Increasing sales is a constant challenge for the business owner. Understanding the demographics and spending habits of your customers will help you identify your target customers, and hone your business to their needs. See the post, "How Am I Doing?" for ideas on how to gather customer information and feedback.

The project management mantra, "You can't control what you don't measure," urges you to track your project or business to gauge its success. You should track every sale, donation, contribution with the customer. If you can get demographic information on the customers, it will help extrapolate your sales information to customers with similar spending habits. This information can be stored in a spreadsheet, or better yet a database.

Over the next few days, weeks, months you will have some sales data to analyze. The information you will be looking for first is what are customers purchasing? Your most popular products or services are successful, so let's leave them running the way they are. Your least popular items may be candidates for getting removed from your offering. Your homework from this exercise is identifying ways to bump up the mid-range items to your customers.

The next target for analysis is your customers. Your top customers keep you in business. 1000Ventures explains the Pareto Law (aka, 80/20 rule). Applying this rule to customers, 20% of your customers should provide 80% of your sales for you to have a stable business. The remaining 20% of your sales will come from a wider and more varied customer base who return to your business infrequently, if at all. If 20% of your top customers provide less than 80% of your sales, you will have to spend more resources (i.e., time and money) on increasing sales from your less frequent customers (acceptable), or recruiting brand new customers (painful : : expensive).

Reviewing your sales regularly is essential to tune your business to the changing needs of your customers. It starts by keeping detailed statistics of your sales so that you can analyze the trends. The reports will show you the customers and products that are improving your sales, and those areas that will need your attention. Your next step is to devise an action plan to connect more products/services with more customers.