What is growth consulting (and how it can help your business)?

Growth consulting helps businesses identify and cover the challenges they’re facing while growing. Growth consultants bring years of experience building businesses and sales teams and work closely with their clients. Their goal is to help them develop systems and processes that are designed to create long-term, sustainable growth. 

Let’s face it, business is difficult. Finding the right customers is hard, so is putting together a good team. If you’re not hitting your sales goals your business is going to struggle.

To help you avoid that, growth consultants use their deep understanding of business and growth to bring in a new perspective, help you focus on what’s working, and help your business thrive. 

When do you need growth strategy consulting?

There are a few key moments in your business when it makes sense to bring in a growth consultant. 

You’re watching out for moments in your business like:

• Sales are flatlining. You’re doing business, but your business isn't seeing growth, despite having an existing customer base your revenues just aren’t growing in the way you want them to be.

• You’ve reached a “make it or break it” point. This is the next step of flatlining sales. You hit the point where you’re not making enough money and have to take the decision to get back to basics and get growing, or pivot.

• You’re doing a push for growth. Sometimes you just want to reach the next level of your business faster. A well constructed growth strategy can help you get there faster than a piecemeal approach to growth and sales. 

When you start seeing moments like this within your business, bringing a growth consultant into the mix can help you go through a course-correct. 

A good consultant can help you take a look at your business to figure out what’s working, what’s not working, where things are getting held up in your processes, and, more importantly, what you can do to set things right. 

A solid growth strategy involves fully understanding not just who you’re selling to, but how you’re approaching the sale, how often you’re following up, and even what conversations you’re having with prospects (and whether you’re having those conversations at the right time).

Benefits of Hiring a Business (or Sales) Growth Consultant

The biggest benefit of a growth or sales consultant is gaining that outside perspective of what’s going on inside your business. 

When you’re deeply entrenched in a business (especially one that isn’t doing very well) it can be hard to see what’s going on. You’ve probably got great staff. Things were probably going really well at one point. However, once things start to slide in a downward trend, you can get lost in trying to figure out why and forget to actually solve the problem.

That’s where growth consultants shine. 

When you’ve not only got the benefit of not being inside the company, but years of experience helping businesses grow and thrive, seeing what needs to be done is easier. 

What a growth consultant does is come in and follow a process that allows them to:

• Review what your team is doing. This involves things like assessing your sales team to ensure that everything is happening in a way that grows your business. 

• Refine the processes. Once the consultant sees how your team operates, it’s a matter of fine-tuning your systems and introducing new processes as needed to help your business grow.

• Rollout your new plans. This means implementing, training staff, watching the results, and making further changes as needed. 

• Replace themselves. The final goal of the consultant (this is especially true of a fractional VP of sales) is to make sure that growth continues after they’ve rolled out their new systems. Typically, what happens is that they work closely with someone on your team and train them to take over when their job is done. 

Need help with your growth strategy?

If you’re like one of our SaaS clients that spent nine years exploring strategies before bringing us in, you’re probably sitting on the answers of how to grow your business and could just use some help to make it happen - we helped them 5x their revenue in 12 months.

Or if you’re like our services client that needed to figure out what was going on with their business and turn things around, and achieve double digit growth after almost 20 years in business, we have resources and strategies that can identify the aspects of your sales process and business that aren’t working to your advantage. 

If you’re ready to start seeing real, consistent growth within your business, you can contact us today.