Growth Strategies for the New Year

I spent some time during the holidays compiling the most powerful and cost effective growth strategies that I helped my clients introduce in 2015. I then further culled the list down to my top six picks for rapid new business growth and wanted to provide the list for you to consider as it pertains to your business.

Don’t get too caught up in whether these will work in your company, just implement, monitor progress, measure results and then assess which are most valuable for you. After all the cost of ideas is FREE!

1. Solicit customer feedback: Obtaining insights directly from your customers is one of the best ways to determine how you can quickly and effectively grow your business. Have customer service and sales ask key questions that include “What is your customers experience with your products or services?” and “What would they have you change, improve or do differently?” This feedback will yield dividends when it comes to quick and cost effective growth.

2. Service the customer at all levels: It’s not just your sales team that interacts with your customers on a daily and weekly basis; it’s also your customer service team, your technical support team, and your shipper/receiver. Do the people in these positions understand the influence they have on the customer and more importantly how they can improve the customers experience?

3. Engage with customers: If you are designing a new vision for your company, or better yet considering new products or services, have you involved your customers? Taking the opportunity to involve your customers in your business will build stronger relationships and more importantly create a clear picture of what changes, improvements or additions you should make in order to grow your business and your market share.

4. Build sales team collaboration: I can’t tell you how many times I hear from CEOs that there is a disconnect between sales and customer service. Typically it involves customers contacting sales once they don’t get the support they expect to receive from customer service, following which sales moves into an operational role attempting to override what’s been carefully planned. Sales, customer service and even marketing are all working with the same purpose, to satisfy the needs of the customer. What are you doing to build a stronger collaboration between these groups to create a seamless and predictable customer experience?

5. Create an employee-customer connection: Do your employees understand how they influence the customer? This is different then point #2 above, in that it extends to employees across the organization. In my book Operational Empowerment I discuss the example of how most payables departments contact the customer on a regular basis, however many have ever been introduced to how they should interact with the customer. How is your payables department speaking to your customers? Are they enthusiastic? Do they obtain critical customer insights and pass this along to those who need to know? Every employee “touches” the customer either directly or indirectly. The question we need to ask ourselves is as to whether they understand the influence they have on the customer, on the business and more importantly on the stability of their role?

So there you have it, my top five ideas for growing your business in 2016. Which ones are you going to introduce that will help you propel to higher levels of revenue and profitability?

© Shawn Casemore 2016. All rights reserved.