13 Powerful Steps To Successfully Grow Your Business

With tough times presently and for the foreseeable future, small business should reappraise how they can get thought this.

The best way is to be bullish and to keeping growing your business.

Here, I discuss a powerful thirteen step process that involves proven ways to grow your business. It works by focusing heavily on your target customers.

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1. Focus On Customer Numbers Not Sales

Most businesses focus on increasing sales to grow, and while this can be successful for driving higher sales, it is not the best way.

The most effective way to grow your business is to focus on increasing customer numbers and to focus on the customers within the individual targeted customer groups, and how to get these through the door.

The most successful in business are the best, because they do this, knowing that by focusing on the customer, the sales will take care of themselves.

If you want to achieve the most rapid growth possible, you should do the same as the very best, and shift your thinking to the customer, too.

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2. Build An Army Of Loyal Customers

Businesses fail because they do not have enough customers to provide enough sales revenue to cover the outgoings, to fund re-investment and to give a good residue profit.

Your objective must be to create an army so big, that your profits are big, too, after everything is paid for.

Not only should this army be big, but it must constitute loyal customers who love what you do and who want to return frequently.

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3. Make Your Decisions & Strategy ‘Customer-led’

If you are to create this large army of loyal customers, every major decision and every major strategy must be ‘customer-led’ and be based on being right for getting your customers ‘through the door’.

One way to achieve this is to ask yourself one very simple question:

“Is this decision right for our customers?”

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4. Identify Your Main Customer Groups

The starting point of the process is to identify the main customer groups that you should target with your business.

Then, once identified, you must focus on the best four or five groups with the greatest number of customers who are most likely to buy from you.

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5. Understand Your Customers Within These Groups

The next step to grow your business is to get to know the customers within these groups, such as:

• Their age and gender

• Their lifestyles and marital status

• Their incomes and their likely disposable income

• Where they live and whether they are houseowners or renters

• Their possible buying habits and spending habits

In particular, you need to know and understand how they live, their possible disposable income and what they are likely to spend with your business.

It is pointless targeting potential customers who do not have the spending ability or the will to purchase your products.

Many business owners make this fatal mistake simply because they target the wrong customers.

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6. Match Your Products To Your Customer Groups

The next step is to ‘match’ your products to the customers within specific customer groups.

It is important to think that customers in one group will not always want to buy the same product as customers in another group; younger customers, for instance, will not always want to buy what the older customers will buy.

This can often lead to having one product for one customer group and another product for another customer group.

There are obvious benefits to such a strategy, as it can spread the appeal for your business and allow you to optimise your sales better.

Many business owners make the big mistake of creating a product, first, and then they try to find customers to buy it; this is a very long, tedious and expensive process that often leads to failure.

Always find the customer first, then ‘match’ the product.

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7. Build Customer Loyalty

Once you have sold a certain product to a particular customer group, you do not want just one sale.

You want that customer to return again, and again, eventually becoming a ‘loyal’ customer.

Once, you have a high degree of customer loyalty from customers within your target customer groups, you will really see your customer numbers and sales grow.

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8. Focus On The ‘Customer Experience’

Ultimately, the overall ‘customer experience’ will determine whether customers return.

If they like the ‘customer experience’, they will return.

Importantly, there is much more to the overall ‘customer experience’ than your product, although the product is undoubtedly the most important.

Much more is included, such as:

• The website

• The social media

• The buying process

• The customer service

• The customer value

• The price

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9. Achieve A 5 Star ‘Customer Satisfaction Rating’

A measure of how people rate your ‘customer experience’ is the ‘customer satisfaction rating’ - create a great 5 star ‘customer experience’ and your ‘customer satisfaction rating’ will grow.

The best in business focus highly on the ‘customer experience’ and achieving a high ‘customer satisfaction rating’ – they know getting both right will also customers returning, spurning high customer numbers.

Many business owners fail because they simply do not focus on the all-important ‘customer experience’ and the all-important ‘the customer satisfaction rating’.

Do NOT be like them!

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10. Exceed Customer Expectations

One good way is to optimise both the ‘customer experience’ and the ‘customer satisfaction’ rating is to exceed customer expectations.

Most customers will have expectations of what they will receive from a business, but if you can exceed these, you will boost their appreciation of what you do for them.

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11. Get Your Customers Excited

The best ‘customer experience’ could get your customers ‘excited’.

This is when you really start to rock!!

Excited customers will buy more from you and they will feel motivated to tell others about you and your products.

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12. Create ‘Word Of Mouth’

The real success of a business is the measure of the amount of ‘word of mouth’ it creates amongst its customers.

In fact, it is the ultimate barometer.

If you are NOT generating ‘word of mouth’ amongst your customers, you have a problem.

High amounts of ‘word of mouth’ indicates a strong business with a high degree of customer satisfaction.

If you want to take your business to the highest level, you need rampant ‘word of mouth’.

One way is to ask yourself this question:

“How can we get our customers to talk about us?”

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13. Create Customer Advocates

Then, rampant ‘word of mouth’ should lead to the creation of ‘customer advocacy’ – an army of ‘loyal’ customers who can be classed as ‘customer advocates’.

These are a group of customers who are so loyal that they will work tirelessly to tell others about your business and products.

These are effectively ‘unpaid influencers’.

‘Customer advocates’ will save you time and money, reducing the amount of marketing required; these lovely loyal customers will do your marketing for you, unpaid.

A dream for every business owner!!

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Many Business Owners Do Not Understand This Process

This 13 step process always works for a business, if adopted in the right way.

I have used it for many years successfully in my businesses and many of my clients have used it too, very successfully in their businesses.

I strongly urge you to do the same, now in your business, if you do not already do so.

Sadly, a huge number of business owners do not recognise how important it is to focus on the customer and on boosting customer numbers to grow their sales.

Please Contact Me,  If You Have Any Comments Or Questions About This Blog Article. I Would Be Pleased To Help You

Robert Viney Is An Award-Winning Business Coach

Top 20 Entrepreneur Coach 2022, Awarded By The Coach Foundation

23 Best Business Coaching Services 2022, Awarded By HubSpot

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