How to increase business sales?

Yes, that is normal, it simply comes down to efficiency.

You have different sizes of business categorisation as defined by various government bodies and companies such as Gartner & Forrester.
Large Enterprise >$70mil revenue
Medium Enterprise $14-70mil revenue
Small Enterprise $3-14mil revenue
Micro Enterprise $200,000-$3mil revenue
Nano Enterprise <$200,000 revenue

The majority of the people on the forums will understand most of the business revenue stream at Nano Enterprise, a handful Micro Enterprise, and have come across a couple Small Enterprise in the past 12mths. Now our situation is rather unique due to the structure we are involved with as below, but spending the past year in the Nano (0-50% automation efficiency) & Micro (100-200% automation efficiency) markets - hence our involvement here.

Enterprise Architects : Large Enterprise : $100s million projects : $10s to $100s billions companies : 700-1,000% efficiency
Implementation Consultants : Medium Enterprise : $millions to $10s millions projects : $100s millions to $billions companies : 500-800% efficiency
Ourselves : Small & Lower Medium Enterprise : $100s thousands to $millions projects : $millions to $10s millions companies : 200-500% efficiency
Venture Fund : all sizes of enterprise : all sizes of projects : $millions to $billions companies : 0-10,000s % efficiency

The smallest project, technically it is an architecture based around Magento CE, we have worked on is $1-2million designed for 950% efficiency. The largest handful of Magento EE installations as confirmed by @benmarks of eBay is $2-5mil - the reference sites on Magento.com are 300-500% efficiency. We have been doing some ad-hoc work with a small business who have ~250% efficiency to move them in to 300-500% so that they could have a chance against their corporate competitors with 800% efficiency - they capitulated thinking they have a few years to work it out.

What we did not anticipate is the huge barrier that a small business must go through to break in to the lower mid-market levels. It has simply come to the fact after 9-12mths working at the small business levels, it is more efficient for us pursue other business and personal interests retracing our steps back to our heritage of Small/Medium Enterprise (~$3-30mil), which run at higher efficiency, while the small businesses work out for themselves how to break through that barrier instead of us explaining how to do it.

The problem for startups and established retailers is that most corporates run at 700-1,000% efficiency (Amazon is 1,100%, Google 2,000%). As these companies seek revenue they will squeeze the small businesses (Panda, 30% margins), leaving only niche markets open - something the corporates are not very good at. The downside to niche is that it is 1:1 due to it being customer service and knowledge driven - that means downsizing. That causes confusion. Confusion breeds contempt.

It is the same for the services providers, however they will be forced to diversify from their 1-2% of revenue stream knowledge to have more overall knowledge. For both sides it is a tough journey as climbing the mountain for the first time is painful, many won’t succeed being forced back down for a multitude of reasons.

For ourselves it is a case of retracing up through the structure – Micro Enterprise is not our thing so thought it would be beneficial for others to retrace our experience instead of going solo with all the associated risk – that was our mistake. So the colloquial comments about gobbledegook are correct – when looking at them from a Nano & Micro Enterprise perspective.

How does this all come back to marketing - very simple, marketing is between 4-8% of the business revenue stream, there is another 92-96% to go. Everything has to match, you can reduce your marketing workload by 200% following standard breakdowns of sales channels - but Google are running at 2,000%. The more you 'tweak' the more you will reduce your efficiency - this runs contrary to a service providers goals and the way an established business did it. By default it will push the site in to the niche bracket - most will capitulate before they get there - the corporates rely on that fact.

One thing to remember, when the corporates squeeze – they don’t play nice and they don’t mess around – their efficiency allows them to squeeze 10x faster than a small business can react – 20x in the case of Google - causing panic which leads to mistakes which leads to capitulation. As Trump says – it's business – nothing personal.

I really like Lori's suggestions. Those are great strategies to try out!

I'd also recommend doing some social media marketing. It's not an overnight fix - takes some time to build a brand personality online. But, little by little, it is really effective. Where you post is entirely up to you, but I happen to find the following social media channels useful :

Pinterest - Great for fashion, jewelry, beauty, home ware. Curalate released a report a couple months back on Neiman Marcus, and how they were able to use Pinterest to encourage follow-through with purchase by creating Pinterest exclusive discounts (i.e. your Pinterest followers would get X% off an item if they pin it to their boards). Pinning activity increased by 32% and they gained 3,000 new followers.

Instagram - Again, good for products that rely on visual appeal. People love seeing "behind-the-scenes" posts here, so regardless of what you sell, you can produce engaging material of your team (or just you!). There's new software that allows Instagram followers to purchase directly through Instagram called Like2Buy. Right now, just major retailers like Target and Nordstrom have access to it...but I have the feeling that we aren't far off from developers making it available for smaller retailers.

Vine - Video marketing is becoming increasingly effective, and Vine is where consumers are looking. Vine videos get shared 400% more than traditional video content, with over 100 million people watching vines each month. There's really no brand limit to who can be effective on here...consumers love a behind-the-scenes look, sneak peaks on what's coming up, tutorials and how-to's, etc. If you want an example of how to do "how to's" effectively, Lowes is fantastic at this. They've taken their line of products, which aren't as exciting or sexy as other merchandise, and made clever videos that get a lot of attention.

If you don't want to spend all day scrolling through your social channels, tools like Hootsuite are really useful. You can schedule posts to go out ahead of time, and see running tabs of your social media sites from one screen.

I wish you the best of luck. Growing a business takes hard work and patience, but you have a great community here who will surely help out with advice when they can!

Tiana

Enterprise consultants, it's the same as asking Gartner how they calculate their magic quadrant. Along the lines of a combination of quantitative, qualitative, revenue, industry, margins, employees, technology.

We presume you drive a car, are you able to to cite the details of the aerodynamics of a Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 car - they both have engines after all!

Right, all makes sense now. See from your posts that you are an existing Magento retailer that did it the hard way, however given that every post of yours about hosting mentions Nexcess.

So when an existing retailer does it this way - http://bpastudio.csudh.edu/fac/lpres...s/image002.gif - and people with Small/Medium Enterprise (our effective rates were $50-125/hr - 200-500% efficiency - Small Enterprise - before we left being a service provider in 2013) can explain how to fasttrack a Magento install - http://www.warriorforum.com/search-engine-optimization/998051-big-websites-pagerank.html#post9554157 with no effort on our part - all based on OCEP - but providing the exact same results by using this method - http://zone.ni.com/images/reference/...ithm_fit_1.gif.

Yes, that never does go down very well. More than happy to explain it to any startups should they want to fasttrack the whole process to rapid 200% efficiency - takes about 2-3wks of your time to live with Magento CE - no service providers needed as it's business not tech focused. Established retailers and service providers seem have a turn at the mention of this - and for good reason.

Perhaps a closed LinkedIn group would work - open source all the way - will have chat with some consultants and see if we can get some gratis tech for it. We are moving away from 200-500% towards 500-800% efficiency ranges (effective $125-200/hr - Medium Enterprise) - so have no commercial interest in Nano/Micro Enterprise.

Excellent, thanks for the idea - be fun to kickstart some startups.