10 Quick Ways to Drive Organic Business Growth

Quick wins are crucial to any growth strategy. They build momentum and fund investment for longer-term growth initiatives. Cost-cutting, acquisition and restructuring are important tools in improving short-term gains, but they often distract organizations from building revenue organically.

Immediate, customer-driven revenue gains are often overlooked in the search for quick wins. When combined with prudent cost reduction they yield tangible results and keep employees focused on the customer. They also build the marketing, sales and innovation competencies needed to grow even faster in the future.

At Prophet, we’ve developed a checklist of ten rapid revenue drivers based on the repeated achievements of successful growth organizations. But first, let’s ensure we’re all clear on what organic growth means:

What Is Organic Business Growth?

Organic business growth is achieved by using your existing resources to expand your business. On the other hand, inorganic growth is done through mergers, acquisitions, and takeovers.

Organic growth is a key method for yielding tangible results, keeping employees focused on customers, building marketing, expanding sales, and innovating.

10 Ways to Organically Drive Business Growth

To help you determine some quick ways to drive organic growth, we’ve developed a list of ten essential strategies, based on organizations we’ve seen grow successfully:

1. Sell More to Your Best Customers

It’s easy to believe your biggest customers are also your best customers. But, usually, it’s a myth. An analysis of profit contribution, cost-to-serve and organic growth potential can highlight key customers worthy of an intense, cross-company focus. We’ve repeatedly seen that type of full-court press on just 10 to 20 percent of the customer base (the best customers) boost bottom-line profit by 5 percent or more.

2. Make the Most of New Customer Relationships

The early days of a new relationship are critical, and yet one of the most overlooked parts of the customer experience. Clients across categories consistently express the greatest willingness to buy more and to try different products just after they come on board. Why not take advantage of that honeymoon period, offering more products, services and accessories?

There’s a long-term benefit as well. Our studies on behalf of clients have found that on average, customers who make a second purchase within 90 days of the first purchase are more than double the lifetime value of the average customer.

3. Focus on Your Sales Team

For immediate impact, adding or beefing up the sales team is one of the most effective drivers of organic growth.  This is especially true in industries with multiple sales channels. We’ve seen it work for a national insurance company, which got immediate results by resisting the urge to cut costs and instead adding sellers to its highest-growth market. And we have also found a consistent pattern of profitable revenue gains from targeted sales-strengthening moves in Fortune 500 companies. Many didn’t even increase headcount, but rather redeployed existing resources, using better training and better processes. Redeploying resources generates an almost instant payback versus the typical six to 12-month payback from new sales hires.

4. Optimize an Upcoming Launch

Too many line extensions and not enough blockbusters scheduled for launch next year? Prioritizing the most important introductions and focusing on execution is one of the simplest ways to organically boost revenue. It won’t create best sellers, but it avoids having a plethora of small launches dilute impact among customers.

It doesn’t happen as often as it should because it takes day-to-day diligence and a willingness of functional teams to work together. But when leaders focus on cross-functional priorities, time-to-market improves an average of 20 to 30 percent, mostly from avoiding the delays that build up in over-extended organizations. These gains require little to no incremental investment.

5. Raise Prices Strategically

While across the board price increases may be inadvisable in competitive markets, there are usually groups of customers or clusters of products that can withstand a price increase without slackening demand. Our clients have repeatedly identified 20 percent of their lines with lower elasticity due to a different competitive set or different buyer profiles. Selective price increases are one of the fastest and lowest risk moves a company can take because almost all the benefits flow to the bottom line and the investment in analysis takes only a few weeks.

6. Implement a Measurable Media Strategy

Insufficient data is no excuse for not being able to assess the impact of media investments or failing to conduct marketing mix analysis. If media isn’t measurable, shift the mix to media that is. If it is measurable, dig in and start optimizing. We have found that companies who have shifted marketing dollars to digital mediums have been able to quickly launch, test and learn new value propositions and pricing, which can add 10 to 15 percent incremental revenue.

7. Consider Organizational Change

Organizational change can definitely result in greater working efficiency and increased productivity, but keep in mind that organization-wide restructuring is incredibly taxing for leaders and employees— it creates upheaval and usually takes a while to pay off.

The cross-functional dependencies required to innovate, sell and market are easily disrupted— so evaluate your goals and your timelines before you decide to rock the boat now, or whether you need to focus on short-term growth.

If your primary goal is long-term organic growth, consider an organizational change. But if your priority is short-term business growth, concentrating on encouraging and supporting the work of informal multi-functional teams will have a greater impact.

8. Refresh Best-Selling Products

When times are tough, supply chain leaders want the sales force to focus on over-inventoried products. Finance frets about margins. And product engineering looks to the newest thing – even if it doesn’t have a benefit. Don’t indulge. Take your best-selling products and focus on selling more of them.

Crayola increased crayon sales by 50 percent in a single year by renaming a few colors. Samsung boosted washing machines sales by 15 percent, simply by making them in bright reds and blues. Find ways to refresh the products through color, materials and packaging. Explore new marketing avenues through brighter merchandising, sharper messaging and more inspired promotions.

9. Rework Your Sales Pitch

It’s usually just a few highly skilled members of the sales team who produce the bulk of incremental sales. Use their experience and customer understanding to rework the pitch for the rest of the team. A sharper pitch, particularly when it shifts focus to customer issues and delivers solutions, can have an immediate organic growth payoff.

Avery Dennison generated remarkable results by doing just this for their reflective materials division. A single pair of salesmen sold five times the average. It turned out they talked about the advantages of the product in a totally different way than their colleagues. The revelation changed the way everyone else went to the market and transformed the marketing message.

10. Set Concrete Goals & Reward Success

It is amazing what people can do if they have a concrete goal to speed up a launch or introduce an important initiative. Detailed process redesign may be crucial to long-term speed-to-market improvements. But in the short term, there is no substitute for asking teams to go faster, celebrating their success and rewarding them for the additional effort. The secret sauce? Growth leaders at these companies take the time to find and unclog administrative and process bottlenecks their teams are facing.

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