How Do You Achieve Business Growth?

When Fred started making his retirement plans, he started thinking about his life and the business he owned. He thought about where he was in life and if it was near the goals he set as a younger man. Fred realized that although he had grown the business from when he first acquired it, he wanted to grow his business even more in the next five years, before he retired.

Fred and I began to look at why he wanted to grow the business, what was his compelling reason. This gave me insights into his values, what was important to him. This would help determine how quickly he wanted to grow the business as well as how it would change his business and his life.

We reviewed the structure of the business and if he was working on the business or in the business. Fred was working in the business more often than not so the way we structured the growth through our marketing efforts would be different than if he had been working on the business. He considered whether he would sell as part of his retirement plan or would he continue in the business, setting up the structure to support his ability to be absent or work less when he wanted.

To meet his goals for this, we designed a marketing campaign to target specific groups of companies. This included multiple 'touches' throughout the campaign ('touches' are the number of times a potential client hears from you in a variety of ways). We discussed the system his company needed to have in place before we started sending the marketing.

We examined who in the companies would be receiving the item, their age and family circumstances, how long they'd been working at the company; what amount of time before they retired, what was important to them, what timeframes would be expected for delivery of the product, what the potential client's approval process would typically be and key words to use to show that we understood them. We tried to determine the triggers that would make the potential customer respond to the offer. These are important steps to go through before developing a marketing piece, since it can save the business owner money by knowing exactly who the ideal customer is. Armed with the knowledge, we created an entire process that included follow up and follow through.

The results were 18 new clients requesting a product that costs between $5,000 & $40,000. The business owner was extremely happy and commented that his retirement may be in 2 years rather than 5. He also made plans to implement more successful campaigns.