So you have established your business and have a steady income. Now’s time to find small business growth channels to ensure you take advantage of all opportunities. Here are a few ways you can get started.
Once you have established your business, it can be hard making the change from just maintaining your profit margins, to really growing your business.
To achieve this small business growth, you will need to ensure that you, and anyone working with you, are focused on sustainable and long-lasting campaigns that will give you the ROI you need.
But as a business leader, what else can you do to take your business’ growth to the next level?
1. Ensure your sales pipeline is ready
There’s no bigger mistake a small business can make when trying to ramp up their growth than to not ensure their sales pipeline is ready for the increase.
You could be running amazing campaigns, but if your team doesn’t have the capacity to contact the sales then this is both wasted cost and wasted opportunity.
What to do?
Map out your sales pipeline step by step, and ensure that each step has been prepared for an influx of new leads. Also determine if there are ways you can improve the sales pipeline by automating some elements, such as sending an automated email so you don’t have to pick up the phone straight away.
Another way to improve the sales pipeline would be to qualify your leads during the lead generation stage, such as with a question as part of the field form on a landing page. By doing this you will reduce the amount of time spent on unqualified leads.
2. Initiate a referrals program
Your current customers can be some of your biggest advocates, and by harnessing their power you can create a viral loop that will greatly grow your sales without too much effort.
For example, use your email database to give a discount to those who refer a friend, or have a coupon code they can give their friends. And take every opportunity to encourage your customers to spread by word of mouth the value of your product/service.
When used in conjunction with a first-class customer support experience, a referral program can drive rapid sales growth – allowing you to grow your small business quickly.
3. Utilise those with more experience
Don’t ignore advice from older, more experienced professionals in your industry. They have a wealth of knowledge that could prove of great value when you are making the transition from a solo or two-person operation to a larger business.
Part of the reason for this could be that older Australians (the ‘Baby Boomer’ generation) are more likely to remain in the same role for a longer period of time than those of later generations – a recent survey showed that Gen Y’s changed jobs over a five year period twice as often as those surveyed who were over-50.
Use their knowledge to give your small business a greater edge than your competitors may have. You could do this by employing them as a consultant, building a mentor-mentee relationship with them, or simply asking an older peer to share their learnings.
4. Make sure your product/service is still relevant
With technology today evolving so quickly, and automation playing a key part in business growth, it’s important when you are considering growing your small business that you stop and take stock of your product or service, and ensure it is still relevant enough to ensure growth.
For example, if your service is as a computer repairer, there is plenty of opportunity for scaling your business. However, if your service is as a chair upholsterer, and the cost of upholstering an old chair is more than the person had paid for that chair in the first place, then due to the increasingly ‘disposable’ mentality of today’s society you may not find business growth possible.
5. Be flexible
While having a solid business plan and goals for the future are essential, it’s also important to be flexible and ready to make changes as they occur. Changes in new consumer trends can crop up at any time, growth may exceed or fall short of your anticipated targets, and your product or service may require adjustments to maintain its relevance as time passes.
By staying flexible and adjusting your approach as you go, you are more able to ride the wave of change to business growth rather than remaining locked into a plan that could cause more harm than good to your business in the long term.
Grow your small business today
Growing your small business requires many facets of consideration and implementation, only a few of which have been mentioned above. However, each of these small business growth channels can help you grow your business from a solo or two-person operation to a small business with increased scalability.