Business Growth Trends for 2021 | Let’s face it; Growth is important for any organization. If your business isn’t growing, your competitors meaning you’re losing out on new business and customers. The biggest challenge is that many businesses don’t know how to grow or where to start, so being on the lookout for business growth trends is critical, which serves as bread crumbs to follow.

Are you struggling with business growth? Let us inspire you by sharing the 7 top business growth trends for 2021, and beyond that, you can add to your strategy.

Read on to learn more!

Understanding Business Growth and Business Growth Trends

Business growth is a stage where an organization reaches its expansion point and seeks additional revenue streams. It is a function of business growth trends, life cycle, and the owner’s desire for more value creation.

Business growth trends are shifts or changes in the fundamental business dynamics within an industry. As your business matures, internal and external aspects of your operations and your target market change. During this stage, planning identifies the best times to launch new products, make capital purchases, increase marketing efforts, or hire more staff.

We’ve outlined 7 growth strategies to guide you based on the hottest business growth trends for 2021 and beyond:

1. Network Security and Privacy

Data security, privacy, and accountability are among the top demands from modern, digitally connected customers when buying goods and services. Unfortunately, many companies cannot meet those demands. With high profile data breaches, especially during COVID-19, dominating the news, the prospects you’re trying to convert need to be convinced that they can trust your business with their information.

This includes contact details like name, email, and phone number that are potentially at risk when they register for an account. More importantly, if you offer paid services, you have to ensure that their payment accounts are safe. Otherwise, they’ll consider a different service.

2. Customer Experience

You might love your customers, but that necessarily means the feeling is mutual. For many customers, you’re just another option, and according to Cisco, consumers won’t care if 74% of brands they use disappeared. This is why sales are no longer about big-budget and mass marketing campaigns to attract new customers.

Now, it’s about customer retention and building long-term relationships with a positive customer experience every time they interact with you. This includes:

• Resolving customer issues quickly.
• Being flexible on refunds and cancellation policies.
• Providing instant customer service.
• Personalized marketing campaigns.
• Exclusive discounts, upgrades, gifts, and more, etc.

3. Real-Time and Round the Clock Customer Service

Imagine this scenario – It’s 2 am, and you’re ready to sign up for a new online subscription service, but at the last second, you have a question. So, you engage the live chat support, contact them on social media, or send them an email. The problem? It takes them hours to respond, usually the next morning. At this stage, you’ve either lost interest or signed up for a different service.

The lesson? 9-5 customer support hours are in the past. Unfortunately, the average customer support response is still 12 hours, even in this age of technology with an abundance of communication channels. Customers today have shorter attention spans, so they expect teams to respond to them within minutes.

4. Combining Sales and Marketing

If your sales and marketing teams don’t collaborate and effectively communicate, then it could be hindering your business growth. By aligning these teams, you can convert more leads and generate higher-quality ones too. Marketers pass leads onto sales teams before they qualify, which often leads to high volume but low quality, thereby affecting conversion rates.

Combining sales and marketing teams can ensure that the company attracts high-quality leads. Since sales teams generate revenue, they won’t have to spend time chasing low-quality leads and improve their conversion rates.

5. Personalization

Since the last decade, personalization has evolved from “they know my name” to “how do they know I’d be interested in that?” Even though this might sound creepy, personalization is merely customer anticipation. Businesses use data to find effective ways to attract new customers and retain existing ones. And it’s what consumers want, and they are willing to pay more for a personalized experience.

Personalization tactics include:

• Exclusive one-to-one offers.
• Using customer’s purchase and engagement history to communicate accordingly.
• New product recommendation.

6. Digital Transformation

We live in a digital age where new technologies emerge daily and seamlessly fit into our daily lives. It is among the leading business growth trends for 2021, considering the impact of the pandemic. Digital transformation for businesses is all about improving processes and efficiency. For example, using SaaS powered systems such as Office 365 instead of desktop versions to store data on the cloud.

Other ways include using artificial intelligence to predict revenue, CRM software to manage leads, and automated email marketing to send personalized emails. Finally, for telecommute, channels like zoom, Google Teams, and Skype are exceptional choices.

7. Using Data to Make Decisions

Gone are the days in which leaders make decisions based on opinions and instinct. This is no longer the most effective way to make decisions, especially when you have data. For example, let’s say your sales manager suggests adding live chat to their website to reduce call load. How do you know if live chats will work?

The answer lies in customer feedback, and today, most feature upgrades are made based on them. Instead of relying on suggestions and ideas only, use data to see what is happening in your business and industry. This data might suggest following other business growth trends in marketing, manufacturing, retail, and other industries.

Conclusion

It’s a competitive world out there, and if you want to survive, you need to grow. You can follow any of the business growth trends that fit your business needs for 20201 and beyond. One important lesson from 2020 is the importance of staying one step ahead – not just of your competitors, but customers and market conditions as well.

If you’d like to learn about other effective business growth strategies with regards to your organizations technology, get in touch with us today.  www.percento.us/expert-services