Click to Listen
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... |
Running a specialized business offers you a niche in the market. The very nature of business requires you to identify your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) and focus all your communication efforts on the USP, giving you high visibility among your target audience. Like all good things, it comes with its share of highs and lows.
Some of the challenges rear their head in terms of the need for expansion, product or service diversification, competition, etc. Unlike a business offering a traditional range of products/services, this can pose many constraints and complexities in the case of a specialized product or service company.
To consistently achieve long-term growth, offering products/services that evolve with time to stay relevant is the goal for every company. Why should you be different? Without growth, there are no opportunities for staff to grow and develop and less reason for talent to stick around, seriously impacting retention.
So, let’s take a minute to understand the possible hurdles you may encounter as you plan an aggressive growth strategy for business expansion and how you can possibly mitigate it.
From managing volatility to preserving efficiency in a more complex organization, here are a few tried and tested tips that I believe you will find useful you carve out your growth trajectory.
There is no better tool to get the word out on the street than Word of Mouth (WOM) Publicity and referrals are just that. As you add a new product or service to your portfolio or diversify, the best place to start communicating about it or seeking business from is existing clients, friends, and families. Educate them and ask for referrals who could benefit from your offerings. Ideally, this initiative should be ingrained in your standard operating processes and not be one initiated to support a growth initiative. Adopt practices that integrate referral-generating activities into the sales process itself.
Apply two principles to evaluate the market for readiness and acceptability of your offerings
The first is multiplication: Can you multiply your presence by teaching others to immolate your offerings? e.g. education franchisees. The second is the application: Can you discover more market applications for your offerings?
Connect with an IP legal advisor to understand what and how to protect and commercialise your intellectual property. Apply for the right copyright, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets, in a timely manner. Intellectual property is the core of business strategy, as seen by the great relevance of fixed assets in company value. Companies profit from turning intangible assets into prospects. Converting your intellectual property into commercial items is the most basic form of revenue growth. Therefore, the question is: are you doing enough to unlock the revenue opportunities you have?
“Be so good at what you do that people can’t take their gaze away from you!
Be better than the best in your segment. Excellence brings with it the dominance needed in the segment you operate. Excel in service/product delivery and customer management & engagement – post-sales. Ensure every touch point is oiled and synchronised to deliver the same above par experience to the Customer; this needs to extend to internal and external customers to translate to market dominance.
This is an important tenet and impacts other elements that contribute to market growth, such as market dominance & word of mouth – referrals.
Unlike the earlier time, customer lifecycle no more ends with a sale; it extends to encompass post-sales. The quality of service, the customer orientation demonstrated, the ownership and decision-making at the service engineer/ service personnel level, and the consistency of service across touchpoints all define the customer journey with your organisation. The more delightful the journey, the more glowing the reviews, the higher the referrals and higher possibility of the Customer bringing more business your way. This is one of the most crucial milestone of a customer journey in defining the Customer’s relationship with you in the long run.
When running a specialist outfit, you need skills outside your expertise, do not cut corners. Hire experts. The quality of personnel will decide the quality of product/ service you can offer. Do not try to fit a square peg into a round hole. Focus on your strengths and pay others to accomplish the rest. Otherwise, quality will suffer, burnout may happen, and expansion will be a faraway dream.
Recruiting new staff helps with task management and is vital in delivering the skills your company requires as it expands.
If it’s a new product or service, you need to educate the audience you are targeting. But with education, you need to get people sitting on the fence to jump in. To help them do that, you need bait. The bait comes in form of discounts, price offs and incentives and if it is an offering where repeat purchase is desired, loyalty point programs.
Once you run any buy now campaign, it is essential to track customers and their buying behaviour to understand the trigger points and how you should devise programs going forward to improve the results.
Adopt automation wherever you can. It adds to the efficiency and streamlines work. Begin by identifying what can be systemised. Then find tools that help you with the desired results. Systemizing does not mean doing away with the human interface. It means enabling humans to achieve more & deliver consistently.
These are just a few questions that can apply to your business to help you begin systemising your specialised skills.
Making your client base in business, particularly online, is the ultimate art form. Developing your brand awareness and business expansion may be arduous for any entrepreneur.
A business growth coach can keep you up to date on this.
Hopefully, this article will assist you in generating more potential clients for your future venture.
