7 Common Business Growth Strategy Mistakes
Growth is a marathon and not a sprint. Anyone can push their way to a revenue number. But to achieve breakthrough growth, you have to do things differently, sustainably, and measurably. This article will explore the seven horrible mistakes executives make concerning business growth strategies. Recognizing these mistakes will allow you to avoid them, and by knowing what not to do, you learn what you must do.
Problem: There’s an expression in sales, and it goes like this—even a blind squirrel finds a nut. So what does that have to do with business growth strategies? What it means is that almost anyone can achieve some level of revenue. However, consistent and sustainable growth with your current database and beyond is what you want as a business leader. That takes more thought and planning.
Opportunity: The reality is that entrepreneurs learn from other business leaders. The world is littered with amazing ideas, products, and services. However, countless of them end up in the trash heap because of the execution. As a result, knowing what you shouldn’t do allows you to move forward, reframe, and correct your plan.
Solution: Recognizing the seven terrible mistakes business leaders make about business growth strategies helps you prevent making those same mistakes. The last thing you want to do is use the shotgun approach for your business. So, let’s explore what you don’t want to do so you can keep to the task of a measured approach to sustainable growth. This list provides you with a practical lens for growth.
7 Horrible Mistakes You’re Make with Business Growth Strategies
As we mentioned, it’s not that difficult to achieve some revenue. However, that’s not where you want to be as a business leader. You want your company to have a sustained growth path driven by sustainable business growth strategies.
Therefore, every business leader needs to understand the mistakes you shouldn’t make. By doing so, you then understand what you should do instead. Remember, business growth is a marathon, and it’s definitely not a haphazard sprint.
1. Not Aligning Sales, Marketing, and Service into One Go-To-Market Team
One of the worst mistakes many businesses make is treating the sales, marketing, product/service, and customer experience teams as separate units. That’s a major mistake because it inevitably creates walls and silos.
Leading-edge companies understand this, and hence they’re reorienting their companies in a centralized approach using the concept of revenue operations, also known as RevOps. When you create a hub through RevOps, essential information travels through your organization efficiently. Moreover, everyone’s reading off the same playbook, and you ensure that silos don’t get created. The pace of business is too fast these days to allow for any friction within your company.
2. You’re Not Strategically Using Your Database to Focus Efforts
Another critical mistake that companies make concerning business growth strategies is to look externally almost exclusively. What they miss is that their database is gold. Inside your CRM system are thousands, if not tens or even hundreds of thousands of contacts to upsell or re-engage.
Sure, having your marketing team create a pipeline of new prospects through content marketing is vital for growth. But, you also have gold within your database. Those people know you and have some experience with your company. Therefore, look to create added value and new opportunities for them, including developing an incentivized lead referral system.
3. Your Team Isn’t Operating from a Common Scorecard Hindering Growth
Again, one of the essential things you have to do as a business leader for the overall health of your company is to eliminate friction points. So, you don’t want to see silos created within your organization. But, you also want to ensure that it doesn’t exist concerning data information.
If you have old systems in place, which you shouldn’t because the price of powerful tech has decreased, you must undergo a digital transformation. Doing so will allow your business units to read from the same scorecard. Moreover, if you do it with the centralized approach of RevOps, you ensure that your tech stack is integrated and the architecture of your technology’s all in a frictionless ecosystem.
4. Technology, Systems, and Data Don’t Support Business Growth Strategies
Dare we say it? Do you operate using spreadsheets and online platforms, such as Google Suite? While there’s nothing wrong with any of those approaches in and of themselves, if they’re not integrated, it’s a mistake and a mess. Again, the contemporary work environment is lightning fast.
As a result of potent tech, underpinned with artificial intelligence and machine learning, executives get data and insights they could never have imagined in the past, including predictive analytics. Therefore, it’s exceptionally vital (is that strong enough?) to have everything seamlessly integrated. Using single spine architecture, you must integrate every process, method, procedure, system, technology, and data.
5. You Aren’t Investing in Revenue Operations
In case you’re not getting the message loud and clear, your company or organization can’t afford not to rely on revenue operations (RevOps). For example, technology exists that could scan billions of data points regarding your sales leads and provide you with exact lead scoring.
That said, tech stacks are getting more complicated, complex, and, let’s face it—overwhelming. Humans can’t possibly process all of it and can’t keep up. So, how do you create a central nervous system within your company that has a hub or heart that views the entire picture of your operations? You guessed it. It’s essential to create a revenue operations frictionless ecosystem within your organization.
6. Real-time Data to Make New Business Growth Strategies Isn’t Used
Data is what gold used to be in the old prospecting days or oil through the 20th Century. Data information is vital for your business growth strategies, and data needs to become a diplomat in your meetings. Moreover, it can’t be data from last year or even a month ago.
Fortunately, your business operates in the digital age, and again, AI and machine learning can process enormous amounts of data every second of the day. Moreover, they provide you with up-to-the-minute and real-time information—if you have the right tech stack in place. Your competitors use the best platforms, for instance, for their sales, marketing, and operations. You’re already behind the eight-ball if you don’t do the same.
7. You’re Not Responsive to Changing Habits, Needs, and Behaviors
What has social media, for example, created for, well, everyone? It’s created on-demand and real-time conversations that happen every second of every day of every year. As a result of this immense tidal wave of information and data we’re all riding, the habits, needs, and behaviors of your target buyers and current customers change and evolve much more quickly than ever.
That means you have to keep in tune with what’s happening. Of course, your marketing team is central to knowing what’s happening. That said, the information obtained has to travel through your organization seamlessly (yes, RevOps is the answer).
Most business entrepreneurs and leaders have gone through the experience of making their first couple of sales and getting excited. That’s awesome, but the deal is that it’s fleeting. For your company to have sustainable growth, your business growth strategies have to be iterative, measurable, and sustainable through the long term.
Remember, this is a marathon and not a sprint. Moreover, your company has to ensure no silos get created and that information travels throughout in a manner that has zero friction.
Finally, you must ensure that all your methods, processes, systems, and tech are integrated and created in a spider’s web that everyone understands. That means two things: 1) a single architectural spine concerning technology; and 2) revenue operations as the central hub of coordinating the orchestra of your company’s system-wide operations.
Ben Stroup is Chief Growth Architect and President at Velocity Strategy Solutions where he helps leaders design, develop, and deploy smarter business growth strategies. Ben is a futurist, disruptor, and data champion. He leads a team that takes a structured learning approach to business challenges, which allows them to assist leaders in bridging the gap between ideas, innovation, and revenue—taking ideas from mind to market.
Velocity Strategy Solutions is an on-demand, next-generation business strategy and management consulting firm which provides clients with a relentless focus on data, execution, and results that positively impact the bottom line. Velocity delivers integrated people and revenue strategies combined with a disciplined approach to growth architecture that elevates the capacity of leaders, teams, and organizations to succeed and win more.