How To Accelerate Business Growth – 7 Ways Explained by the Experts

Barrier 1 – Brand Differentiation in Business

Brand differentiation is one of the most powerful drivers of business growth. Without it, businesses struggle to stand out, compete on value and build long-term customer loyalty.

Differentiation is ultimately about standing out from your competition. Owning your category so completely that your brand becomes synonymous with it (think Sellotape, Hoover or Velcro) is the peak of differentiation, and it isn’t easy to achieve. Strive towards it, though, and you’ll keep your business alive and growing. Ignore it, and your business will become steadily less competitive.

That final point is the real indicator of a differentiation problem. Think about supermarkets’ own-brand value products: deliberately neutral, understated and unflashy. They are designed to compete on price alone, pitched at shoppers who don’t have much to spend. If your offering doesn’t stand out from the competition, you’re Tesco Value, and they’re Heinz.

Breaking through a lack of differentiation

Start by separating your brand’s givens from its differentiators. Givens are vital: a quality product, knowledgeable people and sound customer service. Without them, you won’t be doing business at all. Nor will your competitors, and that’s the point. Every remotely successful business has these qualities. They aren’t things you can boast about; they’re signs you’re meeting basic expectations.

Differentiators are the specific factors that are unique to your business and highly valued by your current customers.

Consider how Dove reinvented itself with the Campaign for Real Beauty, built on making women feel good about themselves. In a market flooded with carbon-copy models and bland messaging, Dove stood out by clearly stating who and what it valued, and its sales rose 700% by the following year.

Finding your brand differentiators

Imagine you’re sitting at a table with all your competitors, and there’s a customer on the other side. Each company can say one sentence to convince the customer to do business with them. What would you say?

That meeting takes place inside your customers’ minds every time they choose what to buy.

Finding your answer often means boiling a complex offering down to a single value proposition. These five questions will help:

1. How do you solve your customers’ problems?
2. Why would they come to you?
3. Why would they not come to you?
4. Why not a competitor?
5. What are your competitors offering?

They might seem like simple questions, but they can be painful. If you can’t articulate what your business does in one sentence, it’s worth bringing in a third party who can help. An outside perspective is invaluable when you’re so tied up in day-to-day operations that you can’t explain why you do what you do. Our value proposition check is also a good starting point.

Learn more in Brand differentiation: how it can make or break a business.

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Barrier 2 – Pricing

Pricing may seem like the simplest thing in the world: cover your costs, add the profit you’d like to see and adjust to what the market will bear. In practice, it’s one of the biggest challenges a company can face.

Uber, for example, is a powerfully differentiated brand that doubled its sales in 2017 yet lost $4.5 billion in the same year. It has since turned profitable, but for many years the business grew while the profit didn’t. Most businesses can’t afford to put off profitability year after year.

Whether you’re raising prices to make the most of loyal customers or slashing them to attract new ones, the problem is the same. You’re admitting that your unique selling point (USP) isn’t enough on its own, focusing your sales team on quick and slender profits, and leaving yourself with nowhere to go but further discounts.

Breaking through pricing barriers

Demand isn’t driven by price, or even by necessity. It’s driven by the perception, and the paradox, of value.

In any sensible world, water is worth more than diamonds. One is a basic necessity for life; the other is a shiny stone that’s hard to get hold of. Yet the diamond’s scarcity and perceived value command a spectacular price.

Set your pricing strategy around how buyers perceive value. Gather as much information as you can about your customers, establish what they consider valuable, factor that into the price, and draw attention to the quality they value.

People like a good deal. They don’t necessarily want things to be cheap, but a bargain is attractive. That’s why promotional pricing works: customers who had no intention of buying chocolate will buy two bars for £1 because it feels like better value.

Do your customers value free delivery? Probably. Multiple studies show free shipping boosts conversions and outperforms percentage discounts. Work out what shipping costs you, build it into the price, and make a big noise about the free delivery. You’ll protect your margins and strengthen your reputation for service.

Luxury brands, meanwhile, sell an experience: a free coffee while you buy Nespresso pods, or a test drive of the Lexus you’re considering. Value brands lean on warranties or promotional pricing. DFS always seems to have a sale on because its reference prices are set high enough that everything can be presented as discounted.

Establishing your price: key questions

Pricing is more science than art. Start with the quantitative factors: what it costs to make your product and the margin you need to make a profit. Then consider the qualitative influences:

• How much value does your company provide?
• How much value do your customers think it provides?
• If there’s a big gap between the two, how can you close it?
• What different pricing mechanisms are available to you?
• Are you using the same margin for every product?
• Have you taken all your costs into account?
• Do you charge one-off fees or subscriptions?
• Can you add value by bundling products or services?

Pricing is one thing, but there’s also the question of exactly what you’re bringing to market. To understand your product’s value, you need to understand what it does for customers, and where it needs developing to stay worth buying.

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Barrier 3 – Product Development

A lack of product development is easily mistaken for a lack of innovation, a buzzword usually associated with category-defining tech firms and disruptive startups. The confusion is understandable: a lack of new products can signal a business resting on its laurels, not thinking about the future or even particularly hard about the present.

Some businesses stagnate because there’s nothing about their product left to change. A hammer is a hammer, and there’s only so much to say about galvanised heads and carbon-fibre handles before your marketing starts to sound ridiculous. But product (or service) development goes beyond what the product is, into how it’s made, sold and serviced.

The first scenario happens when a business has innovated too much, bloating its catalogue and saturating the market. A loss of vision and clarity leads to a presence in every niche and a profit in none of them.

Spend on production, delivery and marketing is spread thinly instead of focused on growing profitable products, and customers may struggle to choose at all. Conversion rates can fall sharply when customers feel uncertain, confused and prone to buyer’s remorse, which they will if there are too many alternatives in front of them.

The second scenario is the result of not innovating enough: neglecting what customers want, what else is on the market and why buyers might be tempted elsewhere. Slow-moving businesses eventually reach a saturation point where everyone who wants the product already has it. They tick along selling spares and replacements, and become vulnerable to disruption.

Breaking through product development barriers

Product development is a medium-risk strategy: the goal is to sell something new to an existing customer base, drawing on the brand equity you’ve already built. The only unknown is the product itself, and the closer it is to your existing offering, the lower the risk.

How far to innovate is a matter of mindset. Forcing obsolescence to sell a new product works for a handful of sector-dominating giants such as Apple, but it’s a risky play for small and medium-sized businesses with modest R&D budgets. Pitching to a secondary market segment can often be achieved with relatively small changes. For example, redesigning your supply chain around sustainable materials and local labour might attract ethically minded buyers. The innovation is in how you make and market the product rather than the product itself. You don’t always need to reinvent the wheel.

Product development is customer-oriented. Provide something your customers want, and if you don’t know what they want, ask them.

Let’s assume you’re making something exciting, attractive and functional, pricing it appropriately, and your brand is well recognised. There’s nothing wrong with what you’re selling, but the growth still isn’t there. What else could be going wrong? Chances are it’s something internal, more abstract and harder to diagnose: how you’re selling.

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Barrier 4 – Culture

92% of CEOs and CFOs believe improving company culture improves their organisation’s value, and 86% of job seekers say culture is a “somewhat or very important” factor for them. Yet company culture is notoriously hard to improve, measure or even pin down.

Company culture is a subtler, more insidious barrier to growth. It sounds airy and abstract, far removed from the products, sales and metrics that make up the business of business, and it’s often associated with expensive perks like free meals and massages.

However, a negative or static culture affects every aspect of daily operations. Employees feel they’re going nowhere, or backwards, and that their time is wasted. If your people don’t value their time, they don’t use it productively, and both your top and bottom lines begin to flatten.

With 80% of workers saying their workplace culture feels toxic, a genuinely positive culture can be a powerful differentiator for your brand.

Symptoms of poor workplace culture

A company culture will develop whether leadership curates it or not. People work together, share opinions and come to understand their roles in the business.

If leaders’ original drive and ambition have been lost or diluted, or leaders have become isolated from the workforce, the culture that develops lacks direction. People focus on getting through the day, taking the path of least resistance, hitting their targets and making sure there’s a job to come back to tomorrow. The business struggles to attract and retain talent, because the best people realise something isn’t right, either before they join or soon after. The brand suffers too, because nobody knows why they’re doing what they’re doing.

How to break through company culture issues

Apple, Google and Netflix don’t hire people who are 40% more productive than average; they enable people to be 40% more productive. Workspaces with room and natural light, well-stocked kitchens, time to work on their own projects: all of these help people feel happy and comfortable, and unhappy, uncomfortable people don’t work as hard.

But culture isn’t only about providing for people. It’s about leading them too. Because culture forms as people interact, leaders need to be among them, talking the talk and walking the walk, showing and telling employees how the company does things.

Key questions to uncover your company culture

If you’ve left your culture to develop by itself, you may not know what you’re dealing with. The only way to find out is to ask your people:

1. What five qualities should a new employee have to fit in with our culture?
2. What makes you proud to work here?
3. What process could be fixed or improved?
4. What do you need help with, day to day and month to month?
5. What’s causing you frustration or delays in your work?
6. Looking back on this week, what would you like to see improved?
7. How do we support your professional development and growth?
8. What’s the one thing you would change if you could?

Once you understand what your people think of their workplace, and how they’d change it, you can start working with those perceptions. Don’t try to please everyone; share your vision, bring people with you, and address the common complaints. Keep communicating throughout. Smaller social activities give you a chance to sound people out informally, and they’re good for morale too.

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Barrier 5 – Changes to the Market

Remember record stores? An HMV or a Virgin Megastore on every high street?

The marketplace is volatile. Fierce competition, technological innovation and cultural shifts in consumer habits can all change the way buyers buy.

Sometimes the market changes in a way that businesses simply can’t survive; think of the near-collapse of independent bookshops after Amazon arrived. Other times the change is gradual: a creeping shift that can easily be mistaken for another barrier to growth.

A declining market affects your business as a whole. Bringing out new products feels pointless because the demand doesn’t seem to be there. Regular customers stop buying even though you’ve changed nothing about how you sell or communicate, and that’s the real tell that the market is the barrier. If you’ve quietly innovated and even your longest-standing buyers aren’t interested, something outside your operation has changed.

How to weather a declining market

The market as a whole may feel beyond your influence, but decisive action can limit the damage as you take control of what you can. Carrying on as you always have will only ensure decline.

Work hard to retain the customers you have. Add a personal touch to customer interactions, improve response times, and ask for feedback, reviews and shareable social posts. Show that you respond when you’re spoken to.

Be strict about marketing ROI. Every penny has to be well spent, so establish what’s delivering results and cut what isn’t.

Four approaches to surviving a declining market

1. Innovation: Diversify your approach. Look at what’s still selling in your market, and why and how, then review your offering and see what you can change.
2. Maintenance: Adjust your business model to the new landscape. Re-evaluate your forecast, align it with reality and appraise your operations. Can you switch suppliers to reduce costs, or cut channels to reinvest elsewhere? Do your systems need updating so your people can use their time more productively?
3. Lead the market: Actively target your competitors’ customers, competing on price, rewards, or better service and branding. Win back share with bold, targeted campaigns, and make sure your whole business communicates your USPs. Look for acquisition opportunities too: purchases made in a declining market will pay off if you turn the trend around.
4. Positioning: Establish where your healthiest demand is coming from and realign the business around it. This may call for significant restructuring, for example winding down a high street presence in favour of online ordering and event sponsorship. Let your existing figures and proven successes give you confidence. The solution here is mainly internal, so don’t worry about the competition.

If your market is healthy and you’re still struggling to sell, the problem may be operational. It’s one thing to know a market exists, and quite another to approach it properly. In the end it comes down to one question: how well do you really know your customers?

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Barrier 6 – Customer Insight

Take a good look at your advertising, brochures and website. What are they talking about? Are they addressing your customers and explaining how you can help them, or are they just talking about you?

Businesses thrive by solving customers’ problems. That means knowing your customers’ pain points and knowing who your most valuable customers are. A stalled business often has little idea who it’s selling to or why they buy, so it talks itself up and hopes for the best.

Symptoms of poor customer insight

Without customer insight, innovation and marketing lack direction and purpose. Understanding how customers feel, what they need and the challenges they face is vital if you want to sell to them.

Try this: describe your three most valuable types of customer. What are they trying to achieve? What problem brings them to you? Why do they choose you over an alternative?

If you’re struggling, either you don’t have enough customer insight, or you’re not using the insight you have in the day-to-day running of the business. Both are equally damaging.

It’s not enough to know a customer’s gender, salary, job title and buying habits. You need to know what they’re trying to achieve and how many other customers are like them.

Without that insight, your business will gradually disconnect from its customers. Your offering will stop meeting their needs, they’ll lose confidence, and they’ll turn to competitors who understand them better.

How to build a deeper understanding of your customers

Start by challenging how well you really know your customers. Needs, priorities and buying behaviour change, and insight gathered several years ago may no longer reflect what drives decisions today.

Then establish what customer data and insight you already hold. Who are you selling to? What do your most valuable customers have in common? What problems are they trying to solve, and why do they choose you?

This is an area where AI can be particularly useful. Valuable customer insight is often scattered across CRM records, sales conversations, survey responses, reviews and support queries. AI can analyse that information at scale, surfacing recurring themes, questions, pain points and shifts in sentiment that would otherwise be hard to spot.

It doesn’t replace speaking to customers or applying commercial judgement. It does help you make better use of the evidence you already have and identify where further research is needed.

Use those findings alongside direct conversations, surveys and social media responses to build, and regularly refine, your customer personas: who buys from you, what they’re trying to achieve and why they choose you.

What and why are often more revealing than how many and how much.

Focus on depth of insight. Understanding why your key customer groups buy, what they hope to achieve by working with you and what influences their decisions will help you break through this barrier for the long term.

Key questions to answer about your existing customers

Test your assumptions. Identify your most regular, highest-spending and most loyal customers, and ask:

1. Who are they?
2. What do they do?
3. What do you supply them with?
4. How do they make buying decisions?
5. How did you find them?
6. Why don’t they take their business elsewhere?

The answers define your customer personas: the people who represent your successes to date. These are the people you can keep selling to, and around them you’ll find similar prospects you can reach out to, accelerating your growth.

There is one more thing that might be holding your business back; one thing that can reduce the best insight-driven, customer-focused strategy to dithering. Fear.

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Barrier 7 – Fearful Leadership

Personal fear can hold us back in every walk of life, and nowhere more than in business. If a business leader is afraid (or worried, or lacking confidence), that state will stifle growth, reduce profits, divert strategy and potentially destroy the business altogether.

To grow, you have to take risks, and overcome the fear of failure that keeps you sticking to failing strategies and routine operations.

Symptoms of leadership anxiety

Inactivity is often a sign of anxiety at the top. If senior leaders fret over making everything perfect, tasks drag on and the business gets mired in inertia. If newsletters go out late, social posts appear once in a blue moon, and every new product idea is picked apart and sent back to the drawing board, someone at the top is afraid.

The ultimate sign of fearful leadership? Refusing to look at sales and marketing figures at all, because you don’t want to know how much was wasted. If you’re not reading detailed, metric-driven reports, or not even asking for them, part of you is afraid of what they might contain.

How to break through fear in your business

Fear is the smallest of the barriers, because it’s entirely personal. It’s also the hardest to break through, because it’s all on you: there’s no delegating it.

Inform yourself. Fear-driven leadership treats marketing strategy as a box of magic tricks that might work for reasons beyond your control. Learn the theory; understand what works and why. As the leader of the business, you shouldn’t be in the audience wondering how it’s done. You’re the magician.

Implement a strategy. Good marketing has a clear objective (reaching and communicating effectively with a target audience) and is built on facts and figures that can be understood and measured. Every business needs a strategy.

Accept that it’s never finished. A lack of instant returns doesn’t mean you’re failing. It usually indicates a slow-burning success that needs adjustment along the way. Marketing doesn’t “go wrong”; it evolves.

Focus on goals. Trends and tactics are distractions. What do you want to achieve, and how will you achieve it? Avoid vanity projects and don’t chase novelty tech out of fear of being left behind. Establish what works and stick to it.

Know your customers. Knowledge is power. If you know who you’re selling to and what makes them buy, you have the foundations of business confidence. Customer personas lighten the load: you’re not talking to hundreds of people, you’re talking to three or four (who happen to represent hundreds or thousands).

Key elements of a viable marketing plan

• Identify your target segments: why and how is your product right for them?
• Develop products and services that address their specific pain points.
• Identify your competitors and position your brand against them. What are you doing that they’re not?
• Set clear objectives, timeframes and metrics, so you can see how you’re doing in factual terms, eliminating uncertainty and banishing fear.
• Choose the channels and tools you’ll use, and be ready to reallocate spend and attention once you know what’s working.

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