The antidote for stalled growth and lack of marketing progress

Before you can really assess how you reactivate growth you need to understand what your real customer value is. Even if you believe the future lies in making changes in direction it’s useful to understand where you can build from.

What we mean by this is the real value of the outcomes that customers derive from your propositions. So not just “great customer service” or “some specific product features”, it’s about identifying the personal and corporate benefits that they derive from your proposition.

It’s important to have a plan for how sales are made which may well involve a rethink of sales processes. After a period of significant growth and during a time of a slowdown, the pressure placed on sales to perform tends to increase. As a consequence the sales team look for ways to win mew customers – “What ever it takes” mentality can take over which can create chaos for the services team, finance, legal, IT and marketing. This isn’t sustainable and more strategic and planned approach is needed.

Having a solid understanding of your customer value will help you start to build a more concrete picture of your foundation for growth. It may be that this is clear already across your business and everyone understands the foundation, however, its useful to write it down so it can always be a reference point for everything from assessing new opportunities to writing the copy for a new piece of content.

You may already have set your growth aspirations some time ago and are still working towards a target? However, it’s also worth revisiting these now. What were they, what assumptions are they based on? Are the assumptions and expectations still valid? Aspirations can be expressed in terms of several different measures, size, profitability, influence, your exit plan, personal wealth creation.

Marketing is your means to create and capture demand for your services which should be your engine of growth. Having created your content strategy, the role of marketing is to run a programme of audience engagement to generate awareness, nurture, and capture leads.

High growth can create chaos within your organisation. Yes, it’s exhilarating, but the continuous change, lack of resource, growth in the number of people and resulting new structures all causes disruption. The disruption saps leadership time and ultimately distracts from core growth strategy and focus. This is particularly true in sales and marketing, where things can go a little feral.

The best form of marketing leads are referrals; from a conversion rate basis they are always the highest, from an acquisition cost point of view always the lowest. It’s a great way to build a business. And if referral could supply 100% of your planned growth objective you would be in a great place. However, it rarely does, especially when the growth demands are increasing. The next best leads to receive are ones where people are actively looking for your solution. The only way you are going to receive these inbound leads is to have an active awareness programme build on a lot of content and related activity.