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You have the choice to either stand still or accelerate. Acceleration of business is a tedious task that requires tactical and strategic planning and execution. The bitter truth is that existing statistics show that an estimated 80% of businesses do not survive in their third year. As a business owner, your thinking should revolve around what next. In this article, I am going to take you through a series of acceleration strategies. Step One: Recognize Your Market Market research is vital to your startup’s growth. The first thing you should do as a business owner is to have a good amount of ideas on what the marketplace looks like. Knowing what your market looks like includes the size of your customer base, the size of possible customers, the income level of your customers and other demographics, your competitors and their market share. Still, on knowing your competitors, you need to know what they are doing, the service and products they are offering, and the gaps they are yet to fill. You ought to know what their websites look like. Step Two: Understand Your Value Proposition Understanding your value proposition is knowing your unique offering. It is knowing what you offer that your customers can’t get elsewhere. If you can identify your unique value proposition, then you can craft a brand story or even use it as a marketing strategy. Understanding your value proposition will guide everything you do, from how you market to new customers to defining your firm’s core values. It’s particularly crucial if you’re looking for additional funding to kick-start your growth. If investors don’t know what you’re bringing to the market, they’ll be much less inclined to risk their own money with you.
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Step Three: Formulate A Detailed Sales Strategy Don’t just sell to anyone at any time until you have drafted your demographics and understood the market and your customers. Having a clear-cut sales process will help you identify the ideal customers, convert and retain them. Your strategy should be tailored to your business but can include everything from how long it takes you to send a follow-up email after first contact, to what sale promotion you have in place. Having a well-defined sales funnel can help you to be consistent with a pattern that can help you accelerate your business faster. You can always automate the process, in which you can reward loyalty, understand customer preference, and always reach out as at when due. Step Four: Hire The Right People The power and strength of a business are in its people. For a startup, hiring the right set of people is very pivotal. A bad hire can cost you a million naira, a right hire can earn you a million naira. It is as simple as that. Therefore, look beyond the resume, ask for portfolios, conduct trials, and run an assessment to get the right people. Furthermore, don’t just get the right persons, ensure that they are passionate just like you. Step Five: Have A Strategy For Scaling Up In the course of running your business, you must have it at the back of your mind how to scale up your business. It might be to open a new branch somewhere in the heart of the city, add a new feature to your product software application, open a new product line altogether and so on. If you do not want to fold up too soon, you must grow big as quick as possible. Featured image source: Peerbits
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