7 Crucial Steps to Fix Declining Top Line of Your Business

Are your sales heading south?

Are you losing customers to your competitors?

There could be various reasons for a declining top line; from key sales channels unable to attract customers to a new competitor appearing in the market and a lot more! Irrespective of the reason, if your business is failing to reverse this decline, it is time to wake-up and take necessary corrective action immediately. The reason for this is clear – if you can’t sell effectively, you won’t stay in business for long.

Here is the list of steps to improve the top line of your business:

1. Evaluate Your Business Performance

Once your business is established and running, you may be inclined to let things continue as they are. But, this is one of the fatal business mistakes that will have a significant negative impact on your sales.

It is important to understand the source of the problem to improve the necessary processes for increasing your top line revenue. This can be done by monitoring your business, day in day out. It is the first and the most crucial step to bring much needed improvements to your business.

Monitoring and reviewing your business will help you understand why your business is failing to achieve its sales goals and objectives.

2. Overhaul Business Plans

Evaluating your business performance will let you know if there is any disconnect between your offerings and customer expectations vis-à-vis these products. There could be a problem with the quality of your product or service, a breakdown in customer service, or a marketing message that’s not reaching the target audience.

After recognizing the red flags that are impacting your business sales, it is time to revise your plan to reflect new business realities. Revise the appropriate parts of your business plan — product design, operations, marketing strategy — to support your revised forecasts.

3. Set the Right Goals

Have you set realistic goals for your business?

Make sure your goals are realistic and that you can actually achieve them within the necessary deadline. Ensure you have enough resources to help you achieve the goal you have set for your business.

For instance, a business owner may set a mid-term goal to increase sales revenue by $250,000 over the next 12 months. But this might turn out to be a wishful goal, if he does not have enough staff to cope with the added workload or enough revenue to invest in the latest technology or equipment that will help him cope with the increase in sales volume.

It is crucial for all business owners to set realistic and achievable yet challenging short, medium and long-term goals for their business.

4. Rebrand Your Company

Constant business evaluation will also let you know what is not working for your business. Your business may not be generating enough sales leads as your competitors might be having a well-entrenched presence in the industry, your target audience doesn’t know what you do or simply because your website is boring and designed with outdated technology.

One of the solutions for all these problems is to ‘rebrand’ your company. This may include completely transforming your brand by changing the logo or making some minor alterations like redesigning your website keeping the latest trends in mind to give it a fresh and modern feel.

However, before you take the risk of rebranding your company, it is important to evaluate and seriously think about all the pros and cons it will bring along.

5. Improve Your Marketing Strategies

No matter how great your product or service, your business will experience weak sales without an effective marketing strategy. If your marketing efforts are not generating desired results, it is time to fix your marketing.

Marketers need to implement the right inbound as well as outbound marketing strategies to increase sales and achieve sustainable competitive advantage.

When it comes to sales, building relationships is the key and social media is the right channel to build relationships with your existing and potential customers. Reaching your target audience through the right channels and delivering a relevant and impressive marketing message is paramount for making sales.

Employ the right social media marketing tactics and strategies to attract, convert, engage and delight more prospects, leads and customers.

6. Leverage Automatic Business Management Software

The inability to manage time may be one of the reasons you fail to achieve your business goals. To get around this problem, the best solution is to use automatic business management software like lead management, inventory management, CRM software, etc. Business management software automates complete processing, saving valuable time.

Apart from saving time, leveraging software will decrease inefficiency and increase customer satisfaction, thereby increasing your sales.

There are various types of software available in the market that will help you handle a variety of applications single handedly from one dashboard.

7. Hire Right Sales People

One of the reasons your business is not generating sales is because you have not hired the right person for the job.  If your sales person provides ‘standard’ generic responses to your potential customers, there are high chances that potential customers will turn to your competitors.

On the other hand, your business has a high chance of success if you hire the right sales people for your organization.

So, once you figure out what went wrong in hiring sales candidates, you can then make course corrections. Once hired, train your sales employee to ask the right questions to potential customers for providing them with a personalized shopping experience.

End Words

Taking these steps will improve operational efficiency, provide early capitalization on new opportunities and increase return on investment (ROI), thereby increasing the top line of your business.

Image source: e21Global