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Discovering your opportunities is the basis of business growth. This is a phase where your business comes to the point suitable for expansion and looks for new options to get more sales. There’s no doubt that this is an important process. So the real question here is how to discover such opportunities.
How to discover profitable business opportunities?
First and foremost, it’s always a smart move to get information from your potential clients. You have to be a good listener and learn more about their problems, needs, expectations, etc. It would be very helpful if they provide information about similar products/services. Especially those ones they have used in the past and what they found good or bad about them.
Next, you should focus on the thoughts and information provided by your existing customers. What kind of questions do they have? What were their experiences with your company and products? Reviews? In this way, you can create new business opportunities by designing new products/services or improving existing ones.
Creativity is something that should be included in every business venture. But this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t care about the activities of your competition. Don’t try to copy them, but try to get updated about the things they are doing. So, it’s a good idea to conduct a brief, yet detailed competitive analysis.
Once you are done, you can get answers to many important questions. For instance, you can find out why some customers choose you over them and vice versa, what their strongest selling points are and more. Obviously, the answers to these questions will help you discover important business opportunities that will support your business growth.
Finally, in order to find exciting business opportunities for your business, you will have to check industry trends on a regular basis. You can do this by becoming part of reputable associations, buying industry publications and following industry news on search engines and magazines.
Designing the best growth strategy
Once you identify a few business opportunities and become familiar with your competition and current industry trends, you can start working on the growth strategy. Designing the best growth strategy for your specific business doesn’t have to be a difficult task.
A good small consultancy can help you analyze all these things and provide tips for the strategy. They can also help you implement this strategy and achieve goals which will be part of this process. But, even if you hire a company like this, you have to understand the basic elements of the process that helps businesses design and develop a successful growth strategy.
The truth is that there are many different strategies like this out there, but it seems that designing any of them requires the same pattern which includes a few steps.
For starters, you must identify both short-term and long-term goals. For example, a long-term goal would be to increase your sales by 50% in the next 5 years. On the other hand, a short-term goal is to launch a new store.
As you can see, the short-term goals will contribute to the achievement of one long-term goal that will help your business grow and expand. There is a wide array of business growth strategies that you can use like boosting web traffic, promoting new products and/or services, becoming present on new markets, creating affiliate programs, updating an existing marketing strategy and more.
Prioritize goals and focus on the most important ones
What many business owners and managers don’t understand is that not all of the goals they have can be achieved in a timely manner (and they shouldn’t be achieved). The explanation is simple – it’s better to have a great selection of many goals and fail to achieve some (at least in a timely manner) than to accomplish all your objectives and witness stagnation. So, the basic idea here is to prioritize goals and focus on the most important ones that can have a significant impact on business growth.
Remember that every goal needs a specific strategy. For instance, if your plan is to hire 5 more people in order to improve productivity, you have to take a few things into account in order to finish this objective successfully. For example, you must create an ad and attract the right persons for the job. You also have to conduct interviews in the best way.
Next, you must be sure that your existing budget will cover the costs for the new employees. Additionally, it’s good to evaluate the current level of productivity in your company. You might get some ideas that will help you boost productivity without hiring new employees.
In the end, you will have to set deadlines and try to stick to them. If you are using a growth strategy internally, you will not have to create a specific format for this strategy, in a case you need it to get investments, you will need to follow a specific template.