2023 Next Level Business Thinking

As a founder, you're always looking for ways to take your business to the next level.

If you're feeling unsure on where to start, here are some ideas to get your creative juices flowing in 2023.

From shaking up your marketing strategy to reigniting the way you handle customer service, these tips will help you push your business forward.

So what are you waiting for?

Think Beyond Gross Revenue

When trying to increase their business value, top-line revenue focus is easy to use but it can also lead to you not completely concentrate on the important aspects of your customer experience. Businesses tend to mistake short term sales spikes for long term growth and focus too heavily on top line revenues instead of investing for sustainable profitability and customer retention.

Good business decisions come from cohesive strategies that look beyond the top line numbers and address underlying operational problems, customer experience issues, and long term growth outlooks among many other elements.

These decisions should be backed by proper market research and competitive intelligence.

Reverse Engineering Your Sales Projections

Reaching quarterly sales goals often requires carefully analyzing past performance in order to identify key trends and set realistic future projections. This process of reverse engineering your sales projections allows you to craft the most effective strategy while using data-driven decision making.

This is harder to accomplish as a start-up as the data might not be accurate enough to make predictions.

By breaking this down sales objectives into manageable quarterly goals, businesses can stay focused and adjust planning along the way to achieve their desired outcomes. Your approach should not be just on deals closed but the effort to get to that point needs to be analyzed. How many emails, cold calls, marketing campaigns were needed to get X number of leads into the funnel and what is your teams closing success rate? Each quarter look at the sales objections and understand how to adapt to your customer needs.

This approach will set the stage for measuring success and meeting quarterly goals in the future.

Innovative Thinking

For businesses looking to make significant advances in terms of growth, innovation is a key component. To gain an edge over your competition and remain viable, it is essential for founders to proactively think of new and better ways to operate their organization.

Innovation can be seen in developing new products or services, finding more efficient methods of delivery, or implementing improved strategies for customer experience. Often times innovation involves experimentation and risk-taking as entrepreneurs seek creative solutions to challenging issues in order to position themselves favourably among customer needs.

Ultimately, understanding the processes that allows your team to make informed decisions and creating feedback loops to constantly improve each quarter be what will take you to the next level.

Be On The Lookout For New Opportunities

Todays business landscape is always shifting and adapting, so it's important to stay on top of trends and market opportunities. Failing to keep up with market changes can lead to a loss of growth potential, or worse yet leave you at a disadvantage in comparison to your competitors who took the initiative.

Staying ahead can also lead to finding new opportunities that could take your business further than imagined. Staying agile will ensure you're never left behind when it comes to market changes, enabling you to quickly negotiate market opportunities when they arise.

Have someone on your team dedicated to following the market and looking for opportunities beyond the founders.

The Long Game

One of the foundations upon which long-term success for any business is built is the ability to measure long-term metrics that relate directly to your future revenue goals. Besides your organizations quarterly / short-term objectives, look at focusing on long-term growth. It's important to look at metrics such as; customer lifetime value, churn, customer engagement, reward programs, reviews, as well as long-term spend by customers over time.

All of these provide insights into what needs to be adjusted or optimized within a business in order to better align long-term objectives with current customer behaviour. Taking these steps ensures a business is setting itself up for long-term success and providing an experience that customers are likely to return for again and again.

No matter how successful your business is, there’s always room for growth. Get creative with ways to boost your bottom line and you can set yourself up for "Next Level" success in the long term.

Enter 2023 reIGNITED!