3 Essential Steps to Supercharge Your Business Growth
There are many things for business owners to worry about, but there is only one thing to focus on: GROWTH. Forget about all the worries, whether it’s customers, costs, cashflow, complaints, compliance, or whatever else. Because if you focus on GROWTH, you will have nothing to worry about.
A growth-focused business is not just about “more sales”. Rather, it’s about “how to get more sales more easily”. This means that a growth-focused business has 3 things: a growth-oriented strategy powering growth-centric systems run by growth-dedicated staff. Let me share with you 3 growth tips that helped me grow sales 400% faster than market average.
1. Know Your Customers, Inside Out
No, not that “every customer is the same, just want cheap” level of knowledge. Knowing your customers means understanding their needs, wants and preferences; analyzing their behaviours, thoughts and influences; engaging them at the right channels, timing and messaging. You need to group them accordingly, pace the intensity of engagement, and hit home with as high accuracy as possible. In other words, you need to segment your customers. Customer segmentation can be a very complex strategic exercise, but for a start, try this matrix and see if it helps you know your customers better:
And then ask which customer type should you prioritize, how should you engage them and what should you say to them.
An example:
Note this is an oversimplified general example. Customer segmentation should be done with strategic relevance to your business and market.
2. Focus on Solutions, Not Problems
Imagine this: you work hard everyday trying every method to get more sales so that you can cover your business costs. You chase every lead, give them as much information as you can, answer their queries in the middle of the night, put on your best smile, and follow up very closely to close the deal. And every day, you still feel exhausted and uncertain. You are focusing on the problems of “not enough sales”, “keeping up with business costs” and “serving customers”.
What if you look a little further, and focus on the solutions of “building a lead generation system”, “building a prospect engagement system” and “building a customer acquisition system”?
If you know your customers, then strategically you will be able to build systems with a certain measure of predictability and sustainability in growing your sales.
And it’s not just sales you need to build a system around, what about manpower management, supply chain, product development, risk mitigation, company infrastructure and other essential business functions? On top of that, your systems need to be adaptable, effective and easy to use, else it defeats the purpose. And always ask, how can you further optimize your business systems.
3. Think About Value, Not Costs
You probably heard this before, so what’s new? The thing is, not many people truly understand what this means.
Let’s say a company decides to pursue online selling and the marketing manager proposes setting up an IT department with 1 manager and 2 executives, hiring an expert in SEO and appointing a social media marketing vendor.
It costs an additional $10,000 per month in vendor fees and another $10,000 per month in salaries. Project is going to take 6 months so it’s $120,000.
If it were you, would you approve the plan and spend the $120,000 or get the marketing manager to explore completing the project in-house with existing staff who are not experts but would save you $120,000?
Without a strategy and a set of systems, it will be difficult for you to estimate the value of this particular project, and you might just have to make a decision based on the costs.
What you do not see is also the cost of lost opportunity in opening the new revenue stream faster, the cost of morale loss in the marketing manager, and the cost of lost productivity when other staff start double-hatting.
In the end, you might find that you and your staff are not dedicated to growth but just trying to finish tasks. And what happens when you think about costs instead of value when dealing with customers? Evaluate value against costs, not just costs alone.
So you see, the point is, when you know your customers, you can develop a growth-oriented strategy; when you focus on solutions, you can build growth-centric systems; and when you think about value, you can build a growth-dedicated team.
Growth can be a complex undertaking. That’s why the Nebulex 4Pro Growth Strategy Framework was developed: to specifically help accelerate your business growth journey. With this framework, it is possible for us to build your growth strategy in as little as 90 minutes, and with the strategy as a blueprint, you can decide how you prefer to work with Nebulex Consulting to implement your growth strategy. Find out more here.