Last week I introduced you to Sarah, the coach who believed the only way to scale was to do more. Instead, I invited her to identify the real levers of scale in her business, and to do less rather than work harder.
Now it’s your turn. Let’s find the levers of scale in your business that will encourage it to grow with the least amount of effort and input from you.
First, ask yourself this: What are the systems I already have in place, and what is their purpose? Think of your business systems as existing in one of three buckets. Ask yourself:
- What do I do to be more visible? This bucket holds activities such as content creation, interviews, affiliate outreach, strategic partnerships, and paid ads.
- What do I do to grow my community? This bucket is for list-building activities and other community-focused strategies, such as building a Facebook group or Substack newsletter.
- What do I do to make more sales? In this bucket, you’ll find things like email sales funnels, discovery calls, tripwires, and anything else with a call to action that leads to a sale.
Don’t worry if your list feels incomplete. Scaling is a loop, not a ladder. You’ll revisit and refine your systems again and again, each time finding new areas of improvement.
Your next step is to note down the data points for each system that indicate if it is effective or not. For example, the number of email subscribers is an indicator of overall email list health, while the conversion rate for a single lead magnet tells you if that specific resource is doing its job.
Each month in Six-Figure Systems I host several live, group coaching calls. If you’re confused or overwhelmed by any of this, bring your questions to a call, and I’ll help you create a plan that fits your business goals.
Now that you have your systems list and some data to lead the way, ask yourself: What system, if it were fully optimized, would give me the biggest increase in revenue? Do you need to book more calls? Increase your podcast frequency? Speak on more stages?
Don’t just pick one at random. Make sure you also understand why that choice would make a difference, and what you hope to gain from it.
If you’re not sure, a good place to start is with your sales process, but with a big caveat. You must have enough traffic/data points to accurately determine the efficiency of your sales systems.
In other words, don’t assume your sales page is to blame for a lack of sales if only a handful of people have ever seen the page. Unless it’s getting regular traffic and has seen several hundred visitors, you simply don’t have enough data to make a smart decision.
Okay, got your system picked out for optimization? Great! Make a note of the system, what you hope to improve, and your goal for it, like this:
“I want to increase the number of course sales I make through my automated funnel to add $1,000 in revenue monthly.”
- System: Automated funnel
- Improvement: number of course sales
- Goal: An extra $1,000 each month
Lather, rinse, repeat
This is where the fun begins. And yes, it really is delightfully addictive to discover how the systems of your business cause money to flow, as if through a pipeline. Clear a blockage here, see the improved flow there.
Master this way of looking at your business, and you’ll be seeing potential time savers and money makers around every corner.
With your system and goal in mind, it’s time to get clear on how your system works and which inputs have an impact on your outputs.
Let’s use that automated sales funnel as an example.
The output is the number of sales made. That’s what we want to increase. That output is directly impacted by several inputs:
- The number of subscribers in the funnel (more subscribers = more sales)
- The number of people who click through to the sales page (this is independent of the number of subscribers)
- The sales page conversion rate (number of sales / number of page visitors = conversion rate, e.g. 12 / 147 = 0.0816, or just over 8%)
In this simple example, we now have three actions we can take to potentially increase sales:
Add more subscribers to the funnel, through ads, social media, influencer outreach, SEO, etc.
Entice more people to click through to the sales page by improving the email calls to action.
Encourage more people to purchase by improving the copy on the sales page.
Deciding which one to tackle is your first job, and just like Sarah’s decision about adding a membership vs onboarding a new coaching client, I’ll encourage you to choose the one that requires the least amount of effort.
Running ads, building up a whole new social marketing workflow, or boosting SEO sounds pretty time-intensive. Let’s save that for later.
What about the number of people who click through to the sales page? That’s potentially an easy fix, so let’s start there.
First, you’ll have to know what the current number is. You can get that data from your analytics package, or from your email platform.
Right now, you may be asking, “What’s a ‘good’ click-through rate?” It’s honestly better to only compete with yourself here, but if you want a baseline to start from, Constant Contact has some insights for you:
Based on this data, if your click-through rate is less than 2%, there are probably some improvements to be made simply by adjusting calls to action.
Sales page conversion rates are also important. You can make that calculation by dividing the number of sales by the number of page visits and multiplying by 100. Unbounce gives us the baseline numbers to aim for here:
Changing up your page headline, copy, call to action, and even the images on the page can all have an impact on conversion rates, so there are plenty of opportunities for improvement here.
The key is to be systematic about the changes you make, analyze the results, and then do it again. You’ll learn more about this approach to business growth in Systems for Solopreneurs, available exclusively to Six-Figure Systems members.
That’s how healthy businesses scale.
What’s next?
You just identified the best move to reach your next revenue milestone. This is where some people get stuck. They can see the problem, but don’t know how to fix it.
That’s exactly why I created Six-Figure Systems. It helps you not just find your levers of scale, it also gives you the concrete steps to optimize your most important systems, with plug-and-play resources designed with solopreneurs in mind.
If your visibility systems are weak, the Visibility Toolkit, The Six-Figure List-Building System, and Creative Connections all make attracting a bigger audience easier.
If it’s your sales systems that are underperforming, take a look at Sales Pages That Convert for help optimizing your sales pages, or Selling With Email for making better, more effective offers.
For optimizing your fulfillment systems, I recommend starting with either The Coach’s Toolkit or The Course Creator’s Toolkit. They’ll give you a framework for setting up repeatable processes that keep clients and customers happy.
Finally, if your C-suite could use a little polish, we have goal setting, pricing, and SOP workshops to help.
In addition, each month we offer live Q & A calls, mindset coaching, and a brand new workshop to help you better optimize all the systems that make up your business.
See everything that’s included and join today by visiting SixFigureSystems.com.
I’ll see you on the inside!
