Where is your business growth strategy pointing to next year? With headlines pointing to economic uncertainty ahead, it’s important to ensure you explore all the relevant opportunities.
9 Business Growth Strategy Directions
We use this framework with clients to explore three potential business growth strategy areas (market development, product development, and business transformation). Across the three areas, there are nine possible opportunities you can include as you develop your success strategies:
Market Development
- Targeting current customers – Sell more of what you currently offer to those already buying from you.
- Grabbing share from competitors’ customers – Take business from prospects who are currently doing business with competitors.
- Opening new markets – Begin selling what you currently offer to new industries, markets, and geographies.
- Converting those who use substitutes – Incent customers who are using alternatives to what you sell to switch to your offerings.
- Selling through new channels – Introduce your offerings into new sales channels, whether they are external or internal to your organization.
Product Development
- Enhancing existing products – Increasing sales of a modified version of what you currently sell.
- Innovating new products – Growing sales through new marketplace offerings.
Business Transformation
- Acquiring growth – Purchase a competitor to grow your customer and revenue base.
- Changing the business model – Revamping your go-to-market approach to fundamentally change the nature of what you offer and how your take it to market.
Strengthening Your Business Growth Strategy
If you see a growth gap in your forecast, now is the time to identify your strategic opportunities in a deliberate way and begin making moves to prepare to market more aggressively, innovate, enhance your experience, and/or directly grab share from competitors. As you determine where your best opportunities will be, you can use the outcomes to communicate growth priorities, provide a platform for developing new growth ideas, determine whether your overall plan is delivering on expectations. – Mike Brown
