One of the main issues that I see many businesses and practices struggling with today is the amount of money they leave on the table every month. I call this ‘lost’ revenue. Unfortunately, this lost cash flow keeps the business struggling every month and focused on staying afloat rather than on growth and prosperity.

Over the last 8 years I’ve been working to solve this problem and today I want to tell you 4 powerful steps that you can take to ‘find’ this lost revenue and put 20-30% more cash back into you business.

The Best Part?

With this powerful method you can get serious results in as little as 30 days.

Let’s Dive In:

4 Steps to Finding Lost Revenues In Your Business

Step 1: Pick A KPI to Measure & Improve

I bet you are wondering where you can find and reclaim 20-30% of currently lost revenues in just 30 days. That’s a bold promise.

It’s totally possible though and you can do it without changing any of your marketing or advertising.

You’re going to do it by measuring, analyzing, & optimizing a KPI or Key Performance Indicator in your business.

Everyone knows that you don’t improve what you don’t measure. So, what KPI should you measure that will allow you to find 20-30% of that lost revenue and do it in 30 days or less?

There is one KPI I think you should focus on, but rather than just telling you, let me share some shocking stats and let those stats do the convincing.

As you know, there are nearly 7 billion people on the planet. 4.2 billion of those people own a toothbrush. You know many own a mobile phone? 5.1 billion.

That’s right, nearly 1 billion more people own a mobile phone than own a toothbrush.

Crazy, right?

When polled, 63% of all advertisers (that’s people like you and me) think that a phone call is the best type of lead that they can get.

You know why?

Because phone calls are 10x’s more likely to result in closed business than someone who fills out a form online.

Because of this, 65% of business owners believe that calling is the most valuable action a prospect can take, compared to only 34% who believe a click to their website is the most important action.

And it’s not just true for local businesses either. Even online the average order values for an ecommerce store are 2-3x higher with phone orders than with online orders.

Call centers regularly have 30-50% close rates to sales compared to the 2-3% average close rate for online orders.

Because of this, many industries are willing to pay an incredible premium for phone calls over website clicks.

• Education will gladly spend $100 for phone call, but only $5 for a website click
• Home services industries will also spend $100 for phone call, but only $4 for a website click.
• Insurance will spend $75, and credit cards will spend $50, and only $4 and 3$ respectively for website clicks.

So obviously, phone calls are a very important metric for most businesses. I submit to you that the KPI you should pick to begin measuring and tracking is phone calls.

Chances are your business is leaving a lot of money on the table in the area and you can find and reclaim it quickly.

Step 2: Start Measuring That KPI

Sadly very few business know how to measure, analyze, and improve their phone calls.

There are two reasons for this:

1. Phone tracking is hard from a technical perspective – which makes it expensive.
2. People think phone tracking requires them to change out their phone numbers on all their marketing and advertising.

Let’s solve both of those problems today.

The first problem is that phone tracking is a horribly complex monster that requires the use of fancy tracking numbers that forward to other numbers that ring your phone and then record data on the callers and how the calls went and how long they were and when they are being missed and… and… and… you get the idea.

But, when tamed, this monster can provide you with some of the most valuable insight into the best money getting asset in your business, your phone calls.

Fortunately, the march of technology has lead to some major breakthroughs in this space and there are now fairly simple online tools that will let you purchase local or toll-free tracking numbers for less than $1/month and simply set them up to forward to your office. You can do a lot more with them than just tracking, but that’s just the beginning.

OFFER HERE TO GET THE SYSTEM I USE

So, if you can get a tracking number for $1 and get it through a simple online system, then this should no longer stop you from starting to track this KPI and start finding that lost revenue.

But, you might still be stopped because you think you have to reprint all of your ads and marketing collateral with your new tracking number. That’s just not the case though.

All you need to have happen is that your callers are passed through your tracking number before the phone rings at your office.

Here’s how you do that while keeping the same number on all of your marketing materials.

Simply call up your phone service provider and ask them for a new phone number and tell them you want to keep your current number. Have them set up that new number to ring your office. Then have them forward your current number to your tracking number. Lastly, just have your tracking number set to forward to your new office number.

It’ll look like this:

Prospect Calls Current Number Which Forwards To >>  The New Tracking Number Where Data Is Collected & Caller Is Forwarded To >> Your New Office Number Where You Actually Pick Up The Call & Proceed As Normal.

This will all be totally seamless to the customer and happen in the blink of an eye.

Just continue to give out your old office number as normal, as if nothing has changed. You don’t have to make a single change to any of your advertising or marketing.

What will happen is that every call to that number will be tracked and you’ll start to gather data you can then analyze and take actions on. Just remember to not give out the new office number or those calls would bypass your tracking system.

Now that you know have begun measuring your Phone KPIs, let’s talk about analyzing the results you get and start finding that lost revenue.

Step 3: Analyze The Results

Let me share results of a simple study done by Web1Solutions. They analyzed over 20,000 calls for local businesses.

You wanna know what they found?

• 20 out of every 100 calls was totally missed. 20% of potential business gone.
• 15 out of every 100 calls was handled improperly and the business was lost.
• All told… 35% of business was just being thrown out the door!

That’s Average! That’s is totally normal for most companies in the world.

Let me tell ya, I think businesses throwing money away like that is crazier than people having a mobile phone, but not a toothbrush.

It’s easy to see how improving in just those two simple areas most companies could “reclaim” 20-30% of the revues they currently leave on the table.

So, if you want to analyze your results and find out where the your lost revenue is, the first thing you need to do is gather these metrics on your phone calls:

• How many calls are you getting per week?
• How many of those calls are missed (when are missed)?
• What is your average conversion rate from call to appointment or sale?
• How is your staff answering the phone?
  • Do you have a proven script?
  • Does everyone use it?

When you have these metrics you can then start making small optimizations that can have drastic results in your business and help you to reclaim any revenue being lost in current processes.

Step 4: Optimize Your Processes

Let’s dive a little deeper into that case study. One of the small companies analyzed was receiving about 6-10 calls a day.

After tracking their calls, analyzing their results, and optimizing just two key things in their business relating to how calls were being handled, there were able to lower their unanswered rate by 15% and improve their conversion rate on answered calls by 15%.

Each of those improvements was worth $10,000 per month in gross revenues for the company.

Or $20K in FOUND money… that they were just throwing away before.

So what did they optimize to find nearly $20K in previously lost revenue?

Only two things.

1. They found that most of their missed calls happened during the lunch hour because no one is manning the phones at that time – but their prospects were also at lunch calling to make appointments.So, they simply adjusted staffing minimally to make sure that they had phone coverage during the lunch hour. One simple fix that added 15% to their business overnight.
2. They also discovered that one of their staff members was absolutely killing it on the phone. She closed more business and set more appointments than anyone else because she has a consistent script she followed every time.
   They simply copied down her script and trained the rest of the staff on how they wanted the phone answered from that point on. This second change added another 15% in found revenues almost overnight.

That’s it. If you follow the 4 steps above you can start seeing results and reclaiming ‘lost’ revenue within 30 days.This is a system that took me some time to develop  and I’m so glad I got to share it with you today. Tons of folks have gotten results from this and I can’t wait to hear about yours!

Richard Matthews

Business Growth Coach