Most businesses seek to increase their profit from year to year. Here are five ways you can look to increase your bottom line.

|1| Increase your leads

First, build a larger pipeline of prospective customers:

• Identify your most successful promotional tactics and repeat them.
• Identify your best customers and contact them directly (if possible).
• Attend industry events and conferences to meet potential customers outside their work environment.
• Ensure your website can generate new leads.
• Develop new distribution channels. Think about using agents, licensing your goods or utilizing a new distributor.
• Ask current clients to provide referrals.
• Actively ask people to get in touch by creating calls to action or incentives through promotional materials, your website, social media platforms and free trial offers.
• Host webinars or speak at events
• Create thought leadership content, white papers, blogs or opinion pieces.

What other ways can you get in front of new customers? This can lead to boosting your bottom line.

|2| Convert more leads into customers

Once you have more leads, increase your conversion rate. Your conversion rate is the number of leads divided by the number of confirmed customers.

Try these tips to help increase this rate:

• Train staff on selling techniques and closing methods.
• Provide staff with incentives or bonuses for higher conversion rates.
• Run demonstrations for potential customers to show what you offer and how they could benefit.
• Develop content that requires potential customers to register to access. Doing so can provide you with a more qualified leads list.
• Create offers to encourage customers to buy.

|3| Increase the number of items you sell per customer

If you can entice your customers to buy just one more item, hour or extra service from your business, your sales (and profits and bottom line) should increase.

On-selling additional items is a tried-and-true tactic to improve profit.

Here are some ways to do this:

• Add impulse or lower-cost products at your checkout (physical and online) or a final sell when closing.
• Ask customers what else they would be interested in buying from you. Then, widen your product range to accommodate their needs.
• Bundle products.
• During check out, let customers know what other people also bought.
• Add services if you sell products, and add products if you sell services.

|4| Increase your average sale

If you can increase the average value of each sale, you should directly improve your profit (unless you’re selling any items for less than they cost).

To increase your average sale, try to:

• Ensure your highest margin products and services are prominent on your website. They should have the highest promotional budget allocated to selling.
• Train employees to know which products have the highest margins and incentivize them to sell more of them.
• Increase prices. Even minor improvements will show direct profit results.
• Introduce new premium products or services that have a higher value.

Learn what to consider when you increase prices >

|5| Increase net profit percentage

You can improve your net profit by looking carefully at your gross and net margins.

Try these tactics to improve your net profit:

• Review all of your main suppliers and determine if you can swap any for lower-cost providers. (But ensure that cheaper suppliers can match the quality and service you expect.)
• Ask suppliers to re-quote you if you believe you can save more.
• See if you have any components or parts of your business that can be sub-contracted to cheaper suppliers.
• Identify your top five overhead costs to find savings. Overheads like power, insurance, office supplies, internet, subscriptions and communications can reduce in price. Make sure you’re offered these reductions.
• Trim costs that you no longer need.

Even if sales revenue is static, you should be able to increase profit by improving efficiency and output.

Final thought

If you need to increase your profit, share the task with your employees. They can have a different outlook than you as the owner. You can also lean on your accountant and other advisors to brainstorm additional tactics.

Monitor your main competitors to see if you can adopt anything they’re doing to increase sales, reduce costs or improve profitability.

Finally, keep up to date with any industry trends, ideas or technologies that might lower your costs or make your business more efficient to boost your bottom line.