4 Steps to Business Growth You Won’t Learn in Any Business School

small business growth

Your business growth is based on what you are doing inside and outside your business. How you are organizing your work and how you satisfy your customers in large part will help you to grow your business.

So, the question is what you can do for your company in order to succeed quickly and have sustainable business growth. Here I want to talk about four important steps you can do in order to enable such a business growth.

1. Define Your Ideal Customers Based on 80/20 Rule

Do you know your target market? You really need to start with this question right now if you want to grow your business. It doesn’t matter what you do until today, or how you have defined your ideal customers. You need to start again.

On the other side, this definition will never be final. You will need to continue to define and redefine your target customers. Simply, you are changing, your business is changing and your customers change over time. You can’t base your business activities on an obsolete definition of your target market.

You can start answering the following questions:

  • Who is your target customer? How can you describe him?
  • Where they live or operate?
  • How are they looking?
  • What are their problems related to the solutions your company offers?
  • How do they want to solve those problems?
  • What industries are they in?
  • What is their demographic profile?

When you define your target customers, you need to try to find some similarities inside your first attempt to group different potential customers as your ideal customers. In such a way you can make additional categorization inside your first group. When you do this ask the following questions:

  • Who are in the biggest group?
  • Who are in the smallest group?
  • Who are the 20% of people who will bring you 80% of your profit?

The third question is the key question. The answer will tell you what will need to be the biggest focus for you.

Now, you can start making the list of 200 to 300 potential but ideal customers. Start with the people you personally know who fit into this category. Then ask people who you know and they know people who can fit in your defined category. Don’t stop trying to find potential customers that fit inside this category until you come to the list with 200 to 300 persons.

2. Why Will People Make a Deal With You?

Now, when you have a list with 200 to 300 potential, but ideal customers for your business you need to answer this important question. Don’t skip answering this question, it will shape all of your next activities.

Write three compelling reasons why someone will pay you for what you are doing. Simply try to answer the following questions that will help you define compelling reasons:

  • What are you offering?
  • What makes your products and services so special?
  • What are the benefits that your products and services offer to my customers? Is it time-saving? Or, money saving? Or, bringing them more fun?
  • What are the pains your business will take out from their lives?
  • What are the pleasures your business can bring to them?
  • What is something you offer them that no one else offers?

Now, you will have a clear picture. You want to define 3 to 5 compelling reasons why customers should buy your products and services.

3. What Will Enable Me Sustainable Business Growth?

When you have defined these reasons, you can start working on the design of your sales machine. This is an important thing because using the tactics I am explaining you here require a systematic approach. You need to build your sales system using the compelling reasons you already defined. When you design your sales system use following questions that will help you:

  • How can I attract the attention of my ideal customers from my list to my offerings? What will I use (phone call, email contacts, one on one meetings, blog)? How will I approach them in less than 30 seconds to attract their attention?
  • What is important for them to increase their interest in my offerings when they already have attracted? How can I use this information in my sales system?
  • What will make them scream about my offerings? How can I increase their desire to buy my products and services? What do I need to do to plant this information in my sales system?
  • How can they take the action to buy my products and services? What my sales system will need to do in order to make them as easy as possible?

4. Push the START button, Review, Improve

Now, you have a sales system in place and it is time to put it into the action. Remember that you want to ensure sustainable business growth. So, simply push the start button and see what happens.

Sometimes, the results will not be as you have expected. But, there is not a place for disappointment. It is normal to have several zig zags at this stage of your sales system. What is more important is that you already have something in place on which you can work to improve.

So, it is time for reviewing your first results. Ask yourself following questions:

  • Am I satisfied with the first results?
  • What do I need to do to remove the problems in my sales system?
  • What do I need to do to improve the results from my sales system?

The answers to this question will lead you to things you need to do to improve the system. In such a way from each next cycle, you will have better and better results related to your business growth.