Many new businesses experience initial growth that levels off once they begin to mature. The experience is not a new one nor is it isolated to the first few month or couple of years either. The peaks and troughs of growth haunt businesses because they must be managed by a succession of skilled managers along the business journey.
You don’t have to just sit and passively take it though. There are things you can do to stoke the fire of growth once more.
Look for Repeat Business
As a business gets busier, staff are pushed to the limit and find it difficult to cope. One of the things that tends to fall by the wayside is keeping up with existing customers and asking for that next order. There’s so much focus on finding new customers and securing their first order that the best fruit is left unpicked on the tree.
As the experts at access2knowledge.org will happily tell you, the least expensive and easiest way to increase sales is to mine your existing customers. When was the last time that a salesperson touched base with these customers? Do they feel considered or cared about? Are their business needs being fully met? Maintaining a solid business relationship with existing customers is smart, as they are the foundation it’s built upon.
What’s Already Effective with Your Marketing?
You may have already tried many different approaches to marketing in a “throw the paint against the wall and see what sticks,” approach. That’s all well and good, but now it’s time to stop trying everything you can think of and review what’s been working for you. If there hasn’t been any effective measurement of results, can this be examined retroactively, or is it something that can only be implemented going forward?
When you have a proper handle on what’s been working so far, ask yourself the question: Will this marketing method still work today, just like it has in the past? Sometimes, marketing approaches get overcooked and are no longer as effective. Are there some tweaks that can be applied based on what you’ve learned that will improve your results going forward, or is a completely new marketing plan going to be required to accelerate sales growth?
Local Only? Try Expanding Regionally
When you’re sensing that you’ve reached a saturation point with prospects in the local area, it’s time to expand carefully, further afield. You don’t have to start taking out full-page ads in a niche magazine, but certainly, you should begin creating a plan to offer your product or service to businesses or consumers outside of your normal catchment area. How will you go about doing this? What should your first steps be? Consider whether you can rank for local search terms in the areas you wish to target and dip a toe in the water there. Learn how customers in this area might want different things and adapt your offering where you can to meet that need.
Accelerating growth when it’s slowed down isn’t that difficult when you’re a newish business. There are plenty of areas to mine that either hasn’t been picked over yet or have been overlooked in the previous push for ever-faster growth. Sometimes, it helps to be more mindful of the best approach the second time around to help sustain the new growth pattern for longer.
