Secrets to Quickly Grow your Business

Small businesses, companies, and entrepreneurs are all waiting with bated breath when the pandemic will be over, and the economy starts to rebound. Many of them are planning to grow this year. Some are thinking of buying new equipment, others are considering taking more risks while planning their business.

It is a bitter truth that scaling your company is not easy and takes great effort. It means dealing with so many things-sales and marketing, your customers and your people. To grow your small business fast, you often have to shift your priorities and take the challenge head-on.

The earliest stages of your businesses’ growth will be the hardest financially. A problem that you might face is that you will have no prior data. What you must do is keep a close watch on expenses, and try to increase profitability.

Business owners are always striving for excellence-they want to be the best at what they do. To expand the business they have to step out of their comfort zone and take the right action. In this article, we will tell you 10 strategies on how to quickly expand your business.

1. Become more competitive

Unless you have a monopoly, you will face competition. Differentiation is the key to successful selling. If you don’t have a Unique Selling Proposition (USP), you have to create one. This is what will give you an advantage over your competitors. It can be your location, your product, or your people.

How can you make your business more competitive? One of the ways to do it is by cutting costs and reducing prices without compromising on quality or profitability. Also, try to motivate your team to give 110% on the job. Invest in branding to make your product or service stand out from the competition.

2. Expand your product base

Expanding a businesses’ product base depends a lot on the existing user base and what they want. You also have to plan for the company’s facilities and productivity. When building a strategy on product expansion, you have to first understand your customers.

Try to diversify your product offering. But, before doing this you have to conduct thorough market research to find out what new products the customers are looking for. Also, study whether you can make these products cost-effectively. Generate some new ideas and pitch them to your target customers. You can receive some valuable feedback this way.

3. Mind the money

Inputting together a strategy for business expansion, business owners should always focus on sales, revenue, and cash flow. To scale up, you have to know every day how much money is being made. Focus on your net profit, not gross profit. This will help you to get a clear picture of how the business is doing.

A loan can ease your cash-flow crunch, and help you to invest in expansion. However, you have to pay it back on time to keep your business credit score good. If your business is working on razor-thin margins, consider passive income streams.

4. Expand your business online

As India is in the early stages of digital growth with a massive potential consumer base, it is one of the most sought-after regions in Asia for e-commerce sellers. More and more people are shifting to online shopping because of the ease. To increase online sales, you have to consider the following factors:

• Knowledge of the e-commerce market.
• Data about specific buying patterns and preferences of customers.
• Human resources to handle the online orders.

Your digital ‘storefront’ should entice and engage customers in a meaningful way. Take steps, like SEO, to drive traffic to your digital platform.

5. Build a sales funnel

One of the most effective expansion strategies for your business is by building a sales funnel system. It is the path that your prospects take on the way to buy your products or services and becoming a customer. Carefully conceptualise the different sales funnels. If you can increase the number of people that go from one stage of the funnel to the next, it can have an important effect on your business.

Your sales funnel could exist as a retail store, sales team, a website, or personal consultation. Building a sales funnel will enable you to accurately predict sales numbers and improve them fast.

6. Increase the number of qualified leads

This is the process by which you attract interested prospects to your business. For example, let us suppose 5 out of 10 prospects end up buying from you, and you increase the number of people coming in from 10 to 15. Guess, what will happen? You will increase your profits by 50 per cent!

You can grow your business by increasing the number of prospects you convert to buyers, and this will tell you how effective your sales measures are. If you can increase your conversion rate from 1 out of 10 to 2 out of 10, you can double your sale and increase your profit.

7. Reach your audience

Listen to your customers and be involved in their buying experiences. Try to find out who your target audience is and how you can reach your message to them. Another way to connect is to find the target audience’s wants and satisfying them. You can increase your advertising spend to get your brand in front of buyers.

One of the best ways to grow your sales is to build an email list. You should only send emails to those consumers who have volunteered to receive them. One of the best ways to create email lists is by giving customers several Calls To Action to sign up for your promotions.

8. Improve your sales process

Look at key areas in your sales process and try to improve a little bit in each area. This can lead to a tremendous improvement in overall sales results. You can grow your business by increasing the number of individual sales that you make to each customer.

By increasing the frequency of purchases by 10%, you increase your sales and profits by the same percentage. What are some things that you can do to get your customers to buy more from you and in greater frequency? You should be continuously looking for ways to upsell each customer so that he or she buys more each time.

9. Introduce a customer management system

Manually tracking orders is difficult and inefficient. If you want your business to grow quickly, you have to go in for a customer management system. It can be a cloud-based one.

When you are small and growing fast, saving time is very crucial. One way to pass on the leads to your sales team in the shortest possible time is to connect all your marketing efforts like email and social through a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) program.

Customer loyalty programs are also a great way to increase sales. Research says that it costs at least three times more money to acquire a new customer than it does to sell to an old one. So, you should always try to retain your old customers.

10. Do customer segmentation

Customer segmentation is the process of dividing customers into different groups to satisfy their needs separately. Try to find out the most profitable customers. In business to business (B2B) marketing, you can segment your customers according to the following criteria:

• Type of industry.
• Number of people
• Location

This segmentation will allow your marketing team to better tailor their marketing efforts according to the audience sub-sets.

Being the best is being in constant motion, working harder and faster. It is also about wanting to learn more. We hope that these 10 smart strategies that we discussed above will help you to scale up your small business, and propel it to the big league.

Also read:

1) How small business promotes industrialisation?
2) Impact of Lockdown on Indian Economy
3) GST: Is this a benefit to the Economy?
4) How funding boosts Startups to redefine Indian Economy?
5) OkCredit: Simple, Paperless & Secure solution for businesses

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FAQs

Q. Why is it important to engage the community while growing your business?

Ans. Engaging the community is important if you want to grow your small business from the inside. It helps in determining the product-market fit. Uber did it very successfully by appointing a dedicated community manager.

Q. Why is it important to align product expansion with core competencies?

Ans. If your product expansion deviates from your competencies, then you have to find new customers and manage separate products. This will require expertise in different fields and eat up valuable resources.

Q. How can I gather information for customer segmentation?

Ans. Some of the main information-gathering methods are face-to-face interviews and surveys.

Q. Why is it important to form strategic partnerships for business growth?

Ans. Strategic partnerships with the right companies will allow you to tap into a large customer base quickly.