keep a record of your lost deals too, so you can track the reasons why you lost them and nurture prospects in the future to win their business and relationship.
The win rate of deals is quite unpredictable, and this is where a smart sales intelligence software comes in handy. Such software takes all the guesswork out of the sales process and produces the real opportunity to home-based business owners. Making data-driven decisions gets easy and beneficial for the growth with sales intelligence software such as Salesmate.
6. Adapt a contact management system
● Even when you give undivided attention to your sales funnel and the customers, tracking all the customer data transaction manually is a bit laborious.
● Moreover, as your business grows, depending on manual tracking of every customer-related transaction gets cumbersome for any home-based business owner.
● To scale quickly and without the hassle of manual data entry, you must adopt a smart contact management system.
● Depending on the industry you belong to, you can always choose a cloud-based software like Salesmate.
7. Research the competition.
Before you get your home-based business the boost it requires and gets your offerings to the target audience, you must research your competition thoroughly.
● You can take help of BuzzSumo and SEMrush for the task of competitive intelligence.
● You can know which campaigns run by your competitors are successful.
● You can easily see which of their content or ad copy is faring better with the audience.
This will help you plan your online strategy so that you can fill the gap your competitors are leaving and gain customers from it.
● find out about the duration of the ad campaigns that you have been running
● how are they benefiting your online campaigns, and
● what needs to be done to get the maximum return
8. Create a customer loyalty program.
● Customer loyalty programs have proven to be a great method of increasing business sales.
● Acquiring new customers costs thrice than maintaining your present customer base.
● Simply put, acquiring new customers is expensive, especially for home-based businesses.
● When a home-based business owner decides to run their customer loyalty program, it helps them show their gratitude towards the regular customers.
● It is also a major channel to attract new customers as the ones getting the advantage of the loyalty programs will be bragging about the same in their inner circle.
● We would suggest that as a home-based business owner, you must develop an attractive loyalty program and make it accessible to your existing customers.
● This will definitely fasten the growth of your business.
9. Always be on the lookout for new opportunities
A home-based business owner must always analyze his business process to keep an eye on any new opportunities. This can easily be done using CRM software that will provide you with detailed reports with insights into the customers purchasing pattern.
● You can easily understand the purchasing trends that change with season or months or occasion.
● Understanding such metrics will allow you to save your critical resources and divert them towards bringing seasonal products or services into the front.
● With a proper tool to help you analyze all your crude customer data, you can easily spot opportunities and stay ahead of your competitors.
10. An email list for your sales outreach campaigns
Building and maintaining your home-based businesses’ customer email list is crucial for your sales outreach campaigns. You can easily create a knowledge base (blog) on your website and share useful content with an option of subscribing to newsletters. Once you do that you can easily integrate your website forms into your CRM and generate leads for your sales outreach campaigns. You can do all of this with a few clicks as a smart CRM can automate your petty tasks so that you can focus more on your businesses’ growth.
Conclusion
For the business of every shape and size, the steps mentioned above must be followed to make your business grow and stay in business. Managing your contacts, deals, and all business data at one single place helps in compiling easy reports. It also enables you to keep an eye on the entire sales process, from lead generation to closing.
Having a smart sales CRM such as Salesmate will allow you to grab every opportunity that comes your way. Automate your lead generation, lead follow-up and lead nurturing tasks with few simple workflows so that you can easily focus on generating more revenue.
Salesmate CRM has various features that complement the sales process of home-based business. If you are curious to know how you can take maximum advantages of the same for growing your home-based business, do get in touch with our team.
