We know how busy you are - wouldn't it be great if you had the time for a roundtable discussion with other owners on how to grow your business?
Dryrun's got you covered.
We reached out to 37 business owners and entrepreneurs for their best advice on adding one easy action to drive business growth this year. Here are the replies to help you fine tune your growth strategy!
Pablo Povarchik
CEO at wOw Prezi & Crowdstrapping Entrepreneur
Pick up the phone. Pick up the phone to test your market and product.
Pick up the phone to bring partners on board.
Pick up the phone to prompt leads forward in the pipeline.
Pick up the phone 20 times a day with the goal of growing your business.
Practice meditation with Headspace.com twice a day. It really works to grow your business and every other aspect of your life.
Hannah Cree
Listen to your customer, really listen without talking back or responding.
If you want to launch your next business strategy, product or service and improve your sales, your customers will tell you what you need to do. And because you truly listened, they will become your biggest fans and early adopters.
Vladimir Gendelman
Founder & CEO at Company Folders, Inc.
@vgendelman
Don't waste anyone's time. This includes your customers, vendors, employees and yourself. Our phone system has an automated system, but we purposely don't use it.
We don't want customers to waste time lost among automated prompts.Instead, we answer the phone right away. Speaking with clients allows us to learn exactly what they are looking for, as well as, more about themselves and their businesses.
This builds trust and establishes a connection.
Tom Ogaranko
Principal and Co-Founder Tessellate Inc.
Understand your business cash cycle!
In our dynamic economic environment, understanding how long it takes to generate and collect a dollar can reveal strategies to improve working capital for growth — from improving collections, to changing billing practices in contracts.
Shortening the cash cycle creates opportunities to invest in marketing and sales, product development or stronger administrative systems.
Jason Suriano
Founder & CEO, Trajectory IQ@jasonsuriano
Build your credibility in the market by collecting positive feedback and reviews from your customers.
Gaining approval to use direct quotes will help amplify your digital and print-based marketing and promotional materials.
Melinda F. Emerson
President, Quintessence Group
Take the time to develop an actual sales process. You should be actively working on sales at least three times a week. Don't wait until there's a drought to start praying for rain.
You need to work on sales daily, and keep your rain boots in car. Hire a great team so that you can be the chief rainmaker. Long-term sales effort is how you will keep your business strong.
Brandon Gains
VP of Marketing at Referral SaaSquatch
My biggest piece of advice is for companies to invest in a lean experimentation playbook.
With that in place, you can consistently evaluate and prioritize growth campaigns based off of a combination of quantitative and qualitative factors that can move the needle for your business.
For instance, you can evaluate:- Using Hunter or Email Magpie to build a segmented cold email outreach campaign to bring in more MQLs this quarter.
Investing in a retargeting program via Facebook or Google for initial website visitors with lead magnets that build your list and convert at a higher percentage than direct sales pages.- Targeting your active customers via Intercom or Appcues with an upsell email nurture sequence to expand customer revenue.
Brandon Gains is the VP of Marketing at Referral SaaSquatch. He leads customer growth initiatives at the company by incorporating a targeted mix of digital marketing campaigns. Brandon also contributes articles to publications like SocialMediaToday, CustomerThink, and Business2Community. You can connect with him via email brandon at referralsaasquatch.com or on LinkedIn
Nellie Akalp
CEO of CorpNet.com
The one thing a small business can do to drive their growth strategy this year is hiring key talent! We are actually in the process of doing this at CorpNet.com now to get 2017 off to a strong start.
When a small business hires strong talent who are inspired and motivated to take your business to the next level, you are sure to grow rapidly! Take the time to make sure you fill the right roles by the perfect candidates and 2017 can be your most successful year yet!
Robbie Richards
Since I work primarily on search marketing campaigns with B2B SaaS companies I'm going to approach this one from an SEO standpoint.
One of the biggest growth opportunities I find when starting an engagement with a client is in their existing content - both top and lower funnel content.I start with an in-depth content audit. This always surfaces a mountain of "low hanging fruit".
Basically, quick win organic opportunities. They are usually broken out into 3 categories:
1. Existing keyword research:
I extract all existing keyword rankings for the site and identify any/all pages currently ranking in positions 6-20. These are assets you can update/improve and relaunch for immediate ranking increase and organic traffic gains. I cover the entire process step-by-step in tip #1 of this article.
2. Consolidation:
I use URL profiler to pull keyword, traffic, and link data from a few different sources down to the page-level. From here, I identify where any keyword cannabilization might be occurring - articles competing for the same keyword. This dilutes the ranking potential for all competing assets. I'll flag the overlapping content, and often combine the assets into one major asset to consolidate the link equity and boost ranking potential.
3. Prune:
Finally, I'll filter the extracted data to surface all the content on the site that gets little traffic, links or conversions. These are often dead weight pages that just eat up crawl budget. Removing under-performing content is a great way to increase the crawl frequency of your more important content.
I always start with that 3-step process. For established sites, I'll typically see 15-25% organic traffic increased within 2-3 months after implementing those changes.
The audit exercise itself can be completed in a day or two. So, the upfront investment is worth it, and the ROI can be significant, especially at scale.
Jerome Ng
Venture Associate, 500 Startups Canada
I often see businesses approach growth as a rush to implement the first ideas that come to mind.
One straightforward action I'd recommend is to take a systematic approach by implementing a growth framework.
A simple framework can be: draw out your sales funnel, set measurable goals and metrics, write out all the possible experiments, prioritize experiments, run tests, analyze results and repeat.
By taking a systematic approach, you'll have a better understanding of what's working and what's not.
Joelle Goldman
Partner at Churn Buster@joellegoldman@churnbuster
Eliminate Involuntary Churn!
Once upon a time, failed payments were treated as an afterthought. And although we've all come to learn that retention is king in SaaS, what many folks don't realize is that up to half of their overall churn might be coming from failed payments if you're B2B (even higher if you're B2C).Up to 70% of that is recoverable...if you do something about it.
Reigning in this segment of your businesses is one of the quickest, easiest ways to make a significant and lasting impact on your bottom line. Want to grow in 2017? Stop losing customers to failed payments!Here's a quick guide to help you get started.
Andrew Koppejan
Founder - ignitephysio.ca
One practical strategy is to focus on maintaining momentum. Nothing is more challenging than maintaining momentum as a founder in a small business.
Pick the goal to reach for the quarter and then break action plans into 6 week sprints. It will help to keep you and your team focused and laser-like in getting results.
Steve Wilkinghoff
Founder and Chief Clarity Officer - BizDogGroup.com
To drive their growth strategy a business should really drill into the components that make up their financial results. Take a look at their customers - what they have purchased, how often, when, and how much they spent each time they bought.After that, consider any "masquerading overhead".
These are items that appear in the overhead section of your financial statements but are actually related to serving your customers and doing transactions. An example would be support team members who are spending large amounts of their time supporting a specific customer or customer segment.
These costs should be considered part of the costs of serving those specific customers when drilling into the customer data.
J Keith Hall
Co-Founder theWTFactory@theWTFactory
The actions you take depend on where you are in your business development and the path you've chosen as your current emphasis.
For this year, for us as a company we are focused on increasing the distribution of our products in the channels that are appropriate for us and make the most sense for our long term prospects. We are hiring an in house sales team and building them up to get feet on the ground for SlimClip Case.
I think brand partnerships are always a powerful way to elevate, grow your business awareness and conversions. Finding win-win partnerships where both ends give efforts to elevate and promote each other symbiotically is a powerful tool.
Giving value to your customers and potential customers. Value that goes beyond your product or service is the most sustainable investment in growth. Whether that be giving value through great content, advice, or providing a service that surprises and delights your base; any and all of the above are powerful growth strategies.
Khuram Malik
I would definitely say to focus on data.
A lot of smaller businesses ignore this area because they feel its reserved for bigger companies not realizing the gains they're missing out on.
Actually as we’ve been working with companies we’ve found many of them aren’t even tracking the basics. You know the simple metrics that indicate the state of the business health. Things like how much it’s costing to acquire each customer (Cost Per Acquisition - CPA) and what each customer is worth (Customer Lifetime Value - CLTV).
Where the growth magic comes however, is recognizing the fact that business is all about creating value for — and serving — the customer, so measuring how good a job the product is doing of that will highlight areas where the product is falling short. That then provides opportunities to increase the value the product is creating resulting in more growth for the business.
Most of the data that’s required to do this comes from creating a 360 degree view of the customer. I.e. trying to understand the customer in the best and most complete way possible, in every way and from every dimension as well as analyzing the full customer journey. I.e. The exact journey each customer takes from the first touch point or interaction with the company or product all the way through and past usage of the product to when they stop using it.
That’s what often gives the biggest insights and helps people recognize the opportunities for growth.All of this is covered (while being aimed at the Entrepreneur) in the Masterclass with actual examples from famous and non-famous companies that have already done this successfully as well as how people can do it for themselves, without the need to be a math genius.
It’s a high level introduction and overview to the topic as data analysis is quite a large field, but it’s a brilliant primer for anyone that hasn’t considered data analysis seriously up till now, or has but doesn’t know where to start.
Sandra Wong
Social Casino Strategist/ Online Marketing and Design Consultant
Build your credibility in the market by collecting positive feedback and reviews from your customers.
Gaining approval to use direct quotes will help amplify your digital and print-based marketing and promotional materials.
Julia Kozlov
CEO & Tech PM, Profile Studio- hustlers in web.
The sole focus of the business should be on two things :
1. A strong B2B partnership strategy. Figure out your best collaborators who are complimentary but not competitive to your space.
2. A strong referral based strategy. Figure out your best customer promoters and colleague partners who are not strong in your space - figure out a way to rewards them and work together.
Colin Christensen
The first thing I suggest most businesses do to start driving growth is to map out the responsibilities of the entire organization: what needs to get done each day, each week, each month?
Don’t apply names just yet. Put it together as an org chart of responsibilities. Maybe break them into major parts: operations, administration/finance, marketing and sales.
Once everything that needs to get done is assigned into roles, start adding names to who does what. Each person should have 3-7 responsibilities. Take a 90 day period and map out the 3-5 most important projects that need to get done.
Assign responsibility to a specific team member for each project and start having weekly meetings where a brief part of the meeting is dedicated to the team sharing red-light/green-light on the progress of each project. Finally, discuss how to move every project forward. Rinse and repeat for the year.
For more information on doubling your profit, connecting a winning team, getting clarity about your business and getting your life back, check out www.wholeentrepreneur.ca.
George Visan
Founder & CEO of Sprout Rewards
We all know it's more expensive to acquire new customers than to keep what you've got. Increasing customer retention by 5% leads to a 25%-90% increase in profit.Get a loyalty program that makes them think long-term, and then over-deliver on it. A
lready have one? Great — focus on integrity in your sales force. That's where most of the customer experience lies.
Pawel Brzeminski
Founder & CEO, Snap Projections on Facebook
A simple but effective approach to growing your business is to start measuring the results of your current growth activities.When you know what is working, then simply start doing more of it. Everything else is a distraction.”
Justin Jackson
Founder, Tiny Marketing Wins@mijustin
Always be thinking about life from your customer's perspective! Specifically:- where are they now?- where do they want to be? What's their dream of a better life?- what stands in their way?
What are they struggling with?Once you have these answers, you'll be able to meet potential customers where they're at. That's how you unlock growth: being able to articulate the customer's main struggle better than they can!
Corey Lansdell
Creative Director, Pulp Studios Inc.
Use social media to let their audience join them on the journey. Do this by using your facebook, instagram, twitter etc. to communicate what you're doing and where you're going.
At the very least just post your journey, optimally, create a communication plan that shares your journey as a story in a way which entices users to follow and share.
Wade Muri
Research and Innovation Specialist - Office of Research and InnovationSchool of Applied Sciences and Technology NAIT
Focus on the thing that is most important to your business – your customers. Take stock of what your customers value most from your organization, and do that better. Don’t waste time chasing new products or services that you feel would be interesting to customers, focus on delivering what provides your customers the most value today.
Darcy Leclaire
Principal - Strive Financial
Investigate whether or not strategic alliances/partnerships could open new avenues for business.
As a small business owner or proprietor you need to ask yourself the question 'Am I standing in the way of my business growth'? If so, do you have the courage to get out of the way?
Marty Gunderson
Founder of Quidni Estate Winery@QuidniWine
I think the most important action a business can take is to share the growth strategy with the staff. Tell them what the plan is, but more importantly, why.
Once they see the why, they will be more likely to be invested in the strategy.
Jason Gordon
Founder & CEO of Strong Social@jasongordons
Focus 60% of your efforts on growing a targeted and active audience on social media. Many people will tell you to focus on content first and foremost, and while we agree that content is one of the most important things your business can do, it's even more important to have a strategy to grow your audience on social media.
Reach out, follow people on Twitter that you want to have as followers, make connections on LinkedIn to people that you want to do business with, and engage with other people's content, this will gain exposure for your brand and your own content. If you can figure out a strategy to consistently grow your audience all of the other things will fall into place much more quickly and your content creation efforts will pay off much quicker and become much more valuable to you.You will actually have an audience ready and waiting for your content.
No matter how good your content is... if you don't have a good and targeted audience on social media no one will ever get the chance to see your content that you spent so much time and energy creating. For us, audience growth on social media comes first, and content creation and planning second.
Lea Alcantara
Partner, Lead Designer at Bright Umbrella
Make sure you create a strategy to regularly follow up with your clients, old and new! Whether you’re actively working with them or not, there should be a plan to be in regular communication to share some expertise, insight or advice in the spirit of generosity. Being top of mind and proactive is crucial for ongoing work.
Brian MacMahon
Milestone everything with simple actions tied into revenue, client & prospect outcomes. Most companies are able to create projections but lack the discipline to follow specific activities every day to measure progress.
If we do the activities and don’t hit our monthly milestones then we know that its because of our people, process or product and we can do something about it.
Bryan McIver
Servant Leader, Fresnel
Secure and install key industry veterans as member(s) and/or advisors of the board of directors. Particularly for B2B businesses. Networking and relationships are the key to establishing reliability and revenue channels with large enterprise customers.
Brian Elliott
For us, it's absolutely imperative to set goals for monthly, quarterly and yearly growth targets. We tend to aim for numbers that seem difficult to pull off, but that helps motivate us to hustle.Then at least once per month we evaluate the goal vs. actual growth numbers so we know how to proceed for the next month/quarter.
I feel that businesses that don't set explicit goals and measure their growth honestly month-over-month may be doomed to slog along unnecessarily for far too long.
Frank Metzel
CEO of Alpen Animation Explainer Videos
If you want more sales, you need to prospect more. More "qualified" and well prepared cold calls by phone, email, letters or knocking doors. There is no magic. Follow the 10x rule of Grant Cardone.
I can highly recommend Mike Weinber´s book: "New Sales. Simplified. The essential handbook for prospecting and new business development".
Bradley Poulette
CEO - Waitless
Growth requires focus and intention. Don't let a grand product vision get in the way of forming deep connections with early customers.
Justin McGill
Chief Executive Officer - LeadFuze
I always recommend utilizing cold email. It's how I built a 7 figure digital agency and now how I'm scaling LeadFuze. Of all the ways to generate leads, cold email is the only thing that can truly be done with full automation.
This frees you up to work on additional marketing channels or other areas of your business, while accomplishing exactly what you need to from a sales perspective - contacting ideal prospective customers in your target market.
Jayson Noftle
Founder/Co-Owner - SatSkin Concealment
For us, at SatSkin Concealment, we take our customers/potential customers, very seriously. We never assume, that we know what they want or that we might know best. We work hard to ‘find out’ and learn what is wanted & needed and what the consumer’s ‘actual’ priories are.
We utilize a number of tools and methods, to gain this ‘insight’…Social media has changed many of the ways that we can retrieve this critical information and helps us stay ‘way out front’ of our industry.This then allows our team to better develop and implement everything from product innovation & design, to message development and marketing strategy.
Ultimately, this is what will drive our future growth and is SatSkin’s primary growth strategy.
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