Consolidation of a Growth Strategy Into a Marketing Action Plan

by Marcelo Salup

A good program should be customized for the recipient. Better mousetrap Part 5

 

Part one Small Business Building the Better Marketing Mousetrap, part two Creating Real Strategies for Small and Medium Sized Businesses,part three Looking for clients in all the right places? Part four Seven Actions You Can Take with Your Customers we saw

The next step is to consolidate our growth strategy and these marketing actions into an actual plan.

As a reminder, this is the current situation with the business:

Revenues are evenly divided between medium-sized businesses, small businesses and rich clients, but the nine medium sized businesses are a huge influence.

Also as a reminder, this is where growth is expected to come for next year:

So, to achieve the $600,000 in growth, you want to add, one medium-sized business, three small businesses and 35 rich clients.

Paths to Growth

There are two different paths to growth and you need to consider both:

  1. Organic Business that grows naturally. This could be through increased business from current clients or from referrals
  2. New -This is strictly business that is unrelated to your existing business

To succeed, both, organic and new are required.

The easy way.

The easiest growth will come from existing clients, of course, for two simple reasons: They know you already and they like you (else, they would have left).

In order to leverage your existing database, you need to understand, in a more granular basis, what your customers are like. So the next step is to form a table like this one, with more detail:

Expanded Target Analysis

For the sake of brevity, let’s skip obvious concerns such as any shaky client, or the length of time that clients have been with your company or any other individual factor. But, in real life you would do this, of course.

Moving forward, however, you need to understand how your business flows.

For example, do the small and medium-sized businesses bring in the rich clients or do the rich clients bring in the SMBE’s? Given that you have 100 rich clients but 39 businesses, it might be that your rich clients are bringing you the businesses. In any case, for argument’s sake.

Riich clients in general bring you the businesses because they know other rich people (yes, we are over-simplifying) so they become the focal point of your strategy for two reasons:

  1. Their network – which brings you business
  2. Your need to get 35 more for next year

In focusing for next year, you see the need to do two things:

  1. Keep the clients you now have: Retention
  2. Attract a sizeable amount of new clients: Referral

Getting your priorities right:

In an ideal world, you would chart all seven courses of action against all of your clients. In the real world, they would probably leave if you started hitting them with marketing effort after marketing effort. Establish priorities.

The best way to keep everything straight is to build a calendar where you can lay out what steps you are going to take and when.

For example:

This is just an example, but possibilies are:

  • Create several retention actions against the Medium Sized businesses (you really do not want them to leave) during the first two months, then begin a referral campaign against the middle ones and a cross sell and upsell effort against the smaller ones.
  • Create several cross and upsell efforts for the smaller businesses to grow them in size while creating retention efforts for the largest of the small businesses.
  • Create referral campaigns for your rich clients (always with an element of retention) as we surmise that they are responsible for bringing in new small and medium-sized businesses.
  • Treat the smaller clients to cross and upsell efforts to get them to trade up and become more profitable.
  • And much more

A good program should be customized to some extent to the recipient. So, for example, if three out of your nine medium-sized companies are lawyers, another three are contractors and the rest are varied, perhaps you should consider three slightly different actions. One geared to lawyers, one to contractors and one general.

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