There are just seven ways to grow your business. The first five grow your sales and the last two reduce your costs. The seven ways are:

1. Increase customer retention.
Stop your customers defecting to the competition by keeping them happy. It's easier to retain existing clients than attract new ones.

2. Increase leads generated.
Gain more enquiries from people who are not yet customers with improved marketing strategies.

3. Increase your sales conversion rate.
Get more of your prospects to buy from you by following up effectively and building rapport.

4. Increase transaction frequency.
Engage your customers to buy from you more often.

5. Increase transaction value.
Help your customers buy additional products or services or bigger volumes.

6. Reduce cost of sales.
Increase your margin by improving efficiency to reduce the costs that go into your product.

7. Reduce overheads.
Eliminate or better manage your fixed business costs.

Which of these should you focus on as a business owner? There are improvements to be made in each area, however, it's most effective to focus on one or two at a time.

For example, a manufacturer will likely want to focus on reducing variable costs first. It might become apparent that wastage of raw materials or inefficient use of time is impacting the profit margin of each sale.

Or, maybe a retailer would focus on encouraging existing customers to come in more often and spend more time training the sales team to cross sell and upsell.

Which of the above ways is the easiest and cheapest to implement?

Increasing customer retention. That's why its top of the list. Simply looking after your customers better is a fast track to growth.