What are the Fundamentals of Growing a Business?

A few years ago, Paul Azinger returned for a speech at Inverness Club, the site of his only major championship, the 1993 PGA Championship. He opened his speech sharing that he had not been back at Inverness since the day he hoisted the Wanemaker Trophy, suggesting “Y’all better settle in. This could take a while.”

He held a short-game clinic the next day and talked about the fundamentals of the golf swing. “Many think the grip is fundamental, or the bending of the wrist at the top,” but he says they are not. “It can’t be a fundamental if everyone in the Hall of Fame doesn’t do it.” He shared that there a multitude of grips in the Hall of Fame – ten finger, interlock, overlap, strong, and weak. The grip cannot be fundamental to the golf swing.

What is fundamental to business growth in the business-to-business market segment?

This clinic got me thinking about the fundamentals of business growth in the business-to-business market segment. What are those things that every organization does that successfully grows year-over-year? It’s not social media, posts, or search engine optimization… these are tactics, not fundamentals. It doesn’t mean that these things don’t have some value, but they could hardly be considered fundamental to strategic growth in the B2B market segment.

My gut tells me that the reason so many of us gravitate to these platforms is that they are relatively easy to administer and free; therefore, we fall into the “everyone is doing it” trap. Not to mention the fact that there are thousands of “experts” telling you that these are the new tools to grow your business – they are not. We are spending far too much time trying to be found. I think the effort gratifies us. “There, I got that done.” But what have we really done?

As a result, there has never been a time in our selling history when it has been easier than it is today to find specific organizations or people that we want to do business with… do you see the irony in this? How about we reach out to them, make friends with them, rather than wait for them to find us?

Fundamentals of Growing a Business in the B2B Market Segment

Strategic growth has a lot more to do with process than it does technique… it’s the design and implementation of a process that proactively and rhythmically communicates your value propositions to strategic targets while building trusting relationships that enable you to learn about buying systems and a prospect’s motivation to buy.

Strategic Architecture

With this in mind, it all starts with strategic thinking. On the surface, this is not a heavy lift for most leadership teams but be careful not to skim through this exercise. The answers to these four questions are fundamental to strategic growth.

1. What do you sell?

This is not a trick question. It is important to deepen your understanding about what you actually deliver for the revenue you earn. Be careful, there will be a chance to talk about quality workmanship, delighted customers, and fast deliveries. This is not the place for that. Tangibly, what do you sell?

Spend time listing the major categories of products or services that create revenue in your system. (e.g. stainless-steel automotive parts for drive trains, or integrated point of sale solutions for unattended applications, or maintenance agreements for hydraulic presses.) It is useful to know the data by category – percentages of revenue, real margin dollars, and percentage of margin dollars, and category growth trends, for example.

2. How do you supply what you sell?

Take time to think about your deal flow and your commercial arrangements, terms and conditions. For example, do you sell by piece, by pound, by assembly, by hour, or by project deliverable?

After all, this an area of enormous opportunity for most to consider. Is there a way to change the way we supply what we sell that will further differentiate us? Do we have an opportunity to pivot on competitors that causes us to stand out from the pack, mitigating the traps of selling on price.

3. Who buys what you sell?

Pay particular attention to your brand promise – your value-to-price position. Then, be sure to target prospects who fit your ideal customer profile (ICP). Think about the characteristics or traits of your best customers. Assuming you want more like them, describe them: market segment, size, geography, etc.

Consider your answers to the first two questions to help you identify nuances of what you offer and how those match various targets in your ICP. If you sell complex assemblies, your ICP should include targets who value that deliverable.

4. Why do they buy from you?

From the target perspective, what do they value most that they need? Of those needs, how does what you supply match up against those needs? How does what you supply of those needs match up against your competitors? What do you supply that is difficult or impossible for your competitors to supply? These are your value propositions.

These value propositions, particularly when you can prove them, supply the target with a reason to believe. It’s important to understand that a strong value proposition defines the dramatic difference you supply.

Building a shared idea of what you do and how you go to market serves as a baseline that focuses the design and execution of a highly functioning strategic growth function.

Process Orientation

I’ve worked with organizations that have great people, but their business growth processes are ill-designed, or non-existent. Not surprisingly, they struggle.

Think of your accounting processes, purchasing systems, and customer support systems; they are all highly refined. Most feature execution of best practices, that include process flows, standard forms, and specific stages, deliverables or outcomes to get into and leave each particular stage. They each have a meaningful set of metrics, or key performance indicators.

Why is it that we allow our business growth processes to be inconsistent, ill designed? The best people working in a poor business growth process will underperform every time.

Therefore, the organizations that grow consistently understand that business growth isn’t accidental or from the gladhand of a charming salesperson—it’s the result of a deliberate business growth process. One that features appropriate structures for each revenue category with disciplined execution, aligns people and processes, and allocates resources intentionally toward strategic relationship development, opportunity identification, and service.

Process design, process control, and process metrics are fundamental to business growth.

Talent Advantage

Organizations who consistently growth are focused on attracting, continuously developing and retaining the best people: those who are situationally aware, they are emotionally intelligent, curious, life-long learners and relentless about matching your solutions to a prospect’s needs.

Moreover, the best people don’t just sell; they drive customer acquisition by understanding how prospects buy, anticipating needs, and positioning solutions that deliver measurable value. It is not sufficient for a sales professional to be an expert in their products or services, only. Likewise, they must also be experts in the industries they work in, understand application nuances and help the prospect with a solution that is specifically designed to their needs; tightly fit.

Either-or is interesting and can dazzle some of the people some of the time, but to dazzle all the people all the time, your talent must command both-and; they need to be experts in your solution and experts in the applications for which they are selling.

That is to say, organizations that experience above-average business growth results have people who know the business and serve as a competitive advantage over the competition.

Knowledge Management

“The only thing that gives an organization a competitive edge, the only thing sustainable, is what it knows, how it uses what it knows, and how fast it can know something new.”

– Laurence Prusak – Knowledge Management Director IBM Institute

In other words, the best systems for growing a business feature a strong dose of knowledge management, a learning system. The key to building a competitive advantage in the market is to learn something you didn’t know before, and as rapidly as you can, apply that learning in the market to your unique advantage. Consequently, top-performing systems know how to gather, organize, analyze, and leverage (GOAL) information that helps them uniquely position (differentiate) their solutions.

Refined knowledge management systems have honed their skills at building information gathering and learning structures. Contemporary customer relationship management systems are capable of content analysis, and with artificial intelligence support can quickly give the salesperson information about tone, style, acceptance/rejection, scoring, and intention of buyers.

Not to mention, information is now cheap. Your competitive advantage of the future may be largely driven by your ability to learn faster and apply that learning to your benefit. This is rapidly becoming a fundamental of strategic growth.

Professional Persistence

Timing is everything. I’m embarrassed to share with you that I’ve failed a multitude of times. “Mark, I wish you were here three months ago. We just let a large order to your competitor. Stay in touch, maybe we can connect next year.” Double trouble – I missed an opportunity because I didn’t stay in touch and now, I’m being challenged to do the same over the next year.

I’m not sure you can grow a business successfully without a heavy dose of professional persistence. One of the fundamentals of strategic growth is eliminating the variable of timing. Bad timing is one of the biggest obstacles to strategic growth. Christmas card marketing doesn’t work.

Some touch point frequencies are tighter than others, depending on your ‘risk to buy’ structure. But if you’re not contacting high-value targets at least once per month – a phone call, a voicemail, an email, or a thank you card, you are likely not creating brand affinity, or developing a personal relationship that is required for the buyer to care about you or your company. Hence, if they don’t care about you or your company, they are not buying from you… unless you drop your price. We all know that result.

Assuming your solution is a tight fit to a prospect’s needs, the only time to quit is when they tell you to; otherwise, stay in touch, keep teaching, continue to share your successes, and be sure to remind them, specifically, the positive disruption your solution will create on their business – and prove it.

Remember what Thomas Edison said, “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

Strategic growth is a daily discipline, not an as-needed activity.

Zinger finished his golf clinic by sharing the fundamentals of the golf swing. I was surprised by how simple he made it seem – it isn’t. He said the key fundamentals that every Hall of Famer has been successful at repeating are two turns and swoosh.

“Turn, Turn, Swoosh”:

1. The First Turn (Backswing): Focuses on coiling the lower body, keeping hips level and initiating power from the ground up, like sitting on a swivel chair.
2. The Second Turn (Downswing Initiation): The hips clear quickly to the left (for a right-hander), starting the downswing with a continuous motion rather than a separate arm move.
3. The Swoosh (Impact & Release): This is the feeling of the club accelerating powerfully through the ball, as a result of the body turns, creating a sound and a free release, not a “flicking” of the wrists.

Not sure if now is a good time to start implementing these strategies? Check out our blog for more information!