September 2022 Newsletter - The Strategy Edition

Letting Your Strategy Drive Your Tactics

Welcome to the 4th Edition of the Grow To Seven Figures & Beyond Newsletter. I will give you an update on upcoming events and my book progress at the end of the newsletter.

The focus this month is going to be on creating a more structured strategic approach to your business growth and moving away from the tactical approach that the majority of business owners fall back to, usually due to the absence of mapped out growth strategy that is being executed on a daily basis.

Last month I spent three weeks putting together a report called the 8 Secrets To Modern B2B Business Growth and Secret #3 focused on how to drive a strategy first culture in a business. In fact, Strategy drives everything in my methodology to support clients, it is the starting point and determining factor of success and starting point of the STEPS Growth Method.

The Strategy Principle

Of course the biggest challenge with creating a strategy to grow your business is that you focus too much on the "what" and not the "how". Creating your theory is fine but you need to have concrete actions steps, tasks and metrics to measure, as you start to implement your strategy.

My advice is to focus on the following key 12 elements when developing your growth strategy and take your time to map each element out in detail, this should take you around 3 months to create, so no you can not sit down on a Sunday evening and pull your strategy together and hope to be successful. On average I spend 12 weeks creating a strategy for a client and diving deep into each element with them, to guarantee success when we start executing.

The 12 Elements To A Successful Growth Strategy

As you can see the 12 elements you need to focus on are:

1. Your Strategic Goals & Objectives - Be specific about your revenue and growth goals, breaking down what you need to achieve to hit these goals is a key part of this, these will become your non-negotiable KPI metrics.
2. Your Target Market - The Who - what industry, what sector, what companies within that sector, your Ideal Customer Profile and the people who work within those companies or your Primary Buyer Personas. Define these and understand them.
3. Your Business Positioning - Your market position needs to be clear, who you help, how you help them and why you do it better than anyone else. Build out your brand messaging, mission, vision and company culture form this position.
4. The Market - Who are your competition and how are they approaching the market, your ICP's and talking to your persona's. What are their strengths and where are the areas that you can exploit, you are looking for the gaps to take advantage of, not to worry about anyone who is a competitor.
5. Your Product - The What - what you are offering to your buyers, your service, product or solution. What is your primary offer, what is your core offer, do you have any upsell, downsell or cross-sell opportunities and what free offerings do you have to pull people in.
6. Your Sales Plan - You must develop a robust sales plan first and then support it with your Marketing Plan, not the other way around. Your sales plan will focus on the revenue you are going to generate, from where you are going to generate it, how many orders you need to create, what the average order value will be, how many leads you need to generate to achieve this number of orders etc.
7. Your Marketing Plan - What campaigns are you going to run? What leads do you need to generate? How are you going to qualify these leads? What lead sources are you focusing on? What content do you need to create? How does your website need developing? How are you going to use social media? Email Marketing? etc.
8. Talent - Recruitment Plan - As you grow how does your team need to develop and grow? Map out when you need to hire and who you need to hire. The focus must be on attracting talent to your business not just relying on a recruitment process to fill a position.
9. Operational Delivery - Map out what your delivery processes and procedures are and how you are going to ensure you delight your customers with your product, service or solution. The key is a consistent experience that is repeatable each and every time.
10. Service & Support Plan - How are you going to nurture your relationships with your clients, send out surveys, drive client engagement, generate testimonials and reviews etc. Remarkable service and support is expected by modern buyers in today's market place.
11. Systems Development - how are you going to pull all of this together with tehcnology, tools and software that is connected, easy to use, gives you a single source of truth and allows you to measure everything and make informed data driven decisions on what is working and what is not working.
12. Metrics, Analytics and Reporting - what dashboards and reports do you need to set up and with what frequency?

If you get these 12 elements mapped out in detail and then write this down and produce a structured growth strategy that evolves year on year and drives your daily execution, I promise you will never look back. It is worth the initial investment of time and energy to get this right, and when you do, it will be a game-changer for your business growth.

Are You Subscribed To The B2B Business Growth YouTube Channel?

My focus this month has been on uploading a video a day for 30 days to the YouTube Channel and the growth in subscribers and views has been really tangible, as well as the traffic coming back through to the website.

I have focused on uploading different videos around a range of topics and then splitting them into playlists, so they are easy to consume of even "binge" watch - so if you have not subscribed yet, then I recommend you do here - Ignite Growth - B2B Business Growth Channel

Feel free to use it as a model for setting your own channel up too. I have done a lot of research into video marketing and how to use YouTube, so follow best practice in everything I do on there.

Upcoming Workshops & Events In October

After a fantastic interactive workshop in September with 12 business owners, I am looking forward to another full house this month, the next "Remarkable Seven Figure Growth Workshop" is on Thursday 6th October at 12 noon - so if you have not got your spot booked, make sure you do so as soon as possible, it is filling up quickly again. You can click below to go to Eventbrite and book your place:

The "Remarkable Business Growth" Book Update

As for my book, progress has been good again over this month, with my Final Draft being submitted to Alison Jones last week, after taking onboard all of the feedback from the six beta readers. I huge thanks Tony Smith MA Austen Hempstead Richard Warrilow David Allen Richard Bell Gary Davies for their help and support as beta readers, you were amazing. I also received the forward back from Dan Tyre and am humbled at his praise at what I have written - so a massive thank you to you Dan - Mr HubSpot

If you would like a free copy of the PDF version of my book - you can join the Pre-launch list here and I will ensure you are kept up to date and sent a copy once the PDF version is ready - Join the Pre-Launch List for "Remarkable Business Growth"

Look forward to talking to you all next month and we will focus on "Traffic" and lead generation as our core topic for the October Newsletter, so make sure you are subscribed and talk then.