Seven Fundamentals for Sustainable Business Success in 2018

Attaining sustainable business growth is one of the biggest challenges business owners face. To have a successful business turnover, you need to create long term value without exhausting the finite resources you have.

Although technology continues to evolve and circumstances for businesses now are different, the fundamentals for sustainable business success remain the same. Here are seven of them.

1: Authentic Purpose

Every business starts with a purpose of, “why we do what we do”. This purpose acts like a North Star for the company and guides every business decision, such as recruitment, customer management, product development and sales.

With a strong business purpose, you drive your company’s growth and profits. To achieve sustainable success, businesses should regularly re-examine their idea of purpose and ensure that they are serving towards it.

With an authentic and inspiring purpose, your company has

·       A constant and consistent sense of focus

·       A strong emotional engagement - within the company as well as with the customers and the partners

·       A continuous and pragmatic innovation

If you carefully observe, most sales and marketing experts usually talk about Unique Selling Points (USP). In simpler terms, the factor or considerate representation by a seller as the reason why your products and services are different and better than that of your competitors.

Having an authentic purpose gives your company a rise in its USP. When your company has a clear perspective of what it wants to do, it becomes easy to create products and services to achieve that vision. For example, Charles Revson, the founder of Revlon always said, “He sold hope and not makeup!”

2: A Powerful Brand

If you hope to create a business that is scalable, you will need to understand how essential it is to build brand equity and connect with your customer base.

It is due to this attachment that your customers will be drawn back to your company, its products and services. Building brand identity is about building and sustaining these relationships over time.

Here we give you some necessary rules that will help you connect, shape, influence and lead with your product and brand:

·       Decide your intended target audience. The most obvious way a business can fail is by trying to provide everything to its targeted audience.

·       Connect with your target audience. Ensure that you make your customers feel connected with the products and services you provide them. This will ensure that they keep returning to your brand and increase their trust in your company.

·       Inspire your target audience. Sending a simple inspirational message across to your customers is far better than highlighting too many product features, functions and ideas.

With a proper marketing plan, businesses can build their brand identity. If you do not have enough finances for a marketing budget, you can start posting your content on social media and create awareness amongst your target audience that awy. Social media marketing is becoming increasingly popular as more and more people use social media more often than any other medium.

3: Partnership and Collaboration

During the initial phase of your business management, handling every aspect of your business yourself is very tempting. Although there’s nothing wrong in employing a hands-on approach, taking on more things than you can actually handle (especially when you do not have the required experience in that area), can damage your business.

In today’s era of global freelance economy, it is very simple to find talented individuals. But you need to know where you can find them. Also, a business does not solely function on talent. It also requires sufficient funds to function and continue its growth.

Securing business funds can be a complicated process. However, SMEs can now easily secure funds with the help of alternative finance firms. These finance firms not only provide funds to SMEs and start-ups but they also provide the funds at a comparatively lower rate than that of the banks.

For any successful business venture, business owners should know what exactly they want to achieve and put essential resources towards accomplishing it.

4: Customer Retention

When a company plans to acquire new customers, it is bound to cost five times more than retaining the ones they already have. As a matter of fact, 2 per cent of increase in customer retention has almost similar effects as decreasing a company’s cost by 10 per cent.

To frame it in another way, when a company decreases its customer defection rates by only 5 per cent, its profits rise by 13 per cent to 25 per cent (depending on the market your company is functioning within).

A successful customer retention process starts when the company initially contacts the customer and continues to do so throughout the lifetime of the relationship.

5: Community

In a business ecosystem, countless numbers of organisations and individuals interact with each other in numerous ways. It is due to this ecosystem that companies evolve their capabilities competitively.

Ecosystems are essential for growing your business as they provide the needed structure that supports the businesses within them. In other words, they extend stakeholder-ship out from the business and into the society.

6: Repeatable Sales

In today’s business world, it is not enough to create a unique product and a brand. Such repeatable sales processes make a business scalable. There is a difference between signing a few new customers and designing and implementing sales processes that could be deployed successfully again and again at an even greater scale.

You will know that you have developed a scalable sales model when:

·       You hire new employees at the similar productivity level as that of your entrepreneurs or the sales leader

·       You can effectively increase the sources of your customer leads on a consistent basis

·       You have a sales conversion rate and return that can be consistently increased

·       Your cost of gaining new customers is less compared to the revenue you generate from your customers over time

·       Your customers get the correct product at the correct place and the correct time

Because of repeatable sales models, businesses get a platform to scale. However, a lot of experimentation and intense research must be carried out before a company achieves a sustainable sales model.

7: Flexible, Adaptive Leadership

Entrepreneurs need to become leaders at every stage of their business’s growth for a company to experience sustained growth. As every company needs to change at each of its growing stage, their leaders also need to keep evolving at the right time and right place.

For this purpose, leaders need to have introspection, self-awareness and a keen sense of strategy, both short term as well as long term. Mindfulness is important to develop a flexible and adaptive leadership style.

Leaders need to understand that their individual, interpersonal and working lives are all interconnected. Hence, by being mindful, they understand these relationships and know how they can utilise them to create, innovate and lead.