has your company revenue stalled?

A lot of small company’s start out with a great burst of activity once they get a bit of traction but within a period of time (say 18-24 months) find that they are losing momentum in their revenue growth. There are a few things, within management’s control, that if done early could prevent your revenue from stalling and all involve a laser focus on users of your products and services.

What are some red flags that revenue could potentially stall?

• You can’t articulate your true core market and customer attributes (you are currently just being everything to everyone)
• You don’t truly understand your current (or potential) competitors and how they play in your space
• You don’t understand how your customers value your products or services as a part of their work flow nor can you translate customer requests into new products and services
• Your core customers are not willing to pay for your brand reputation or superior performance or you sense that customer demand patterns are changing significantly.

So what can you do today?

Step 1: Know your customer (current and potential): don’t include the entire universe of potential customers just those you could realistically serve given the capabilities and products on hand. Try breaking them down into new segments. Typically companies break down customers by sales channel, vertical or geography instead of by which people (in particular end users) use the products and services. You never know, you may uncover opportunities in fast growing areas, where you have strong capabilities and where your competitors are fragmented.

Step 2: Know your competitors: yes, this is critical no matter what the size of the company. Even if you have to hire a co-op student to do it, get it done! Update it frequently! And watch closely for upstart competitors and successful rivals that are viewed as less capable. When you are pitching sales ask who else is bidding? Then try to figure out why they are in the opportunity. It’s not always just the established competitor who is taking your market share sometimes it is a low cost solution that offers a “good enough” alternative.

Step 3: Know how your customers USE the product: map out a ‘day in the life’ of the user of your product. Delve deeper into the daily activities of your segments. What are their pain points? What do they do on either side of using your solution (e.g. re-input into excel)? Should that be integrated into the product (e.g export to excel functionality)? Are there different types of users of the same functionality? For example, basic needs (executive), advanced functionality (staff) or high end super-users (administrators). Should you offer three versions then?

Step 4: now that you know your customers needs and what your competitors offer, you can add new features that address those that you don’t already - create products that fill the gaps. However, product development needs to prioritize on what people are willing to pay for - which is not always what they say they want (e.g. what pain points in the customer work flow are they willing to pay to ease?). Also, tailor your messaging even further to connect with your customer base through solution selling and consumer marketing techniques.

Step 5: ongoing customer feedback loops are crucial. Period. Sales, services and support are critical to providing the company feedback to see if there are any gaps between your theory about what customers want and reality. Integrating the customer feedback into the company culture is a must: the first three steps gather information to tailor sales and marketing, product development, services and support and should be revisited regularly.

So, don’t just sell products - sell tailored solutions of products and services as a part of a flexible, constantly evolving go-to-market strategy that responds to your customers. You should see your revenue growth follow accordingly.