Not long ago, Leah Pope, wrote an article in Forbes about the immense pressure CMOs and Marketing is facing to drive and deliver measurable business growth. We’re not seeing this abate as our customer hear their boards reiterate their expectation for Marketing to lead the business forward.  Where are the growth opportunities? We  have found that strategies for growth typically evolve around nine areas. There is a logical sequence to growth for any company. As Marketing strategists here’s what we recommend.

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Invest in These Nine Growth Strategies in Sequential Order

Explore and excel at the first 5 before you take the remaining four.  Develop and execute your strategies in this order.

1. Increase your focus on customer retention: Ensure existing customers are retained. Aim for at least 90% customer retention. Achieving this level of customer retention requires companies to target and grow customers who will have the greatest lifetime value and strategic fit. If you have customers, this is the first area in which to invest in your growth.  The experience you deliver impacts your customer retention.  Most experts support the premise that is it more cost effective to keep a customer than to replace one.
2. Identify where you can grow share of wallet or share of customers (footprint expansion): Keeping your customers is one thing. Growing their value is another. The second area to invest in for growth is to grow the share of the customer spends on the category with you.
3. Win new customers. You acquired your first customers, retained them and they are buying more from you.  It’s important that you are able to attract new customers.  Attracting new customers with your existing solutions demonstrates your ability to develop the market and grow your market share.
4. Develop new solutions.  80% of new products fail to generate a return to shareholders. To improve the success rate of new products, focus on making sure that prospects/customers see how the new solutions offer a new benefit that is seen as unique. Your new solutions must come to the market at the right time for the buyers. These new solutions must also in  some way enable you can create a barrier to entry for competitors. A new solution that isn’t properly supported by Marketing is doomed. Whatever you invested in developing the product, you will need at least that level of investment to market it.
5. Enter New Markets. Often this means different positioning, pricing and promotion strategies to address the different needs, operating processes and buying patters in new markets.

Avoid moving into the following four areas too early. Pace yourself to sustain growth and include these four areas on your growth road map.

6. New distribution channels

7. Exploit international markets

8. Acquisitions and Alliances — while very popular, most fail to add value to the acquiring company.

9. Expand outside industry boundaries

This process provides you with a logical sequence for growth. The objective of each of these nine areas is to develop a pipeline of projects that will create major new streams of cash flow for your company. As you focus on growing your company, assess at which stage you think you are the most successful and then focus on strategies that will take you to the next step. Need a bit of help, that’s why we’re here.

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