Once you have a product or service to sell, the best way to improve it is to make small changes, and not big, sweeping changes. The problem with big changes is that you never know how they are going to impact your business?

• By lowering your prices, are you actually going to drive away customers who devalue your product now?
• If you change your marketing strategy to focus on a specific medium, is it a viable way to reach your clients? Maybe direct mail marketing reaches them passively but they are not actively searching online so you can’t move online.

Once I have something that I know works somewhat well (even if it’s not quite profitable), I like to go in and make small changes that have huge impacts.

Some of the things I like to tweak:

• Lead Generation Rate – If I’m generating leads at 1% through a campaign, can I increase that to 2% or 4%?
• Sales Generation Rate – I might be converting 1 out of every 10 leads. Can we convert just one more person per 10 and make it 1 in 5?
• Client Lifetime Value – A client for a product might be worth $1,000 to me over their lifetime. Can I increase that value by having them pay more each time or by increasing the amount of time they are a client?
• Support Metrics – If our support issues are closed in 24 hours, can we increase that to 12 hours?
• Costs – Can I reduce my expenses for every unit sold by making an investment and paying a lot up front?

How You Can Make Small Changes to Make Huge Changes in Profits

These are a few of the ways that you can make some small changes in your business to get big results.

• Increase Lead Generation Rate by split testing copy or offers or targeting demograhpics more specifically (ie: only target businesses in top 20% of median income zip codes)
• One of the best ways I have heard to increase sales generation rate was by adding a follow-up sequence to your marketing efforts. This doubled sales conversions for the Surfing Guru
• If you want to get your clients to stay with you longer, improve your products and customer service. It will cost more upfront but you will be paid off enormously with long-term customers and positive referrals.
• Some of our monthly expenses are extremely low per client. But with every client that we have, they start becoming significant. For example, our hosting is at a point that we should probably bring it in-house (but of course I’m too Lazy to do anything about it).