Growth Strategies: Management
Management plays a vital role in every successful growth strategy. It’s up to your leaders to create and foster a culture that embraces your customers and your team. After all, both are vital to your growth.
As a leader, you need to look for ways to innovate your products and services, improve the customer experience, encourage your team to grow, and seek new market opportunities. It’s your role to support the people who provide value to your customers—your customer success team, sales team, and developers.
So how do you manage growth strategies?
Involve your team in making vital growth decisions
They see issues, challenges, and solutions that you may not be aware of, and they can tell you what’s feasible based on their experience. They can let you know if they have the resources to implement a growth strategy or what additional support they may need to meet your timelines.
This makes it vital that you talk with team members and share your vision with them. Sharing your vision enables buy-in and fosters engagement.
Ask questions like:
- What is a good market for us to expand?
- How can we most efficiently diversify our products or services?
- If we were to grow into new markets, what sort of additional support would you need to do your job effectively?
- Are our processes still effective? What inefficiencies can we streamline?
- Are we currently meeting our customers’ needs? Which needs are our customers most concerned with?
- Are there opportunities within our current offerings to add value for our clients?
Focus on metrics, not just sales numbers
Yes, sales numbers are important to your growth, but other metrics also play a critical role in your success. When you’re analyzing the efficiency of your processes, don’t just look at how much money has been saved or spent; look at other metrics as well. These metrics can include your customer retention rate, user growth metrics, and even net promoter scores (how likely your current customers are to recommend your product or service to others).
Sales numbers only tell you how well your product is selling, but they don’t indicate how well you’re doing for your customers.
Talk to your clients to get their feedback.
- What do they like about your product or service?
- What could be changed or improved?
- What have they found surprising about your product or service?
- Do they use it in a way other than what was intended?
- How responsive has your customer service been in responding to their concerns?
Foster collaboration
Your marketing team, development team, and sales team each play a vital role in customer satisfaction, whether that’s through attracting and engaging customers, solving their problems, or providing responsive customer service. As such, they should each have an idea of what the other teams do and how each role fits into the overall success of your organization.
Talk to them to discover what they know about each other’s role in your organization.
- Do they know what the other teams do?
- Do they know why each role is essential and how they all contribute to organizational success?
- How can they collaborate to more easily meet customer needs? For example, can customer service advise the developers when feedback on a new product is received?
Your management leads your company’s growth and acts as a facilitator between your divisions, ensuring everyone is working towards your overall goals.
