EP28: The Top 5 Growth Drivers

Every business, regardless of its size, relies on certain key factors for growth. However, identifying and mastering these factors is easier said than done.

In today’s blog post, we’ll take a look at five primary growth drivers, drawing from real-world experience and examples to shed light on “what” and “how” to achieve business expansion. Let’s get started!

1. Growing Awareness

Growing awareness is crucial for brands but often challenging to track. A common key performance indicator (KPI) for this is impressions. Another metric some companies use is social mentions. For instance, when a brand is mentioned on platforms like Twitter or Facebook, it contributes to brand awareness.

Word of mouth also plays a significant role in spreading awareness. This can be measured by the number of testimonials or referrals a brand receives, either through trackable referral programs or organically.

But because awareness can be qualitative or quantitative, measuring awareness isn’t always straightforward. Still, this doesn’t make qualitative methods any less valid.

Qualitatively, growing awareness means more people recognize a brand, understand the problem it addresses, and know the solution it offers.

In the early stages of a company, growing awareness is a priority. Yet, it typically becomes a major growth driver once a brand has scaled and achieved a significant market share. Consider companies like HubSpot and Salesforce. Both initially emphasized raising awareness, diversified their focus to other growth drivers, and later amplified their awareness efforts, even to the extent of running Super Bowl ads.

2. Growing Traffic

The next growth driver on today’s list is growing traffic. This is the growth driver many companies turn to the most, especially in their early days.

For brick-and-mortar stores, growing traffic means increasing the amount of people who walk through your doors. But in the digital age of 2023 and beyond, we’re talking about digital visitors or people who visit your website.

Growing traffic can be extremely competitive, particularly when considering strategies like SEO or paid acquisition. But regardless of how you approach growing your own traffic, this step is critical. The more people to become aware of your business and visit your site, the more chances you have to turn them into a lead or a customer, which brings us to the next growth driver.

3. Capturing More Leads

This growth driver is more complex than building awareness or driving traffic. Capturing leads requires a website experience that effectively converts visitors.

And as if managing a top-tier website wasn’t complex enough, conversion can manifest in numerous ways: signing up for trials, creating accounts, making outright purchases, subscribing to newsletters, or booking demos, among others. These lead generation activities ideally target potential customers at various stages, from awareness (top of the funnel) to consideration (middle) and decision (bottom).

The significance of capturing leads isn’t just about increasing their number. It also focuses on improving conversion rates. A higher conversion rate indicates that your website effectively turns visitors into leads, whether that’s through trials, demos, or other avenues. However, your website isn’t the only medium for lead generation. Campaigns, for instance, can also be instrumental. Their efficacy can be measured by the number of leads they generate and their overall performance.

In essence, our aim in capturing more leads involves both boosting their volume and enhancing conversion rates. To maximize our lead generation efforts, it’s crucial to evaluate our current strategies, determine their effectiveness, and identify areas for improvement from there.

4. Increasing Sales

When analyzing your business’s performance, your primary focus is usually on three elements: growing traffic, capturing leads, and boosting sales. Of these, increasing sales typically earns the most attention, and for obvious reasons. Sales are the closest link to revenue-generating behaviors.

Increasing sales is not just about customer activation, it’s also about profitability. There are multiple ways to look at this. The go-to method is to ask, how can we close more deals? But, you can also look at things like, can you speed up the sales cycle. For example, reducing a 60-day close period to just 30 days.

In addition to acceleration, you can also look at profitability. Consider opportunities like upselling, cross-selling, and more clearly communicating value so your customers are more likely to spend more money.

The overall goal in increasing sales should not just be about finalizing sales, it’s about maximizing profitability from each transaction, accelerating your conversion process, or tapping into additional revenue models.

5. Increasing Business Capacity

Finally, the last growth driver, increasing business capacity often remains an under-discussed topic because many founders don’t recognize business capacity as something that can impact growth. However, in our experience, augmenting business capacity can play a pivotal role in your growth. Reflecting on our journey with a client over the past two years highlights this.

While there’s always a case to be made for growing traffic or capturing leads, for this client, the real challenge was maximizing capacity. It was clear that the CEO was spread too thin. What the company desperately needed was to delegate tasks and create new roles. Realizing this, we advised them to onboard an operations specialist, amongst others.

An operations specialist could help streamline processes, allocate resources efficiently, and remove the larger projects from the CEO’s plate. When the company incorporated this change, the results were transformative. The CEO’s productivity practically tripled, with each department benefiting from specialized hires.

This experience underscores a valuable lesson: growth often depends on the collective skills, bandwidth, and alignment of your team. The CEO had unintentionally restricted growth by attempting to manage everything. Many leaders struggle with this. While it’s tempting, and maybe even more comfortable, to retain control, recognizing when to delegate and harness the strengths of specialists is crucial for a company’s expansion.
Wrapping Up
There you have it, the top 5 growth drivers! Each driver plays a unique role in creating a sustainable and positive growth trajectory. By giving each driver attention, you can generate growth for your business.

Ready to start your growth journey today? Book a free 45-minute growth audit with me now. In this audit, we’ll look at your current offerings and where your top growth opportunities are. I’ll see you there!