The Best Path to Growing Your Business

There are many ways to grow your business.  Choosing the best one depends on four critical points;

1. What stage of growth/size is your business in?
2. What is your industry?
3. What do you sell?
4. What do your customers require?

There is no one size fits all answer so you will need a solution that fits your unique situation.

Stage of Growth

Where your business is in terms of its growth and maturity, its size and position in the market play a big role in what you need to do to best grow your business.

If you’re well established and highly profitable you a lot of options. You can hire companies to generate leads, you can invest heavily in lead generation, direct marketing, advertising and even fund your own sales team. While all of these methods can work, most of them require a greater investment in time and of course money. Not to mention that they all require greater levels of expertise to create and run effectively.

When you don’t have a lot of money or when you need to generate more business right now you may not be able to engage in the same kinds of activities. the most common approaches taken by nearly every business in the stage is to work on referrals, word-of-mouth and through direct networking. While these are all great and very low cost they are far from reliable and predictable. Low-cost lead generation strategies for your website and social media quickly surpass what you can do through referrals, word-of-mouth or networking. Also once you begin building up your own online lead generation you quickly learn that it is very powerful and very scalable.

What Is Your Industry?

While all the techniques mentioned above work in all industries there are differences in the speed, cost and efficiency. if you are in a B2B or industrial marketplaces you face a different set of challenges. These markets typically have longer sales cycles and require higher touch to find prospects and convert them into customers. As at the stage of businesses in the industry you’re in greatly affects the amount of investment in time and money that is required to successfully increasing customer base, Gross sales and increased profits. What works when selling directly to consumers doesn’t work when selling industrial products or selling to other businesses because typically these buyers are much more sophisticated, know how to research you and your competitors, and often have extensive experience with products and services in the industry. Often times they know a tremendous amount about the kinds of products you are selling and are quick to dismiss offers that they perceive don’t meet the needs, so even when your product or service is a great fit  if you fail to communicate that fit  you lose out.

When selling direct to the consumer you face the challenge of the potential for a very large audience that can be hard to market to. Need to be very careful in how you segment and understand the audience or you end up trying to appeal to everyone and end up appealing to no one. This can also be true in industrial and B2B markets however they tend not to be as large. also some direct to the consumer it can be very different to stand out as often the consumer may not understand the subtleties of what you offer.

What Do You Sell?

It’s no surprise that selling very different kinds of products and services necessitate very different kinds of growth strategies. But understanding how your product or service drives your best growth options is not easy. Selling high-performance Summer tires is not the same as selling all season tires. Yes they are both tires but the buyer’s intent and expectations are vastly different. Understanding not only your product or service and how it is perceived by the customer and how you position it in the marketplace is critical to understanding what choices you must make.

This aspect of the positioning your product or service is often overlooked and routinely mishandled by most businesses. As a result they often end up losing business to competitors with inferior products or higher prices and cannot understand why. when this happens companies often resort to lowering prices because they think price is the problem. While price is a factor for most businesses it is not the critical one and yet nearly everyone thinks it is.  Moreover dropping your price is a terrible way to try and grow your business. To truly understand the price problem you should read The Problem With Pricing.

What Do Your Customers Require?

Sometimes what you sell is what your customers need but not what they want. Sometimes what you sell is what your customers want but not what they need. Sometimes the customer doesn’t know what they want or need  and sometimes they know but they don’t perceive that your product meets that want or need.

In order to grow your business effectively you need to be able to clearly communicate to your customers that your product or service fits their wants, fits their needs and make sure they understand the value and the benefits they gain from doing business with you. But you also need to set yourself apart from all the other businesses trying to fill that customers wants and needs.. If you don’t do that you will not be able to gain more customers and you will not be able to grow your business. In fact if you’re not careful you might be driving business away from you and into the hands of your competitors.

Be Your Customer’s Solution

if you’ve been struggling to grow your business or having a hard time keeping prices up or standing out versus your competitors go back and think about the four points above. Think about how your customer sees you and your competitors. If an obvious answer doesn’t jump out, and it seldom does, you may need outside help. One of the problems is that we often become too familiar with our own product and services. You know the benefits that you provide, you know how good it is, you know why it’s superior to your competitors. Unfortunately all too often what you know in your business doesn’t get communicated or is not evident to your potential customers.

if you’re faced with these kinds of problems and is much faster and far more effective to get somebody who specializes in understanding and solving these problems then it is to spend a lot of time hoping and guessing. Most businesses resort to lowering the prices. This is a race to the bottom that nobody wins and it certainly doesn’t help you to grow your business.

Take the Profit-Growth Challenge and see how we can find you an additional $10,000 or more in your business in less than 1 hour.