10 Growth Hacking Strategies to Triple Your Sales…

How do you build and grow a successful business? How do you take it from ground level, to national or even global awareness? How do you generate sales on autopilot and get people to notice you in a sea of other businesses grappling for the consumer’s attention? As an entrepreneur, these are questions that often arise. As we fight the perilous uphill battle to succeed, we’re plagued by a variety of fears that are difficult to overcome.

However, to the victor go the spoils. Isn’t that how the saying goes? We all know that there is light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. But, how do you get there? How do you move from your present situation of struggling to keep your head above water, to swimming in a sea of profits? Is it easy? No. Definitely not. But, there are growth hacking strategies you can employ, right now, to take your business to the next level.

Henry Ford once put it very eloquently. He said that, “Whether you think you can do a thing or you think you can’t do a thing, you are right.” Meaning that mindset is everything. It forms the basis for out ability to grow our business no matter what stage we’re in. You see, if you’ve given up mentally, you’ve already lost the battle. The key to winning lies in your mind. It all starts and ends there.

Related: 7 Key Selling Habits All Sales Professionals Must Develop

Best Growth Hacking Strategies

Shows like Shark Tank, and it’s European counterpart, Dragon’s Den, have grown in popularity over the years. They’ve risen among the ranks and have created celebrities out of the personalities that are investing in businesses that are vying for attention. People like Kevin Harrington and Mark Cuban and Daymond John have become household names thanks to the popularity of these shows.

So what is it about shows like that? Clearly, these entrepreneurs-turned-investors have experience in growing businesses. Many of them are multi-millionaires and billionaires who’ve been through the so-called ringer. Not only do they have experience in growing epic businesses, but they also know the specific steps that need to be taken to growth hack any business, no matter what stage it might be in.

To that end, I turned to another wildly successful entrepreneur for advice. Someone who’s generated over $600 million in online sales. One of the creators and architects of the business, QLink Wireless, a company that went from zero to 1.7 million customers and $200 million in annual revenue in just under six years. Yes, Andrew Lermsider knows a thing or two about how to build a colossal business.

Over the course of 17 years of experience in building and consulting for hundreds of businesses, including his own, he’s learned a thing or two about how to scale a business as well. Growth hacking? Sure, that’s easy and it’s straightforward, according to Lermsider. That is, of course, if you know what you’re doing and what to look for.

Lermsider, who today works alongside some of the top ecommerce companies, real estate brokers and surgeons in the world, lays the groundwork for the proper fundamentals that need to be in place to growth hack your way to success. It boils down to 10 very particular strategies. They might seem rudimentary or fundamental from the outside looking in. But, without tackling these first, you can kiss your chances of building a wildly successful business goodbye.

1. Build an irresistible offer and work backwards.

One of the most powerful growth hacking strategies you could employ is to focus on building the irresistible offer and to work backwards. The offer is key. Of course, you do have to understand who your target demographic is. You need to know your customer. Otherwise, if you don’t know them down to the very last detail, how can you expect the offer to be irresistible to them? So what makes an irresistible offer?

• It’s clear and concise
• It addresses the problem and solves the pain
• It invokes powerful social proof elements
• It delivers an enormous amount of value
• It has a bulletproof guarantee
• There’s a strong call-to-action
• Employs scarcity to invoke an immediate response

Related: AI Is Taking the Art Out of Sales

2. Pay attention to the user experience.

Look at it from the customer’s point of view. Analyze the entire journey. What does the user’s experience look like? How effective is your site in drilling down and taking them through the stages of your sales funnel? How easy is the site to navigate and understand? What does the mobile experience look like?

If your user experience is poor, not only will it hurt your overall chance of getting the sale, but it will decrease your visibility when it comes to SEO. Google pays acute attention to the user experience. Don’t destroy it by flooding the pages with ads or making it very difficult to navigate around your site. Here are some tips:

• Remove all the non-necessary items from your sales funnel
• Ensure the prospect can move from page to page quickly
• Don’t create any interruptions in the funnel

3. Build a value-driven lead magnet.

How much value are you adding to the exchange? Did you know that most people won’t buy a product or service on their first interaction? A very small percentage will buy right away. It often takes somewhere between 90 days and 18 months for the consumer to buy once they’ve inquired about a product or service. Your goal? Be there when they’re ready to transact.

How do you do that? Offer them value first. Build a relationship. Don’t ask before you give. Give before you ask. This will set you up as an authority. And if you help them in some small way, they’ll remember that. What does a great lead magnet include? It could be a variety things. But, at the end of the day, you just need to ensure it’s quickly digestible and the information is actionable.

Make it easy to read and insightful. Don’t just fill it with information. Fill it with information they can take action on. That’s the difference between delivering information and giving them something insightful. If you don’t have a lead magnet, make one. Either create a checklist, a cheat sheet, a PDF or something else that will deliver some value.

Related: 7 Tips for Getting More Sales Meetings With Prospects

4. Nurture subscribers with an email sequence.

One great way to growth hack is to connect with your subscribers. Sounds too fundamental, doesn’t it? Well, Lermsider says that’s one of the keys. If you can nurture your subscribers and develop a relationship over time, you can ultimately get them to buy something from you. But, if they don’t connect with you on some level, then you can pretty much forget about it.

Build an email sequence that keeps on giving. Make it weeks or months long. Send one every single day. Nurture that subscriber. Tell stories. Build a bond and strengthen that relationship over time. Don’t try to just sell to the prospect. Be sure to teach them things that you know will help them.

Talk to them like they’re your friend. Use Dear and P.S. and acronyms like TTYL and so on. Be clear and concise in your communications but also be friendly. Think about it as if you’re just talking to someone that you know really well. That’s it. Don’t play the short game. Think long-term and be strategic.

5. Focus on conversions and optimization.

Do you have a converting offer? If not, then why? Without a converting offer, you can’t possibly begin to scale or even optimize those conversions. Now, building a converting offer does involve invoking a lot of marketing principles into one. Your offer needs to be good, first and foremost. If it isn’t, go back to the drawing board.

If you know that you can spend a $1 and make $2, wouldn’t you continue to scale out that spend to ensure that you made more money? Ask yourself, is your website optimized for conversion? You can use tools like Google Analytics for conversion tracking, or by building your entire funnel in software like ClickFunnels.

Learn and understand the meaning and the importance of terms like cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-acquisition (CPA) and so on. Dial these in by honing in your targeting and your understanding your customer better. If you’re not converting with Facebook ads or any other paid traffic means, go back to the irresistible offer. Address the pain points better and rework it.

Related: 11 Ways to Boost Your Sales Performance

6. Segment your lists based on actions.

How much segmenting are you doing in your business? Are you separating your messaging on your website, emails and ad campaigns based on their interaction with you? The better you are at segmenting, the better you can tailor your messaging to the particular person you’re speaking to.

This does volumes for your sales. It can be used to hack your way to extreme growth no matter what stage you’re at. This can run several layers deep because there are so many potential metrics involved. And the bigger your business is and the more products or services you offer, the more complex this can get.

7. Re-engage and re-market with pixels.

How much are you re-engaging and re-marketing to people who visit your website. Again, most customers won’t buy on the first interaction. They need repetition. The more they see you, the more likely they’ll be to buy from you. Lermsider suggests that re-targeting should be aggressive in the first seven to 14 days. After that it looks a bit like stalking.

How can you setup a campaign that will re-engage and re-market to individuals based on prior visits to your website? You can easily use the Facebook pixel to do this. Or the Google pixel. It tracks the user’s visits to your site and you can re-engage certain people who’ve recently visited your website.

Related: The 15 Characteristics of People Who Succeed at Sales

8. Monetize your customers through life-time value.

Most entrepreneurs are short-sited. They look at the current interaction of the sale and don’t think about future interactions. But, Lermsider says that the world’s greatest entrepreneurs understand their customer’s life-time value (LTV). When you understand LTV, you can implement strategies to monetize your customers down the road.

Take a careful look at your upsell process. Do you have a system in place for referrals? What about the process after a customer purchases from you? Do you have a system in place for communicating with them? Remember, people are more likely to spend larger sums of money with you once they’ve spent a little bit.

9. Improve your website’s speed.

Did you know that most people will abandon a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load? Keep in mind that speed is everything. There’s a reason why Google and Facebook are so fixated on speed. After all, they have introduced the Accelerate Mobile Pages (AMP) and Facebook Instant articles, respectively speaking.

Most of the world still operates on slower mobile broadband speeds. And, even for the parts of the world that are faster, the speed of your website and the underlying user experience are crucial determining factors in your ability to sell. No one wants to wait around for a site to load or be stuck trying to navigate a poorly designed website. No one.

Most sites lose half their visitors before the page loads, according to Google. Why not test your site with Google’s new mobile speed tool. You can also use a more in-depth tool from Google called Page Insights. Both tools will analyze your site and produce a series of recommendations for fixes that you can enact right away to improve the speed.

10. Carefully evaluate your analytics.

Take a careful look at your analytics. Who are the customers and where are they coming from? Lersmider says that the better you know this information, the easier you can make decisions to help boost your growth. How long are these people sticking around on your site and what pages are they visiting?

Use this knowledge the glean information on where the funnel breaks. Use it to improve the user experience and effectively scale your growth by seeing what’s working not working and putting in the efforts to fix it. Use tools like truconversion.com or hotjar.com for heat maps and user-session monitoring. This can offer potentially invaluable information that you can then use to take things to the next level.