Have you ever had a job in sales?

Even if you haven’t, you can imagine the persistence and discipline required to be successful.

You know the importance of needing to attempt to close the sale by asking for what you want (which is difficult for a lot of people to do actually).

And you can even feel the discomfort of hearing ‘No’ a whole lot more often than you hear ‘Yes’.

Imagine you’re working your job in sales right now and that you are the most persistent and disciplined salesperson on the planet (congratulations!). You are disciplined to the point that you make exactly 100 calls every week without fail.

And you’ve found a precise formula that you follow on every call that works well enough to earn you an income a bit above the amount the average salesperson at your company makes.

Your formula successfully closes 1 out of 100 calls.

Realistically, you’ve got two paths to doubling your revenue:

• You can start making 200 calls per week (testing the limits of your energy and sanity each week)

Or

• You can learn through your own trial & error or from the more successful salespeople how to improve your formula to begin closing 2 out of 100 calls

Either way, you will now be making 8 sales every 4 week period when before you were making 4 sales each period.

When you consider the additional investment of time and energy, improving your closing rate feels like the obvious choice (unless of course you are simply dying to work twice as hard as you already do…)

Even if you struggle for a week or two while adopting a new formula, the reward is worth the growing pains many times over.

Simply put, there is far more leverage in improving your closing rate. Going from 100 calls per week to 101 calls per week is a 1% increase. Increasing your closing rate from 1 in 100 to 2 is a 100% increase.

Not to mention that the higher your closing rate is, the more motivating, exciting, and lucrative it is to make calls or begin making more calls.

When each call is more likely to make a sale, each call is worth more to you.

And something magical happens when you increase both the number of calls you make and your closing rate. When you doubled one or the other, you ended up with 8 sales per 4 week period either way.

But what if you increase both by 50% by making 150 calls per week and close 1.5 out of 100 calls? In that situation, you are making 600 calls every 4 week period and closing 1.5 out of every hundred so you end up closing 9 sales.

When you improve multiple separate leverage points, it truly is a case where 1 + 1 = 3

If you really were this salesperson, how stubborn would you have to be to decide you were going to ‘brute force’ your way to more sales solely through doubling the number of calls made?

Especially when you know for a fact there are others using a more effective path to sales than the one you are using….

Well…your Shopify Store is a lot like this mythical ‘persistent and disciplined’ salesman.

Your website shows the exact same content (AKA formula) to every single visitor it gets.

And there’s a good chance your store’s conversion rate has held fairly steady as long as it has followed the same formula. Of course along the way there could be changes in conversion rate with any redesigns, updates to site content, sales you’ve held, seasonality, receiving significant publicity or endorsements, etc

If you want your website (AKA your salesperson) to make more money, you can either bring him more ‘leads or calls’ in the form of increasing your traffic or you can help him discover a better formula or system that improves his closing rate (AKA conversion rate).

[There’s actually a third way to increase profits and I expand on that in my bestselling book Profit Hacking but we’re keeping it simple here]

When dealing with traffic to your website, the difference in “leverage power” between traffic and conversion is even more significant than it was in our imaginary sales career.

In the sales job, we were talking about 100 – 200 calls per week. But your Shopify Store may get thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of visitors each week.

Compared to our sales job, your site receives many more opportunities to convert a prospect into a sale. Because the number of opportunities is much higher, any improvements to your website that increases the conversion rate can mean many more sales each week (and month).

A 2% conversion rate on 100,000 visitors a month is 2,000 sales. You very realistically could be only a few conversion boosting improvements away from a 2.25% conversion rate.

That would be 2,250 sales from the same amount of traffic. 250 more sales at a $40 average order value is an extra $10,000 in revenue.

Depending on how many potential improvements could be made on your site, you could be a few months of diligent focus on improving your Shopify Store’s conversion rate from adding a full percentage point or even a percentage point and a half to how it’s currently performing.

And something curious happens when you increase your conversion rate….

….increasing your traffic actually becomes easier and easier the higher your conversion rate grows.

The reason is that as your conversion rate grows, two things happen:

• You generate more revenue from the same amount of traffic. Because you do not need to invest more time, energy, or other resources into traffic generation to get this revenue growth, a larger than average percentage of these revenue gains sticks as profit
• Each visitor to your site is worth more to you as conversion rate grows. When visitors are worth more and more, it becomes easier to invest in new traffic sources.That is because the odds of the investment being profitable are much greater. Advertising opportunities that used to be too expensive to be profitable become viable opportunities.The value of traffic generated by adding members or consultants or agencies to your team who specialize in various traffic sources (SEO, social, content, etc) becomes so great that it is much less risky to invest in those human resources.

And of course the most effective path to growth comes through focus on growing both your traffic and your conversion rate at the same time. Ideally, there should be a focus on growing both at all times.

For most Shopify Store owners I talk to, when I ask them “What are you doing right now to increase your traffic?”, they confidently state several strategies and campaigns currently in action to achieve that goal.

Then when I ask them “What are you doing right now to increase your conversion rate?”, they look at the floor and sheepishly admit they’ve been meaning to start A/B testing, improving their understanding of their analytics data, and other activities that will improve their conversion rate….

….but they just haven’t had the time to prioritize it….

This is the online equivalent to us in our fictional sales job deciding that we don’t have time to learn a new formula that will improve our sales closing rate.

It’s the equivalent of ignoring the leverage that comes with focused improvement on the conversion rate and instead choosing to “brute force” our way to growing earnings.

The point of this isn’t to chastise any Shopify Store owner who isn’t currently doing things like A/B testing but rather to invite you to make a decision now to start – – to begin experiencing faster growth, greater profits (you could even say that you can begin hacking those profits of yours), and harnessing that leverage in your business.

You can even calculate the exact amount of money your Shopify Store is missing out on each month by having a lower conversion rate than what you could have with a few optimizations and winning A/B tests.

There are valid reasons why the majority of Shopify Stores don’t actively engage in conversion optimization activities like A/B testing (even if they fully understand that it is valuable & important):

• It can be difficult to set up and begin these activities.
• The experience, knowledge, and necessary skillsets may not exist on your team.
• You may not know what you should test (let alone how to actually properly execute a test).
• You may worry about messing up one or more of the moving technological pieces and temporarily screw up your site
• The possibility does exist that you’ll run tests that perform worse than what already exists on your site and those will cause you to actually lose revenue

For two years, Conversion For Good has helped Shopify Stores avoid these issues by handling the entire process for them.

In the past, the only way to work with us was by agreeing to a 6 month, $60,000 contract for our services. We guarantee at least 100% ROI on that service and are proud to say we’ve blown way past that ROI benchmark for every client.

But we have recently created a new way of working with clients that has been generating a lot of excitement. It has been called “an absolute no brainer” (and the client roster is filling up fast as past clients as well as potential clients from the past two years (who at various points seriously considered paying my team $10K+ per month) are taking me up on this offer at an astonishing rate so far).

If you are currently earning at least $100,000 per month through your Shopify Store, you may be a good partner for us. If you and/or your business exists to help make the lives of others & the world a better place, you may be a perfect partner for us.

Fill out the contact form on this page or email Sheila Herrera* with a little bit about you, your business, and your conversion goals to get the conversation started (and get your Shopify store on the path to increased conversions, revenue, and profits).

* in case the mailto:sheila@conversionforgood.com link doesn’t work, you can reach Sheila at sheila@conversionforgood.com

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If you aren’t yet ready to contact us to potentially partner (and/or you don’t have a Shopify Store and instead use other platforms, business models, payment processors, etc but knew the lessons of this post are insightful for many more business owners outside the world of Shopify), a great place to start is with my book Profit Hacking.

If for no other reason than to see the very interesting (and potentially devious muwahahaha) way of offering a digital product you can craft with a combination of Amazon + gumroad.

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And if you aren’t convinced that reading more of my words will help you make a lot more money than what I’m asking for with the above Profit Hacking offer, then may I interest you in some of my other favorite content on the site:

• The Dan Martell Series (the one where Dan goes Ham!)
• Run The Mile You’re In (lessons from running the 2015 Chicago marathon)

And if you would like to join my Insiders family, you’ll get in on one of the most talented, most interesting, and most extraordinary communities* in the universe (well the marketing + personal development ones at least)

* Superlatives taken from the LEGO Movie’s ‘The Special’ (if you haven’t seen that movie….go now and watch it….well join the Insiders and then go watch it…..check Netflix…maybe Redbox?)

Alright, thank you for reading all this – – I really do appreciate that you took the time to read my words. If you want more of them, I’ve offered a few wonderful options (including one where you get to choose how much you pay for a value packed Profit Hacking bundle and one where you get a unique insight into my marketing mind & personal search for my truth that is free-ninety-nine).

Hope to get to know you & hear about your business / mission!

Even if you choose to not take me up on either of these two invitations, I hope this article proves to be much more than “entertainment” and propels your business to greater success.

– Steven Daar