The first thing I focus on when working with any consultancy client is 12 weeks of hard work creating a detailed small business growth strategy for them. I can not underestimate the importance of this time and when done correctly, this one step guarantees growth for my client and their business.
Your Strategy Will Dictate Your Tactics
In my book “Remarkable Business Growth” I spend three chapters talking about the importance of creating a strategy. Your growth strategy will become your North star that dictates everything you do on a daily basis. I see far too many “tactical” business owners. They jump from one “tactic” or idea to another, hoping it will help them to grow. This is the “silver bullet” approach to business growth, Yes you can occasionally stumble onto something that works. But for the majority of the time it leads to frustration, overwhelm and a lack of clarity. If you watch the video below I dive deeper into this.
How Your Small Business Growth Strategy Will Give You Clarity
When you dive deep into mapping out a growth strategy for your business a strange thing starts to happen. You will have metrics and KPI’s in place that you are measuring in each area of growth. You will know what is working, what is not working and what can be optimised to work better.
Your strategy will dictate the tactical execution in your business every day. The clarity that this brings is something I love to see in my clients, as we work together on this. We dig into their “good fit” customers and who they get the best results for and why. Once they understand their customers at a deeper level, they can profile them and identify what their dream customer looks like. We then work on their lead generation and sales process. Where are these dream customers congregating and how do we throw out “hooks” to grab their attention.
We then create a predictable step-by-step sales process to move these leads along, in a human, holistic and helpful manner. A natural sales conversation can then take place to convert them into sales and revenue for the business. Finally we delight these customers with remarkable operational delivery and customer service.
The 12 Elements Of Your Small Business Growth Strategy
If you head over to the Resources Section of the website and go to the Remarkable Business Growth Resources . You will be able to download a checklist of the 12 elements of your remarkable business growth strategy. I will summarise them below.
- Objectives, Targets & Goals – Get specific about your revenue goals, milestones and KPI’s you need to hit to achieve them.
- Target Market – The Who – Understand deeply the Sectors, Companies and People who are a “good fit” for what you do. Be a specialist not a generalist.
- Positioning – How are you going to position your business in front of your target audience, so they understand who you are a specialist in helping, how you help them and why you do it better than anyone else.
- The Market & Competitors – Competitor Analysis, where are they strong and where are they week in communicating with your target audience. We are looking for gaps to fill here.
- Your Product Offering – Think through your product ecosystem, bot just the obvious core product you sell. You need free gifts for grabbing attention, conversion products for capturing data, core products to get results and products for customers, to maximise profits.
- Your Sales Plan – Revenue and customer goals, your sales process and sales pipeline management. Think conversion of traffic before volume of traffic. Ensure you have a human, holistic and helpful sales process.
- Your Marketing Plan – Identify your core 5 lead sources and optimise them for lead generation. Map out your marketing campaigns and the assets for each with metrics to measure success. Plan your social media posting and content mix.
- Talent & Recruitment Plan – You can’t do this on your own. Map out what team you need to build, what positions you need to fill and when. Focus on attracting A-players for each position.
- Operational Delivery – Time to blow away your customers with the delivery of your core product and service. Focus on making this remarkable in every way and over-deliver on value to keep the customers loyal.
- Service & Support Plan – Delight your customers by giving them remarkable support and showing you value them. Use surveys to get feedback and continuously improve what you do.
- Systems Development – Map out your connected business system of software, tools and apps. You are creating a single source of truth, that is easy to use and measures everything.
- Metrics, Analytics and Reporting – Set up your dashboards and reports to show you what is working. You also need to know what is not working and what can be improved to work better. Replace opinion with data driven decision making for predictable results.
Get started on your small business growth strategy today
Take these 12 elements and spend a week working through each one in detail. Go deep and think about each in detail. I promise you the work you do here will pay you back many times over the coming years. When you are making data driven decisions and letting your strategy dictate your daily tactical execution, you will have complete clarity on what you are doing and why you are doing it each day.
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