What Are The Essentials For A Growing Business?

Gone are the days when securing a 9-5 job was the ideal career goal for people. The horizon today has changed in a way that people are transitioning away from jobs and towards entrepreneurship, where they can be their own boss. This trend can be backed by numbers, which cite that as many as 1,67,076 small businesses were set up in India in FY 22. These are the number of competitors that a small business owner faces while starting out in his journey. This seems like a highly daunting proposition! 

How can you make yourself stand out among this crowd of emerging companies? That is the sole question on every new entrepreneur’s mind. The answer comes in the form of a few golden rules that a growing business can adopt to race ahead and outshine its contemporaries. We aim to provide you with an understanding of what you can do to scale your business, and hence we have outlined some of the essentials for a growing business. All these factors are interlinked, and seamlessly flow into one another to enhance a business:

1.Creating a good product/ service:

The success and reputation of a business is directly tied to the quality of its product or service. Before proceeding to attain any of the other business essentials, it is of utmost importance that a growing business creates a good product/service. Along with maintaining good quality, it is also essential that the product/service is unique and different and offers higher value to consumers than any competitor’s product/service. Some of the ways in which a business can ensure this for its product are:

• Thorough research about product/service that it’s trying to venture in
• Analyse the strengths and weaknesses of competitor’s products
• Gain insights about what more the consumers would want in the product/service

The product/service is what will eventually allow the business to stand out and it will also bring small entrepreneurs at par with large enterprises.  

2.Understanding the market well:

Would a business centered around offering co-working spaces thrive more in a hardcore industrial and factory setting, or in a corporate setting? This is where having a good understanding of the market becomes crucial because it is hard for your business to succeed in a market that is not suited for it. 

Gaining this understanding is not as simple as it sounds, but it is a highly analytical process that involves a lot of data. A business must correctly ascertain its market before establishing itself there, and here are a few points that can help in this decision-making:

• Historical market trends
• Metrics of demand-supply for the type of product that you are offering
• The compatibility of the market conditions with your business
• The number and type of competitors that you will face in your chosen market

Data points such as these can be studied and analyzed to identify the market that is most suited for your requirements. Besides this, it is also essential to understand the nature of your non-competitor businesses that are established in the market and try to establish strong business affiliations with them. This will greatly benefit the business to create a stronghold for itself in the market. 

3.Understanding the target audience well:

If we revisit the dilemma of the co-working space business owner about where his business can thrive more, it becomes clear that the correct answer is influenced by the target audience who will avail his services. 

A business can only sell to consumers who need their products or services. If a business does not identify its target audience, it might end up spending precious time and resources on consumers who are not interested in their product, and those who will never make a purchase. After all, however good your marketing and pitch might be, you cannot sell ice to an Eskimo! The scope of businesses has drastically changed from what it was a few years ago, and consumers are now very vocal about their demands and preferences. Technological data, in the form of social media engagement, website browsing metrics, SEO trends etc. can accurately guide businesses towards the consumers who in need of their product/service, thus creating a mutually beneficial network for both the interested stakeholders. 

4.Nurturing consumer relations:

The biggest strength of any business is its consumer base- who dedicated to the brand and can be a reliable source of sales. But do all consumers naturally have such instincts of loyalty towards any business? That is not the case. 

Consumer relations have to be carefully nurtured and built over time. The brand must interact with them regularly, keep them engaged and interested, and convince them to repeatedly make purchases from the brand. The consumer base of any brand is comprised of people of differing age groups, social settings, product/service requirements etc. It is essential for the brand to treat each one of these as a unique consumer, and not try to utilize the same marketing strategies with everyone. 

Personalized communications that address the main pain points of your consumers will go a long way towards showing them that you truly wish to serve them well.  Data collected from surveys also shows that up to 56% of customers stay loyal to brands which “get them”.In the larger scheme of events, investing that extra time towards nurturing your consumers will yield a solid ROI, since your brand can gain a consistent and steady income source from a loyal consumer network. 

5.Efficient team collaboration:

Picture a business that has a great understanding of its market and target audience, a strong product development team, as well as dedicated resources for nurturing consumers. To ensure these teams work efficiently together, many businesses implement employee awards programs to recognize and motivate their staff. But what if all these personnel cannot work efficiently as a team despite these incentives? The result would be chaos, and unproductivity.

For a small business to thrive, it is vital for all its resources to collaborate well and function as a seamless unit. Strength lies in numbers, and only once all the heads of a small business come together to work can it truly scale and expand. 

• Systematic delegation of work
• Seamless transfer of work between employees
• Complete transparency among all employees regarding work updates
• Tracking and monitoring of the teams’ work

are some of the ways in which a business can have its employees and teams efficiently collaborate with one another and scale their productivity. 

The Challenge for Businesses

These essentials are straightforward to understand, and easy to envision, but their accurate implementation is where it gets tricky. From an overview, it is evident that most of these essentials are focused on acquiring and analyzing data. A small business can easily manage this for a handful of clients, and when their operations and team are on a small scale. A small business can then be caught in a very tough spot. Its aim is to ultimately expand and grow. But when this expansion happens, it will be difficult for it to stay on track of achieving the milestones essential for its growth. How can small businesses find a way to overcome these conflicting situations? The answer is CRM!

CRM- the Ideal Companion for a Growing Business:

Customer Relationship Management is an easy, impactful and systematic manner in which businesses can keep track of their operations. As the name suggests, it helps businesses manage customer relations and ensure that they create a smooth purchasing journey from them. CRMs have transformed the age-old notions associated with business operations, as a result of which 79% businesses have presently adopted CRM. 

But the real extent of work done by CRM is not simple enough to be contained within the description that it manages customer relations only. It is an all-in-one tool that performs every aspect of work required by businesses, as well as their teams. Here’s how CRM software takes care of the essentials for a business:

• It collates and stores information pertaining to leads, consumers etc. in a centralized database
• It analyzes this information, and gives usable insights for businesses
• It helps in timely interactions, by automating communications 
• It helps business to create personalized content for their customers by analyzing their preferences 
• It enables quick and easy delegation between team members, creating a smooth flow of work
• It allows business owners and managers to track the performance of their team

CRM is hence that requirement of a growing business which allows it to ensure that all the other essentials are being catered to. Without CRM, the true potential of a business or its team will never be reached. It is the ultimate essential, which makes sales CRM the best thing for small business growth!