What Is Our Growth Attributed To?

We broke our single day sales record (based on the volume of orders) yesterday for the second time since we launched our new website. We broke the record while I was at the New River Network Professional Mixer and so of course, I told some people about it. Someone asked me what the record was attributed to. Whenever someone asks me this type of question it would be great to be able to spit out a sexy one liner to make it sound like I’m on top of it and that I can put my finger on everything that happens here at Webmail. But the real answer just can’t be stated in a one-liner. This blog actually started out as an email to the person who asked the question, but by the time I finished writing it, I figured it might as well be a blog.

Here are some of the reasons:

1. We continue to have our best sales month, every month. And since we take a percentage of sales and reinvest that money into our marketing efforts, we continue to spend more on marketing every month—and it works.

2. Our new website is a much better sales and marketing vehicle so the more money we spend to get people to the site, the better the site is going to do at capturing leads and helping to close sales.

3. Our sales team gets better every day. They are obviously a huge factor.

4. The more customers we sign, the more customers we make happy and the more influencers and “sneezers” we have in the industry. Sneezers are people that use our product and tell others about it—that is my loose definition of Seth Godin’s word from the Purple Cow.


5. Our brand is growing. More and more people know who we are or have “heard of us” from somewhere. People are seeing press releases; they’re seeing the progress we’re making. They’re reading our blogs. I don’t think you can see that same progress from most of our competitors (we do have plenty of those).

6. Our product gets a little bit better every day.

7. We continue to manage our growth and execute better than everyone else—at least in my opinion.

These are the reasons that I can think of off the top of my head that I know make real contributions to our growth and success.One book I think every business leader should read is Good to Great. It’s an awesome book about how good companies become great. One of the things that the book talked about that resonates with me big time is how good companies become great over time. Most great companies can’t point to one thing and say “look, this is why we became so awesome.” It happens over time and is a culmination of great strategy and execution. I’m a big believer in the book and I can see most of the points Jim Collins makes here at Weblog every day.

Posted on November 04, 2005