10 Jan 3 Places You’re Leaving Money on the Table (and How to Fix Them Today)

Good business consultants are able to look at a company objectively, ask pertinent questions, and guide their clients through the process of creating a plan for future growth. Consider a consultant your objective third party, the one who can sort through the processes that work and those that don’t work and help mold your company into a profitable entity.

For any business owner with an online presence (and EVERY business should be online!), there are many passive ways to build income streams into your business model that will bring in extra money while you focus on serving your current customers. Passive income is good and will help your bottom line while you actively market your business. You’ve invested good money into your business and your website; why not make it work harder for you?

Affiliate Marketing is a simple way to make commission by recommending products or services to your audience. This process is similar to telling your friend or neighbors about the great pizza place where you just ate dinner. Simply sign up for the product’s affiliate program and place a unique link within a product review on your blog or on a web page listing all the business tools you recommend. Every time someone clicks on your link, they are brought to the product’s site and if they make a purchase, you get a commission. Affiliate links can also be added to eBooks or other digital products you sell. However, review the Terms of Service for all the social media platforms before posting an affiliate link.

Creating upsells in your sales funnel is another overlooked place where you can bring in extra money. Do you have a basic sales funnel in place (if not you should), where you make an offer to your broad audience and then have more focused, more expensive offers for them to choose from over time? These additional offers that move your customers through your sales funnel towards your higher ticket offers. Now, for each main offer in your sales funnel, think of an upsell your customer would find valuable. This may be free admittance into your private Facebook group or maybe it’s a report, checklist, form, or eBook for a nominal fee. You want this to be a no-brainer add-on to their order. For your more expensive offers, add a more expensive upsell, like a trial period in your membership site. The key is to choose relevant upsells that will benefit your customer and that makes sense to couple with the initial product purchase. In other words, don’t create an upsell that doesn’t make sense.

Back-end efficiency is important to any business, whether it’s strictly online or whether you also have a physical location. A business consultant can objectively assess whether you’re working most efficiently and can offer solutions to make customer service, billing, and customer fulfillment (just to name a few areas) quicker and more efficient and accurate. Very often business owners are too close to the situation to see how everything flows (or doesn’t flow) together, similar to why having someone else proofread your sales copy is ideal because they are more likely to pick up typos, strictly because they didn’t write the copy.