How to grow your business in a down market

As my businesses is growing… double digit growth every couple of months… I am often asked what am I doing that really sets me apart from other organizations? How are we increasing our business when others are failing? Why am I able to hire new employees when others are required to downsize?

How is it that my business is growing when the economy is “so bad?” I know that my company isn’t the only one that is doing well.

Certainly, in one blog post, I won’t be able to tell all the reasons why our little company is seeing so much success, but there are some things that you can do right now (or start doing right now) that will have meaningful, positive impact on your bottom line.

Here are the top three things that we have focused on that have made all the difference to us.

Stop Pitching and Start Teaching

If you have read my blog for any length of time, you know that I am not a fan of the stereotypical sales model. I don’t like the car sales approach (and so many businesses employ this tactic). It is the attitude that the salesman is all knowing and every customer should just trust that the salesman will do no wrong.

Customers are far more sophisticated than that. They want to learn how to do things. They want to learn why they should do things. They may not want to learn all the details, but they do want to learn. This is the reason I write this blog (notice, no advertising… teaching is more important). This is the reason why on my business site, we have blogs, tutorials and information about how we give back to our development community. You’ll even notice that the majority of the posts (the vast majority of the posts) contain zero sales pitches.

Even without a sales pitch we get plenty of business opportunities. We get clients that are interested in being informed. We get clients that understand how and why we do business the way we do. It significantly improves the relationship with the customer.

Develop Strategic Partnerships

You can’t be all things to all people. Sometimes we have the attitude that if someone asks us to do something that is outside our skill set, we want to provide those services because, if we don’t, we’ll lose our client.

The result often is failure.

Developing strategic partnerships can really help you to focus on what you do best and allow others to do what they do best. We have developed a number of key strategic partnerships. In some cases, they are with sales organizations. In some cases, they provide services that we can’t provide. We even have some that we have co-developed and co-branded products together. I’d be remiss if I didn’t give a shout out to some of the key strategic partnerships that we have developed. Dealer Marketing Systems, Tricycle, Seybold Scientific, XFactor Marketing and Maryana Young.

Focus On Verticals – Be The Expert

Being a salesman or a sales organization provides the stigma of simply being a pitchman. Certainly, this is related to the first point above of stop pitching and start teaching. The fact is, you can’t start teaching until you have proven that you understand what you are doing. If you try to pretend that you understand someone’s business but don’t, you will be called out on it.

Focusing on a vertical market doesn’t mean that you forsake all other business, it just means that you become the expert in one area and a generalist in other areas. Being an expert in one vertical will open other opportunities for you… opportunities in other verticals.

When you become an expert in a vertical market that relates to your business, suddenly you can start to write for industry publications and speak at industry events. Potential clients will start to seek you out for advice and will rely on your expert opinion.