Step 4: Grow Sales of Existing Product(s) or Build New Ones?

There are 2 big decisions we’ll need to make before we can create our growth strategy plan:

1. Can we get to the milestone with your current product or do we need to add another product?
2. Can we get to the milestone with your current marketing channel, or do we need to add more channels?

In this step we’ll tackle the first question.

Grow Existing Product(s) or Build New ones?

Here’s a question that takes a lot of guts to answer: can your existing product get you to your growth milestone or do you need to create another product to sell as well?

For example, let’s say your growth milestone is earning $5,000/month and you are currently making $3,000/month from one product. The question here is: should you focus on growing revenue from that product alone or should you build a new product and try to create new revenue? That depends on the circumstances of your business.

To help you decide, here are some questions to ask yourself:

1. What products or services do I currently have for sale?
2. For each product: how much monthly revenue am I earning from this product or service?
3. For each product: has revenue for this product grown or declined over the past six months?
4. For each product: do I feel confident this product can reach more people?
5. What would have to happen for me to meet my growth milestone from my existing product(s)? E.g., given your current conversation rate, how much traffic would you need to hit your milestone? What would you need to do to get that traffic?
6. Do I want to focus on growing existing products or building a new product?

If you feel the need, spend some time with those questions. They can help clear up which way to go on this decision.

Decision time

This step is complete when you’ve decided if you’re going to build a new product or focus on growing sales of your existing product(s). You might have a very clear sense of direction, or you may need time to work it out with the questions above and conversation in the forums or your mastermind group.

If you decide to focus on growing sales of your existing products, then the rest of this stage will apply directly to you.

If, however, you decide to build a new product, a good next step — before you move on to making the new product — is to set up some “autopilot” marketing that can keep marketing that existing product while you create the new product. For example, making an email giveaway from a part of your product and then creating an email autoresponder sequence that promotes the product for all new subscribers. (Then you can return to the product stage of the roadmap to guide you through creation of your new product.)