How do you get your business to where you want it to be? Once you’ve set some objectives and goals that you want to achieve – the number of new clients, the increase in your turnover or the launch of new products, for example – how do you make sure that you achieve them? You need a strategy! That can be a big scary word that puts many people off going any further, so in this blog I’m going to share with you a simple way of working out the best way forward.

Last month I worked with two new clients, to help them plan the way forwards with their business. We started off setting some objectives and then used this clever tool to work out the best strategy for each objective. The process made it really clear as to the best way to proceed, showing what specific marketing was needed for each objective and in which order we should pursue them.

There are four possible ways you can grow your business:

1. Sell more of your existing products and services to your existing clients. This is the simplest strategy to follow and yet is one that many people forget. Your current clients already buy from you, so why not offer them more of what you do? One of my new clients provides training courses to a University, for a set number of people. She’s going to run more of the same courses, opening them up to more students.
2. Sell new products and services to your existing clients. These people already love working with you and love what you do for them, so why not ask them what else they need? If they’ve completed your standard training course, create new ones that add to what they’ve learnt; look for products that you can provide them with, to complement the training – like the CDs and training manuals that one of my clients produces.
3. Sell your existing products and services to new clients. Once you’ve developed a solid range of products and services, you can ask your happy clients to recommend them to other people. One of my new clients will be approaching different universities to see if they need the same courses as her existing client university.
4. Sell new products and services to new clients. This can be the hardest strategy to follow – and the most costly and risky – so don’t rush into it without first working through the other strategies. If you’re developing new products, try them out on your existing clients first, to see how well they are accepted.

When you’re growing your business, you need to plan the best way in which to do it. You can use one, two, three or four different strategies, depending on what you want to achieve. Once you know the different strategies that you’ll be following, you can plan the different marketing activities that you need for each. This focus on your individual objectives will make your chosen marketing activities far more effective, producing much better results.