11 Ways to Boost Business Growth

Boosting your business’ growth is necessary to remain competitive in any industry. Focusing on your market, customers, competitors, and internal approach are all ways to start the process of jumpstarting growth. 

If you have just embarked on a new business journey, you may have questions like:

• How to improve the sales chart?
• How to win the trust of customers when I don’t have a big name or brand?
• Did I complete all my legal formalities?
• When people will know my name, will it be worth enough to use as a trust factor?

You do a lot of research and analyses before starting a business, which is actually good. From taking advisors' assistance to understanding stats, reading books, magazines, and investing a lot of money and time, nothing exactly gets you close to your business objective like these next tips.

11 Best Practices for Letting Your Business Grow

1. Build a sales funnel
2. Establish a CMS (customer management system)
3. Conduct a competitor analysis
4. Establish customer loyalty programs
5. Analyze new opportunities
6. Form strategic partnerships
7. Use global platforms
8. Create product license deals
9. Use a franchise model
10. Enable diversification 
11. Build passive income

1. Build a Sales Funnel

Sales funnels are the visual path taken by a person to become a potential customer. Continuously using sales funnels helps in figuring out the sales process and accurate analyses of conversion at each step of the funnel.  

According to Salesforce, 68% companies never attempted sales funnels, and 79% marketing leads failed sales conversion! The diagram below shows the path the funnel follows, starting with “awareness” and ending with “purchase.”

Looking at the funnel above, the overall objective is to increase potential customers and conversion rates. With new processes, unbeatable customer experience is the new challenge.

2. Establish a Customer Management System (CMS)

An effective CMS is directly proportional to a sales boost. With improved technology, the majority of salespeople believed in achieving top-notch deals.

By gaining the information of a customer’s credit history and predicting fraud, you can quickly maximize the chances of cross-selling and up-selling, as it also removes repetitive data of customers. 

A few features of a CMS, shown below, are customer care, analysis, documentation and PR. All of these work together to establish a strong relationship with your customer and boost your growth.

 

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Communication, customer loyalty, acquisition, and a database all contribute to a CMS, as well, in the image above. 

Upselling and cross-selling of the existing customers are much easier than approaching new ones. Credit activity report, behavior data, and customer notification services build customer relationships and let you know the best time to contact customers and grow your business.

3. Conduct a Competitor Analysis

Surviving in today’s market has become really tough, and it’s not easy to operate the business and generate sales to pay the running costs easily. The reason being when you analyze your competitors and their products, you will come to know where you stand in the market. 

For example, you can see price variations on your site and competitor’s site. Timely low-price changes result in higher profits. Yelp is an example of how you can measure your competitors' market success online.

Use Yelp or bbb.org, Google local, etc. to know your local competitor.

Just enter your business category and location. To be aware of your position in the market, take into consideration these two crucial factors during analyses:

• Strong points of the competitors
• Your strong points against the competitors and advantages

4. Establish Customer Loyalty Programs

Before conducting customer loyalty programs, analyze in detail, whether it will be helpful for your business or not. 

Keeping loyal customers often outweighs gaining new ones. For example, spending $100,000 on an advertising campaign to gain 10 new customers means each customer costs your business $10,000.

Maintaining an existing customer that continually buys products worth $20,000 saves your business money. 

Attracting new customers may cost you thrice as much compared to maintaining a healthy relationship with existing customers.

Persuading new customers is tough, as they don’t fully understand your products/services.

Eighty percent (80%) of the revenue earned by companies is from 20% of the existing customers.

5. Analyze New Opportunities

Conduct SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats) analyses to identify new opportunities; it is essential to understand your business’s capabilities, strengths, and resources.

Conduct these analyses to identify new opportunities:

• Consumer Division: Understand the demand of products and data of consumers that can show you the number of targeted customers. 
• Consumer purchases: Observe the purchasing nature of consumers. 
• Existing Competitors: Existing competitors that are growing significantly can help you decide your supply quality and quantity. 

Conducting these analyses can help you understand your target audience, consumers, and competitors. 

6. Form Strategic Partnerships

Adidas enters the top 100 clubs with 50% brand value increase to $12.5 billion, making it the 12th highest rising star. Last year, with 57% brand value boost, it was the central fastest-growing brand.

Below are a few ways partnerships help businesses thrive. 

Partnerships help businesses in many ways:

• Obtaining new customers: 68% of senior executives explained that attaining new customers is the main benefit of partnerships.
• Revenue Growth: An effective alliance offers new opportunities to both sides like revenue increase as their resources complement each other.
• Covering more geographical area: Business owners believe that partnerships help in getting strong customer links , which opens up more possibilities to increase revenue.
• Access new technologies: Twenty-six percent (26%) of business leaders think partnerships help in accessing the latest technologies without investing in resources. 

It’s clear that partnerships are viewed favorably by business owners and executives, and establishing one can help your business grow. 

7. Use Global Platforms

In this digitized world, using the digital global platform is becoming one more effective way to grow sales. 

The best example of using the global platform is the e-commerce giant Amazon’s FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) service. They pick, pack and ship your order and ensure 1–2 days free delivery with proper customer support. 

The success of these global platforms is supported by easy accessibility by using their app available on all different mobile, operating systems, and the highest percentage of share in the digital world is mobile users.

The graph below shows the growth over 6 years in e-commerce spend. 

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B2B will be worth $6.7 trillion by 2020, predicted by Forbes. But according to the market trends, by 2020 it will surpass $1.132 trillion.

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Looking at the yearly growth since 2014 in the chart, the predictions display a 12.1% share of total B2B sales by 2020, versus 11.6% in 2019. 

8. Create Product License Deals

Licensing is granting someone access or produces someone’s design or idea legally in exchange for payment.

Starting a company requires a lot of time, a well-crafted idea, space, and talented employees to stand in the market, but getting the license of a product is much more profitable and has higher chances of success.

In 2017, entertainment and characters licensing accounts were worth $118.3 billion (45% of the total global licensing market) followed by apparels (14.9%), toys (13.3%), and fashion accessories (11.3%).

The fastest-growing category in licensing products was pet and infant products.

Licensing products or ideas give 20 times more than the expected return on investment in terms of time and money.  Licensing allows you to leverage the benefit of an already established company, providing a balance between risk and reward.

9. Use a Franchise Model

Apt for an established business looking to grow fast! Unlike previous methods, it is not that simple since marketing efforts and other aspects of understanding are crucial to maintaining the business image.

For example, McDonald’s is the best-franchised business model with 80% franchisees by 2013.

McDonald’s brand, franchisees, and suppliers along with its marketing and selling of food and beverages form the three main pillars of success.

10. Enable Diversification

To continue business growth, you should expand your business horizons by diversifying your product offers to your customers through:

• New or relevant product/service to existing customers
• New markets for an existing product
• New product for new markets

By looking into different services and product offerings, you’ll engage a wider customer base.

11. Build Passive Income

This is best for thin margin businesses needing an extra push to grow faster. Passive income helps you to stay in business by affording mistakes and providing a base to grow with the market.

Here are the best possible passive income ideas:

• Selling products online
• Conducting online courses
• Writing blogs
• Building informative apps
• Running a YouTube channel
• Have a stock exchange library (Niche specific)
• Use a review-based website
• Rent out expensive equipment
• Buy an existing online business
• License out your smart ideas
• Invest in real estate
• Become a silent business partner or limited partner
• Rent out unused space

Through the passive income ideas above, achieving financial goals and paying debts is easy, especially for a new business to pay the upfront fee.

Outsourcing non-revenue generating tasks such as accounting, data entry, research, and analyses generates passive income and cost less as compared to in-house employee hiring.

Set Your Business Up for Success Today

Incorporating one or several of the tips below will strengthen your sales and set you up for long-term success.

Along with a combination of right-brain strategic logic and left-brain creative thinking, brand success is ensured. However, picking the best suitable tip is greatly recommended.

Get your plan for growing your business underway and find the approach that works best for you.