Perception and position will unlock your growth. Or maybe this book will.

The secret sauce to your growth

I’m going to let you in on a bit of a secret; there isn’t a single secret sauce to sprinkle on your business to crack your growth strategy. Feel free to stop reading here if you want to.

There are, however, many ingredients that are forgotten when they are taking? business, brand or product to market. They’re common gaps and easily closed to create a more robust market offer and guide your thinking around your growth strategy.

The Foundation

You’ve built a successful business, and your brand is growing. Many businesses suffer growing pains at this stage and often the answer is just a list of services, outputs or deliverables.?

So what is missing from this answer? It’s the thing that takes a business to the next level and unlocks growth.?

It’s the actual value from their proposition.

Good businesses sell products and services. Great businesses solve problems. More specifically, you solve problems that your customers have. Making yourself more valuable than the sum of its parts.?

The customer problem is our foundation.?

A training company does more than provide market-leading training solutions. They create winning teams, future leaders, and working environments that allow people to thrive. The value is so much more than the product.

A design agency delivers more than the look and feel. It creates an experience and a custom retouch point that counts.?

As we grow and find ourselves with more customers, we often forget to take the time to reflect and think strategically about what got us to this point and what is going to move us to our next stage of growth.

Without this foundation, you’re missing the lync pin to success. Your sales and marketing strategy risks being hollow. Your user acquisition strategy has no meaning. You’re competing with the competition in the sales environment rather than making them look, sound and feel redundant to the prospect.?

What goes into making your foundation stand out?

Understanding what you sell

What you think you might sell, might not necessarily be the value you create for your customers.?

There could be a lack of understanding of your main business values between your employees, even your main stakeholders, that’s causing a misalignment when it comes to your customers. But, this is easily fixed. The first thing to do is to work together and find the common ground between what everyone thinks are the main value points of your business. This allows you to build a foundation so you can start continuing to build value on top of these and focus on aligning yourselves to improve your value to customers.?

Know who you are, but importantly who you’re not

Within your business it’s important to make sure you know exactly who you are. This sounds like an obvious thing, but you really have to look under the bonnet and use different dimensions to fully understand yourselves. This includes looking at the business models you use, the culture you’ve created within your business, the experience you want to deliver to your customers and your market positioning, as well as many others.?

The bit behind that however, is focusing on working out what you stand for and are good at, as well as working on what your aspirations are for your business in the future. However, it’s questionably more important to work out who you’re not and what you don’t want to be perceived as by your customers first so you can steer your business in the right direction.?

Market Challenges

When I say market challenges, I am not talking about your own. Yes, thinking about the challenges we face in our industries is important, but it is almost part of our daily lives. Where businesses often lose focus is on the challenges of their clients. How much are you thinking about what keeps your clients awake at night??

If you don’t think about what your clients need, how well can you know your audience? On top of thinking about your clients, you absolutely should take the time to talk to them. Again this sounds simple. I am not suggesting you have forgotten the basics of client relations and building strong partnerships, but what is missing from most businesses is understanding the broader challenges their clients face. What is happening beyond the UX design problem?

You should wire the concept of thinking and talk about the entirety of a client’s business into the way you position yourself.

Themes emerge

You will start to see from thinking and talking to your clients that they all have many problems. Too many problems. The danger here, and one I know many younger companies fall into, is trying to be all things to all people.

Rather than try to solve every problem you can, bracket these problems into themes. Focus yourselves on the areas that form the basis of your value proposition.

Finding your whitespace

In order to find your whitespace within the market, you really have to analyse your competition in the right way. This means looking into the value that your competitors are creating (or potentially not creating, as most businesses don’t put enough focus on talking about the value they’re creating for their customers).?

Undertaking the right analysis allows you to plot yourselves against the competition on the various different axes that are important to your customers and to you, which helps show you your whitespace within the market. Finding your whitespace is essential to differentiate yourself against the competition and grow within your space to reach the right customers.

Show the Value?

Now you’ve analysed all the individual components of your business and created a more aligned purpose, you can bring it all together.?

This means you can start to craft a more thought-through meaning within your business through mapping out the purpose, the position, which are the features you offer, and the proposition. This underpins your entire business and brings together everything so you can begin to weave in a more value-oriented message because you now entirely understand the value you add for your customers.?

Develop your sales ladder

Every business has its core product or services, but most companies forget about gateway products. These are smaller value products, not necessarily strategic, for example, a site audit or a basic training package. Given their transactional nature, they are naturally cheaper and sit below a procurement threshold. Your gateway products should be built across the themes of your client problems and designed to add value and guide a strategic decision.

Create your go-to-market around your value?

Now that you’ve worked out the value you create and the problems you’re solving, we can confidently take it to market.?

Going through the various steps allows you to actually be able to comprehensively understand and talk about the value that you create and the problems you solve for your customers. By doing this, you can start linking to the sales ladder and the various different levels of products you sell within conversations with prospects, so you can start to solve even just small parts of their business’ problem. This helps to build relationships and create bonds with clients that you can then use to develop in the future to help build revenue and give you more control over your situation.??

So what now? Just start.?

These are some practical recommendations on what we would naturally do to help a business put the foundations in place to drive them forward. We’ve just done it ourselves, we’ve done it for global brands all the way down to SMEs, consultancies and creative agencies, but what we’ve recently done is distilled out thinking in a really easy to read and understand book.?

It’s not a textbook, not just a bunch of anecdotes but a really practical set of playbooks that help you achieve growth yourself. It's written in a straight-talking way without any BS or nonsense and dotted with anecdotes and stories from first-hand experiences from my journey.?

It's designed to be a practical guide to take any or all applicable parts to help validate or guide you through your own business and product offering proposition. How to bring that to your chosen audience and build a sustainable pipeline that turns into revenue. As well as accelerators to help speed things up along the way.?

At the end of the day, no business book is going to change your life, but it should supplement gaps in your expertise, validate what you already know and enjoy the story behind it, which shows business growth is far from a straightforward path and how to take the good from the challenges along the way.

If you fancy nabbing a copy ahead of the herd, you can pre-order it here.

Did i mention, please buy my book? :)