The last time when you got your business plans absolutely successful, you had already chalked out a growth plan. And, it worked! Sounds great, right? But, what if your business plan was not meant for the long run? It succumbs inevitably to the constantly evolving competition. How would you find support and resource to bolster it?
The above situation is quite common with most start-ups. And, the truth is if you do not nurture it, even the best business plans meet a premature death.
Remember that rapid growth may sound great, but a sustainable growth strategy is a business imperative. Otherwise, you might get stagnated all too suddenly, which might lead you to lose sales and eventually bankruptcy. According to the leading startup business consultants, in the current scenario when every passing second introduces you to uncertainty, a viable strategy is more of a survival imperative
Page Contents
- Create a powerful brand
- Partnerships and collaborations
- Customer retention and satisfaction
- Repeatable sales and retainers
- Have a brilliant team
- Keep analyzing and revising your strategies
- Align your sales and marketing
What’s in a Sustainable Growth Strategy?
When we talk about “sustainability”, we essentially focus on realistically attainable growth that a company could maintain without running into problems and generate a healthy profit. And yes, every financial year. There are a few tips and tricks you could follow in order to achieve that with your company. Let’s explore them together.
1. Create a Powerful Brand
As startup business consultants believe, a powerful brand comes from its ability to develop a personal connection with its customers. In order to get them to return to you and build your brand, you need to really focus on developing and sustaining these relationships over time.
Identify your niche, before everything else. “If you try and sell everything to everybody, you successfully sell nothing to anybody”, quotes David Finch, the Managing Director of Purple Frog.
Secondly, you need to really identify your buyer persona, and their pain points and present your solutions. The objective is to reach them out and make them believe that you can help them. Additionally introduces you to the ways how you can help gain more customers. The trick here is to educate and inform your customers, not interrupt them with ads. So reaching out to them individually on social media with ad hoc posts, or writing very informative blog posts/white papers/guides that cater directly to their needs, is the best way to nurture a relationship with strangers and be found by more potential customers.
Keep in mind that inbound campaigns go a long way to help you reach out to potential customers and grow your brand.
2. Partnerships and Collaborations
Growing your business is always the end, but if it comes down to scenario one described in the intro, where the growth is too quick, you should always be prepared. No, it’s not that you will fail in the long run, but chances are. One of the big issues that hold back start-ups is a staggering lack of internal resources, but if you know where to find them externally when in need and have good working relationships with freelancers or other similar companies to yours, then you can be confident that you will be able to handle any kind of job that comes your way.
Another great way you can leverage collaborations with other businesses is by starting to refer customers to them and asking them to refer some to you in return. In that way, you will have a very solid network of referrals and a continuous stream of new clients coming in.
3. Customer Retention and Satisfaction
One of the most important segments of every business is sustainable customer retention. We are sometimes so engrossed with finding and nurturing relationships with new prospects and leads that we often forget about our customers who have already worked with us. As Emmet and Mark Murphy write in their book on the Edge of Chaos, startup business consultants, always focus on nurturing existing relationships while making plans for new business acquisitions on a 40:60 ratio. Remember, that a 2% increase in customer retention can have the same effect as decreasing a company’s costs by 10%.
If you start considering customers as more than just a sale, you introduce the possibility of them coming back time and time again, which will increase their lifetime value to you. For instance, if you can work out that the average customer makes an annual purchase of 50 lakhs and you manage to get them to stay with your company for around 3 consecutive years, instead of being a one-time customer, their lifetime value will be 1.50 crore. If you can get the relationship going for more than one year, then, that is effectively a grand investment in your business. Because over time, you might earn more business from your existing customers.
For that, you will certainly need a marketing plan and well chalked out budget, so that you can acquire new business from the old customers. It’s high time that you start treating your client base as leads and prospects.
By delighting your customers, not only will you earn a returning customer, but also your customers become promoters of your business, bringing in more customers in turn.
The issue with this is that 80% of companies believe they deliver a superior proposition to their customers, but if you ask the customers of those companies, in only 8% of cases do they agree. They refer to this as a delivery gap, the difference between what you think you’re doing and the reality of how customers perceive you. No doubt, this is going to damage your reputation with your customers.
Try integrating surveys and net promoter scores into your business, asking your customers to give you feedback after every interaction. This way you can engage with your customers and get an objective view of customer satisfaction. Also, you can identify the areas you need to improve.
4. Repeatable Sales and Retainers
You know you have achieved this when you have a sales conversion rate and revenue that you can consistently forecast. This can be done by implementing repeatable models and processes that will save you planning time and assure your success every time and with every customer.
Another great idea is to try and hook your clients and prospects into a retainer model, rather than getting them to pay on an individual sale basis so that you have some predictable, fixed income every month.
5. Have a Brilliant Team
Having engaged employees often means having happier and more loyal customers, getting from them a higher level of productivity and work quality, and spending less on recruitment costs. In order to keep your employees engaged and motivated, create a positive environment, reward high-performing teams and recruit the right staff that will fit in your company culture.
6. Keep Analyzing and Revising Your Strategies
In business, it’s never a case of discovering a model or strategy that works and sticking to it for decades. This is why many companies partner with startup business consultants so that they can innovate on new strategies and come up with something that is business-specific and ROI-driven. The world changes quickly, and you need to be able to adapt. Keep analyzing all your strategies on a regular basis (and that is more than once every year) to identify what works, what needs tweaking, and what isn’t working and therefore it’s best to concentrate your resources elsewhere.
According to Forbes research, companies able to analyze and successfully exploit the information they hold outperform their peers by up to 20%.
7. Align Your Sales and Marketing
This is something that we constantly repeat to our customers. Bringing your sales and marketing team together by making them focused on the same revenue goals is absolutely crucial for any company to be able to grow. In fact, your sales team will know a lot better the issues that customers have, and marketing can build campaigns around them, but this will only work if there is a complete collaboration between the two. The job of the marketing team is to generate more qualified leads that your sales team will turn into customers and make way for sustainable revenue.
The Bottom Line
To be honest, these are some of the tried and tested ways to grow your business, but, you can always choose to really focus on your own strategies or the ones that your business consultant suggests. The objective however is to give business growth the right boost. In any case, always analyze the effects of any strategy that you implement in your business. You’re definitely not ready to suffer repercussions after making significant investments in it.
