Increasing Sales
Every decision to increase sales, whether it’s adding to your salesforce, changing product lines, remodeling your showroom, or developing a new marketing program, requires the same basic information:
- Are the changes you’re considering appropriate for your market?
- How large is the market – is there enough potential to make it likely that you’ll reach your goal? Force yourself to quantify this.
- Does what you plan to do change the competitive landscape? Does it improve your position relative to competitors enough to have the positive impact you’re hoping for?
- And, don’t forget to consider where we are in the housing cycle. Are we in the up part of the cycle? The down? Mid-up? Mid-down? Is it about to turn up? About to turn down? We never know for sure where the next few years will take us, but if we look at how long we’ve been running above or below trend, we can make a pretty decent educated guess. The question is: Is the market likely to be strong enough long enough to support the initiative?
One more thing—don’t forget to assess the total cost of the initiative, including the hard-to-measure opportunity costs. What won’t get done because resources are being expended on this initiative?
These questions apply to virtually every investment you make to increase sales. For every specific initiative, there will be other specific questions. Some will be answered directly with readily available data, others require that you do some digging, and some will force you to make inferences. A few may even be out-and-out guesses, but the accuracy of these guesses is improved when you have solid information on which to base them.
Sometimes you get lucky and win a bad bet. Enjoy it, but don’t confuse lucky with smart. In the long run, fact-based decision-making works much better than gut-based decision-making.