Achieving efficient business growth is not just a challenge for start-up companies or smaller businesses, efficient growth is essential for all successful businesses. It doesn’t always come easy, especially organically rather than expanding through business acquisitions.
The Key To Business Growth
The truth is, any sized business can suffer from limitations with what they’d like to achieve in terms of expansion and market share, even at an enterprise level. More often than not, these limitations come down to resources or a lack of resources. For example, your internal team may already be stretched with the day-to-day running of your business, negating the luxury of deviating them from your current projects. Or, as a business owner, you may not have the time to plan the strategy needed to take your business to the next level. Whichever the case may be, the outcome is the same. Your business isn’t growing without an effective business plan.
Any business can achieve efficient business growth. The primary challenge to overcome? Free up as much time as possible to make your growth plans a reality. Here, you will find a 5 step action plan for business owners to save time and work efficiently to focus on growing their businesses.
As well as finally getting your expansion plans off the ground, you will also see better lead generation and sales outreach results, increased revenue, and efficient business growth.
1. Leverage what you already know about your current target market
If your company needs a boost in revenue and rapid growth, efficiency is imperative. In light of this, think about what you already know about your target market and current customer base. Consider the customers you’ve been successful with so far. How did you go about winning their business? Can you use the same model to target low hanging fruit?
To ensure your business growth is decisive and effective, clarify that your product or service will succeed in your desired market before you commit. Knowing this will save you a lot of time should you miss the mark initially.
Also, consider:
- Do you know if the market will be receptive?
- Is now an ideal time to experiment and test new markets?
- Or, do you need quick results?
For efficient business growth, tackle markets and locations similar to where you already have a foothold. When rapid and efficient growth is the goal, it is often wise to stick with what you know. Establishing your business in these markets may have better longevity in an entirely new market.
Plus, acquiring business in familiar areas won’t be an enormous learning curve for you or your team. You already have solid experience and an understanding of what and how to deliver, so put it to use!
2. Review your current sales activity & performance
Another element to efficient business growth is to conduct a thorough sales assessment of your current sales outreach and lead generation activity. A sales assessment allows you to take stock and review how things are currently performing, streamline your team’s approach and provide additional guidance to your team where necessary.
You can ensure your company’s interactions with prospects or customers are consistent, to the point, and effective, especially when looking to acquire new customers. When you implement your growth strategy, your team and business will be better informed and in a stronger position to proceed.
The final thing to note on Sales Assessments is the need to benchmark your current company performance. Then, you can measure the impact of your growth plan, set goals, and see whether you are going in the right direction.
3. Design your sales outreach strategy before you start
Get your strategy nailed before entering any new market or beginning your expansion. It will ensure you have a direction for your business to grow with structured goals, timeline, and a method to get you where you want to be.
Take everything you know about your current market and activity, plus the insights you have gained from your sales assessment and account for them in your growth strategy.
Consider:
- How to approach your market entry
- Which potential customers to pursue
- What marketing strategies will support this
- How to position your business, products and service offering
- Where is the biggest market opportunity for high profit margins?
Once you have a solid understanding of how your current sales activity is performing, you can decide what lead generation and b2b sales outreach activity to proceed with and amplify revenue growth. Crunch some numbers based on your goals and calculate how much outreach you need per month to generate a strong pipeline of customer acquisition.
Define how many touches you will need to acquire an SQL and progress it to an opportunity and make the sale. Take a targeted approach backed by research and data. This will help you appeal to the right prospects and save time chasing the wrong target personas.
4. Increase your lead generation activity
To achieve rapid business growth, a strong relevant pipeline is essential for opportunities and warm leads to close. Look for ways that will deliver the quickest and easiest return and the profitability of this. In your particular location and market, what channel is the most effective:
- Telesales
- Inbound marketing
The most effective strategy is through a multi-channel approach. A multi-channel strategy gives you a competitive advantage and allows you to tell a complete story across different platforms, building a relationship with your prospect. Consider and define, what this story is and how to best execute it across different channels.
Review what works for your market and how much time each channel takes for your team to perform. You can then decide how much investment is required to dedicate to each channel for your business to grow.
Remember, time and resources are of the essence, so choose your activity based on what your market responds the best to and what delivers results. Clarify your approach and scale up your lead generation activity.
5. Measure and track sales activity to ensure successful and efficient business growth
Without accurately tracking and monitoring your sales activity, you miss a huge opportunity to learn and optimise as you go. A proper tracking system allows you to review every stage of the sales cycle. You gain visibility on what contributed to an opportunity or why you may have lost a sale.
Keep efficiency at the forefront of your mind, and think how much time and energy you might spend manually following up on different prospects. If you have the option to automate these follow ups, consider investing in CRM platforms that can help you do this. This will free up your team to focus on other tasks, such as pitching or phone outreach.
Monitoring and analysing sales activity ensures you can properly plan sales strategies, and avoid human errors. We’d recommend to monitoring:
- Prospect types – Are these the personas that are profitable for you as a business? Should you continue sales outreach for these prospects and business types?
- Automation – How can you automate processes to increase revenue and closed deals, whilst freeing up your team?
- Lost opportunities – Are there themes as to why you are losing opportunities? Can you take this data, learn from it, and apply it to other SQLs so you can increase conversion rates?
- Marketing – Are there common questions you often get asked as a sales team? Can marketing use these to create campaigns which will increase inbound leads?
- Successes – What is working well for your business? Can you do more of these things to increase sales?
What are the 4 stages of business growth?
Start up
When a business has just begun and may be receiving rounds of funding and is considered the riskiest phase of business growth. Typically these start as small businesses and can scale up quite quickly. During this phase flexibility is essential to react to market changes. Profitability can be unstable during this stage and its very common for aggressive growth to be a key sales strategy to win more funding rounds.
Growth
Once an established customer base is achieved, a company enters the growth stage. This is usually after 2-3 years of a business is founded. One of the biggest challenges of this phase is continuing business growth, expanding into new markets and showing a key unique selling point within what can be saturated markets.
Maturity
Once a company has steady cash flow and stability, they are now in the maturity stage. During this stage, the business usually has strong customer loyalty and competitors aren’t as much of a threat as they were in the previous two stages. Within the maturity phase, stagnation and lack of growth can be a challenge, so continuing with growth initiatives and business growth strategies are key.
Renewal / Decline
Once a business is in maturity, there is a risk that the business could decline in growth if they do not stay up to date to the latest technology and environmental changes. This may be things like employing new business leaders, upgrading technology, repositioning their product or marketing. If the business is seeing things like reduced cash flow, increased employee turn over and lack of innovation, the business may be falling into decline if they do not act. A business who is addressing these pain points and can be agile, can avoid decline and instead head into renewal; increasing customer retention and revenue.
How can business growth be achieved?
There are many ways to grow your business. The most effective one is with a strategy that addresses your specific business needs and addressing your customer’s pain points. There is not one size fits all approach when it comes to growing your business, but working with a sales outsourcing expert can be the key to unlock efficient business growth and drive revenue.
Why I am not able to grow my business?
Organic business growth takes work. However, with the right tools, systems, and planning you will accomplish your goals and efficiently achieve sustainable growth.
If you require assistance with planning your next growth spurt, a sales outsourcing agency can provide you with Sales Consultancy support. This ensures you embark on your new venture with a watertight strategy, backed by data and specialist sales advice.
To learn more about our services, send us an enquiry message to us today.
