Measure the little things

The revenue model has been gaining great traction of late with new clients coming on board and lots of enquiries from those wanting to sign up. Unfortunately we can’t take everyone on board due to them not being ready. Those that are ready need to have their ducks lined up.

What I learned

• You need to know your revenue
• Are those figures correct in Google Analytics?
• Have you contemplated an exit strategy?
• Little things can make all the difference

Transcript

Hey, welcome back, Rankers. You having a good week? It’s only just started, how could you? Now, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about a couple of things to focus on. So, I’ve been talking to a lot more clients recently, we’re putting them on the new model, and it’s really exciting. So, really enjoyable conversations that we’re having now with clients. So, the couple of conversations I’ve had this week were about, “What’s your revenue now,” and, “Are these numbers correct?”

Make sure your dollar is correct and accurate in Google Analytics, especially if you’re a retailer, because there’s so many that we come across where it’s not. So, just make sure your revenue numbers, basically, are what is real and what’s in your books, because … Look, you’re going to get some discrepancies here and there, but if it’s by and large pretty close, then that’s really going to help you in the long term.

But the sort of conversations we’ve been having is like, “Could you scale this business? How much could this business make? How many are employed in the business?” Finding out about the warehousing, finding out about where stock is acquired, what the interests are of the business owner as far as … Even talking exit strategy sometimes with business owners, because you can’t do that with the business owner’s employee. That’s not a conversation you can have. But sometimes with a lot of business owners who are on this trajectory like this, it’s a thing we have to talk about, because a lot of business owners don’t want to talk about it because sometimes they can think, “Oh, I don’t want to scare my supplier away.” But we’ve worked with a couple of clients where we’ve taken them to an exit strategy and it’s a lot of fun when you’re doing those sorts of things. It’s a lot of fun when you’re talking to the clients more about, well, how quickly could we make these things happen on your site.

As I’ve said, I saw a lot of retailers up at Retail Global who I’ve thought, “Geez, we could double the revenue.” And a couple of them that we looked at that we could, but we decided not to work with them because they just weren’t ready. They wouldn’t be able to cope, get the work done that needed to get done. We’d put in extra work. And when I say, “Work to get done,” sometimes … Like we’ll do a lot of work where we can, but sometimes you just can’t for a whole host of reasons.

So, some of these retailers have been rejects because they’re just not ready for the model or for us to take them on. It just wouldn’t make a lot of sense. But for others, it does and they’re better conversations because you’re talking about the little things that make a huge impact to revenue. Like this one here, this is … Well, I’ve shown you this one before. This was just one change that I made and what you can see there, it’s doing 432% more revenue this year than what it was the same time last year. Now, this is a small retailer. We’re not doing a lot of work for him. I’m doing a little bit of work for him, but then he’ll ring me up and I’ll say, “Now, Andrew, go and change this, go and change that, because you’ve broken that and you need to fix that.” And he’ll go away and do that and the revenue will come back.

A couple of times, he’s removed things that we’ve told him to put there, accidentally and whatever else. There was one message he had that he said, “No, I had to remove it because it didn’t apply to all customers.” And I said, “Just put an asterisk. Say, ‘Doesn’t apply to all customers,’ or whatever it might be. But put it back because that’s what this drop here was.” He changed his messaging and then got it back again.

So, a lot of these things are small. They’re incremental. They’re looking for little tiny things that can make a big difference. What we’re trying to do throughout all of this is reduce cognitive load on the new user. Just make it easier for the user to hand over their details and buy stuff from you. Hopefully that’s helpful, and we’ll see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.

Jim

Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.