You running a business which has grown nicely but has struck at some point and you tried doing everything which you possibly can think of but still your business isn’t taking off from there. And you are going crazy and have no idea about what to do.
Sounds familiar? It’s time to think again and do things differently.
If You Always Do What You’ve Always Done, You Always Get What You’ve Always Gotten.
If you don’t do things differently, results will never change and your business will never be able to reach the next level. Although different businesses require different approaches to move to the next level but if you follow below steps, it will certainly pave your way for taking your business to the next level.
1: Revisit your Company’s Vision: Stats show that 94% of business owners generally go off track and forget their company goals and company vision. If you forgot your vision, aims and destinations what else is left. You should always keep an eye on your company about its current position and where its going. If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there. So, first step is think about your vision and goals again and analyze where your company is standing right now and where it is set to move forward.
2: Write down your goals: Once you have revisited the vision and current situation, its time to write down company goals on paper. Goal setting is a great way to clarify your focus, measure progress and track achievements. Goal Setting is a discipline in itself. Most people do a serious mistake with goal settings, they keep their goals in mind and think that since they have good memory its fine to keep their goals in mind. Goals when kept in mind is never achieved. Once the goals are written, you should make a proper plan for your company, your products, your finances, your employees, your competitors on paper. Don’t think much at this point, just write it down. Just write down whatever you can think of to make take you company to next level.
3: Believe in yourself: Before you move forward to the next step, it should be remembered that most important factor in taking your company to the next level is the ability to have belief in yourself. If you don’t believe in yourself, none of the steps or tips is going to work and it is sure that you wont be able to take your company to the next level. So, believe in yourself and sky will be the limit.
Once you have understood the above points, its time to do proper planning to take your company to the next level. Planning is very crucial for the success of any company. Without proper planning, it’s almost impossible to take your company to the next level. There are generally 2 ways to take your company to the next level :
- Targeting New Customers
- Targeting New Markets
We recommend you focusing on one strategy at a time. Overall taking your company to next level will depend on 4 factors. Just focus on these factors honestly and your company is sure to reach the next level of success.
- Marketing
- Sales
- Customer Service
- Productivity
Marketing: Poor marketing is one of the most important factor in any company’s failure. Marketing can either make or break a company growth. Even though as a matter of fact, most company owners don’t do marketing for their business. Why? Because of a common myth that marketing is very costly affair.
Fortunately, the marketplace has now become digital and the world has shrinked to become a global village. Digital marketing is a very cost effective way to market your business to the global audience. With strategies like content marketing, SEO,SMO and PPC, you can easily improve branding and revenues of your company in a very cost effective way. Also consistently changing, testing and mixing your marketing activities can be a valuable way to see what works, what doesn’t and what type of result it produces.
While you do not need to do all of these activities at once, start with one or two that are already aligned with the way you run your business, and then start to make changes to incorporate other digital marketing strategies gradually.
Sales: Sales is the heartbeat of any organization. While marketing brings you leads, sales is what converts those leads in to paying customers. Sales is the process through which revenues are generated for the company. Thus its very important to look into the sales process and find its strength and weaknesses. Focus on whats working and do more of that and also try to explore more sales avenues.
Focus on finding new effective sales channels for your product and services. Doing this can help diversify your brand and attract more customers. Partnering with different companies for growing your customer base is another example which you can do increase your customer base. Use the concept of freemium creatively to explore yet another untapped portion of the market. Try Introducing items that complement what you already sell can also help you in generating new sales and thus will improve customer satisfaction.
Customer service: Ability to retain clients plays a significant role in the continued success of any business. Not only does having regular customers mean regular income, but happy clients can also provide powerful word-of-mouth marketing.
Thus you should always focus on retaining your customers. Along with providing your clients with an exceptional product or service, you can encourage repeat business by being customer service-focused. This means asking for and acting on feedback, addressing issues and complaints quickly and thoroughly, and being consistently accessible and accountable.
If you don’t have a good customer support, make it better immediately. Talk to you customer support department and take feedback and talk to your customers also to take their feedback. Based on the collected feed backs, make improvement in your customer service.
Productivity: No matter what you do, if your team is not productive enough, reaching to next level will remain a distant dream for you. Care and process has to be maintained in order to ensure that daily tasks should be completed in time. Productivity will largely depend on the team work and therefore care should be taken to hire perfect people in the team. Team should be motivated and appreciated from time to time for their accomplishments. You can boost your productivity by developing systems that streamlines operations and execution processes.
That being said, it is very important that proper attention and care should be taken in each of the above points and appropriate plans are made. Nothing great can be achieved without proper planning. Make sure you focus on your growth strategy with a perfect written down plans. Have a vision of where you want to get to and make sure your plans are made to achieve those objectives. Spend time thinking about what makes your business proposition unique, What value do you add and what are your customers are looking for and make strategies accordingly? And don’t forget to start ASAP…
3 Comments
We need to think in customer point of view and need to analyse customer taste and preferences and need to make changes in our business accordingly. This is one of smart ways to improve our business.
Very Innovative business idea. This is very informative. However, you should focus in entrepreneurship first. Because we cannot start a business without being a entrepreneur. Thanks!
wow very nice blog