What’s blocking your growth?

And where is it in your pipeline?

As the owner of a small business, you want to see your “baby” grow. You’re investing time, money, blood sweat and tears into this business and growth is the ROI you need.

Your growth is determined by performance in three areas of your business: marketing, sales and operations.

• You cannot add clients if your marketing isn’t generating leads
• Leads need to be converted into sales if your business is to grow
• Operations needs to deliver, or you will lose clients

If your growth stalls, you need to quickly identify where the issue is, so you can resolve it and restore growth. Here is what we recommend you do:

Is Operations blocking growth?

Problems here will most likely show up as either lower sale values or client churn. You’ve invested time and money in acquiring clients, so losing them through operational issues is going to be painful. As this isn’t our area of expertise, we’ll leave this here!

Is Sales blocking growth?

If the issue is in your Sales function, there are two reasons for this:

1. Poor quality leads that are never likely to be converted.
2. An inability to sell

Review your conversion rate.

If historically you have converted 20% of all leads, but now you’re only converting 10%, what has changed? Have you changed parts of your Sales function? A new salesperson may take some time to get up to speed, do this may be a blip. If an individual’s conversion rate has dropped, you need to talk to them and find out why. Do they need more training? Has something happened in their personal life? If you don’t find out, you cannot do anything about it.

Review your leads

Has the quality of your leads changed? Has Sales spoken to Marketing to let them know? If they haven’t and Marketing hasn’t spotted the issue, the conversation needs to happen quickly if you are to unblock your growth.

Is Marketing blocking growth?

The first step in identifying if Marketing is the issue is knowing your numbers. Unfortunately, we see too many small businesses that do not know them. The numbers will tell you what action is needed to turn things around.

Marketing platform reports

Every digital marketing tool you use has a reporting function. They will tell you what has changed:

• Are you not getting the engagement you used to on your social media channels?
• Have your email marketing open and click rates dropped?
• Are you slipping down the search rankings
• Are fewer people seeing and clicking on your PPC campaigns?

With much of your marketing aimed at driving the right traffic to your website, have you checked Google Analytics to see what is happening with your website traffic? Looking here first will give you a good steer on where you need to look.

Budgets

In times of uncertainty, marketing budgets are often cut first. As the business owner, you’ll know if you’ve cut the budget, but have you checked whether the budget is being used? If Marketing has changed something, they may not have told you.

Is the market changing?

Over time markets change. Fashions, technology and other factors may mean less demand for your products/services. Ask the people who were at Kodak or BlackBerry. Keeping your finger on the pulse if vital for the success of your business.

Finding where your growth is blocked is critical in growing any small business. That’s why the first thing we do with any new client is Measure. We make sure that our clients know what is and isn’t working within their business, not just within their marketing so that we can then start planning how to generate the growth they are looking for.

If you need some help in growing your business, get in touch. Let’s talk about your business goals and how to unblock your growth.