Stay Relevant to Customers: 5 Things You Should Do to Achieve Balanced Business Growth

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Achieve Balanced Business Growth

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When you’re rooting for the success of your B2C or B2B business, profits are not enough to give you an edge over your competitors.

You need to keep refining your business through consistent growth to give your business a better chance to compete in a competitive market and to increase the profits you make.

According to Fast Company, increasing business revenue is the biggest challenge that small businesses face.

When you want to grow your business, increasing your revenue and profitability is the number one metric that you should monitor closely to measure your progress. Increased business revenue increases the chances of business survival and ensures that you have enough resources to implement any growth strategies that you may come up with.

Here are five ways you can achieve balanced business growth in your business.

1. Keep your finances under control to prevent negative cash flow

Cash flow is the net amount of money going/flowing in and out of your business.

Nowadays, businesses of all sizes struggle to stabilize their finances. For most, the money flowing out through expenses and payments exceeds the money flowing in through funding or revenue. This negative cash flow kills most businesses by draining their finances.

According to CBInsights, running out of cash is the top second cause of business failure, and causes 29% of all startup failures. If you want to grow your business and get an edge over competitors, you need to choose banks with no fees and maintain a balance in your cash flow by setting up and implementing effective strategies to achieve your money goals.

To begin with, cut down your expenses to the mere necessities only since this allows you to utilize the rest of your finances in funding your growth.

2. Use CRM to facilitate customer acquisition and retention

Your relationships with your customers are the number one determinant of the success of your business growth strategy.

According to a recent consumer study, around 79% US buyers and 72% UK buyers will only consider buying from a brand if the brand shows that it understands and cares about them.

For you to win customer trust, you need to implement customer relationship management systems (such as Salesforce) to help you collect and integrate customer data. Using this data, you can then personalize your interactions with customers, showing them that you know them and care about their individual needs.

Using a CRM will not only help you win new customers but also help you retain your loyal customers, who are more likely to buy from you repeatedly, and who spend 67% more than new customers.

To help with the growth of your business, you can facilitate broad user adoption of a CRM system such as Salesforce. By engaging your key stakeholders before implementing a CRM system, you will have a group of advocates that will encourage and support end-user adoption.

3. Build an online presence to expand your customer reach

Building a strong online presence for your business helps you achieve business growth by increasing your audience reach and making it easier for customers to make purchases from you through your website. Tides have now changed. For you to sell, you have to engage your customers. According to X-cart, selling on social media only works if you have an engaged audience; and that is true for other marketing platforms as well.

With decreasing human attention spans and the need for increased customer convenience, making your digital marketing efforts work for you requires more than just a website.

To achieve the kind of digital marketing results that will help your company grow its customer base, sales, and revenue, you need to invest into multiple channels of marketing to ensure that you’re reaching as many customers as possible.

The most common marketing channels used by B2C brands with a strong online presence are email marketing, social media marketing, and paid advertising.

Given that 43% of companies with online stores receive significant traffic from social media, you should start investing in different digital marketing techniques to get a chance to multiply the number customers that your business has.

4. Diversify your products

When running any type of business, you should never put all your eggs in one basket.

The success of a business is mainly determined by the number of sales made and profits generated. However, when you want your business to grow beyond its current size and financial power, you need a lot of resources.

Having a limited stream of products on offer limits the number of customers you can appeal to, thus limiting your sales and profits. Diversifying the products you offer your customers could be the key to achieving your business growth goals.

Offering multiple products not only multiplies your profits by increasing your revenue streams, but also prevents seasonal voids in revenue and growth that occur when one line of products is not in high demand.

Diversity is the key to well-balanced growth and can be achieved by offering related products to your customers.

By analyzing what products most your customers are buying, you can determine what related or complementary products they may also need. For example, an entrepreneur who sells mom clothes can add children clothes to their catalog. Most moms buying their clothes may also purchase clothes for their children, increasing your sales and profits in the process.

5. Hire your team strategically

When you’re trying to grow your business, you need a group of highly skilled workers to help you realize your business growth goals.

According to entrepreneur Numaan Akram, one of the best ways to guarantee the steady growth of a business is through investing in people. For business growth, the early employees and cofounders must have competencies that complement each other.

While more human capital sometimes means increased efficiency and output, that isn’t always the case. When your primary goal is to drive your business through balanced growth, you need to focus on the quality of your hires over the quantity.

Hiring too many employees in a bid to increase efficiency and grow your business may slow growth since you’re using too many resources to keep the employees, and that may cause a negative cash flow.

Don’t spend too much on staffing. Instead, make fewer, more qualified hires that can enhance your business growth instead of slowing it down.

Think big but start small

Although business growth is key to business survival, the rate at which your business grows can make or kill your company.

Slow, consistent growth equals balanced business growth and has more chances of success than rapid growth.

Many B2C entrepreneurs make the mistake of confusing balanced growth with rapid growth. Balanced growth is slow, consistent growth that is manageable, while rapid growth is much faster and hinges on you and your team’s ability to adapt quickly to shifting business environments.

While explaining how rapid growth almost killed his business, entrepreneur James Sudakow explained that the biggest lesson he’d learned was that too much success too fast can actually lead to business failure.

Don’t be in such a rush to grow your business that you start taking shortcuts that may eventually ruin your business. Focus on slow strategic growth that is more manageable, and that gives you and your team enough time to learn and optimize your process as your grow.

Hassan Mansoor
Hassan Mansoor is the Founder and Director at Technical Minds Web. After completing Masters in Business Administration, he established a small digital marketing agency with the primary focus to help the small business owners to grow their online businesses. Being a small entrepreneur, he has learned from project management, and day to day staff management and staff productivity. He's a regular contributor on Business.com.

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