The early stages of a new business are incredibly exciting. Seeing your initial idea realized as a product and watching those sales figures increase steadily is great and it feels like you’ll be able to ride that momentum to the top. But 6 months down the line, things are going to slow down. If you keep adapting, you can maintain some of that momentum but if not, you’ll soon find yourself in a rut. Sales are stagnating and you don’t know how to kick start them again. So, what do you do? You could always carry on as you are and hope that things will pick up again but that doesn’t look likely at this point. Instead, you should be proactive and try some of these methods for getting your small business out of a rut.

Get New Staff

When things aren’t going well, spending money on extra staff is probably the last thing that you want to do. But introducing a new energy to the team can really help you to get things going again. Having said that, you’re taking a gamble by investing more money in the business so you need to be selective. Use a recruitment employment agency to find the very best candidates in your field who can make a real difference. When your staff have been working on the same problems for a long while, it can be difficult for them to see the bigger picture. But if you bring in somebody new with their own set of ideas, they’ll be able to pick up on things that the rest of the company are missing. New staff members are also likely to be more motivated which will rub off on the rest of your employees and give the company the kick that it needs.

Change Prices

There might be a complex set of reasons why you aren’t seeing any growth but in some cases, it’s simple; people might not be buying your products because they’re too expensive. If you’ve got a large margin, consider changing your prices. Even though you’ll be making less profit per unit, you’ll still be performing better overall if you’re making a lot more sales.

Do Some Market Research

The easiest way to find out why people aren’t buying your products is to ask them. Conduct some market research and see what it is about the product or the pricing that is stopping people from parting with their cash. A comments section is an essential feature on your website because it’s a very easy and cost effective way of finding out exactly what customers think about your products. If you’ve got multiple people commenting about the same problems, you know there’s something that needs changing. It’s important that you’re monitoring the comments section and encouraging customers to use it, as well as doing periodic market research so you’ve always got a sense of where you are and what it is about your products that people respond well to.  

When your small business is in a rut it’s easy to sit back and do nothing, but that’s never going to help you. Try these methods and you’ll get sales going again in no time.