Powerful Strategies For Long-Term Business Growth

According to the research that covers the timespan between 1994 and 2020:

• More than 30% of new small businesses in the United States fail within the first two years.
• More than 50% fail within the first five years.
• More than 65% fail within the first ten years.

Meanwhile, for startups, the situation is even more grim: their failure rate is 90%. On the flipside, around 1.5% of them go on to have a $50M+ exit.

If you don’t want your company to end up in the graveyard of failed businesses, you should ask yourself: how can you build something that lasts?

Today we are going to share ten strategies for sustainable business growth that can help you with that!

#1: Create an Amazing Product or Service

Your core product or service is the foundation of your business.

Attempting to grow your company with a low-quality core product or service is like building a house on shaky ground. It might work for a while but it will inevitably collapse, rendering all your effort wasted.

That’s why your first priority should be creating an amazing product or service. In theory, this may seem obvious, but in practice, very few entrepreneurs do that.

If you take time to focus on quality before you start pursuing growth, you’ll almost certainly have an advantage over your competitors who went straight for the latter. But how can you tell if your product or service is good enough?

You’ll know once you start getting overwhelmingly positive customer feedback. Otherwise, even though it may be hard to admit, the chances are that your product or service is simply mediocre. And if that’s the case, your business is not ready for growth yet!

#2: Package Your Product or Service Into an Irresistible Offer

If you want to make sales, it’s not enough to have an amazing product or service, you also need to package it into an irresistible offer. But how can you do that?

Here’s our irresistible offer formula:

Low Price + High Value – Financial Risk = Irresistible Offer

This means that you can make your offer more appealing by:

• Reducing its price – Ideally, you should charge less than your competitors. However, if your price is super low, potential customers might assume that it indicates low quality and choose to go with a more expensive option instead. So don’t go overboard with it!
• Increasing its value – You can do that by throwing in bonuses that don’t cost much to you but provide value to the customer. Digital goods such as cheat sheets, eBooks, videos, etc. work best for this because they have insanely high profit margins.
• Removing financial risk – Either offer a 30-day, no-questions-asked money-back guarantee or find a way to tie your pricing to measurable results.

Ideally, you want to do all three, which will make your offer stand out from the competition!

#3: Use Cold Outreach to Get Your First Customers

We would argue that if you are just starting out, the best way to get your first customers is cold outreach:

• Cold calling
• Cold email
• Cold DMs

Ultimately, this low-cost, time-consuming customer acquisition strategy is a numbers game: if you make 100 cold calls, send 100 cold emails, or reach out to 100 people via social media DMs every day, sooner or later you’ll start making sales.

(Obviously, it’s not enough to just contact someone and let them know about your product or service, you should also continue following up with them until you get a clear yes or no answer.)

There’s something that our friend Alex Hormozi calls the “Rule of 100” that can be helpful here: do 100 primary actions per day for 100 days straight.

In this case, do 100 cold reachouts per day for 100 days straight, which should take you around 4 hours every day.

This will add up to a total of 10,000 reachouts, which should be enough to get things going!

#4: Acquire as Much Social Proof as You Possibly Can

Once you start making some sales, you want to proactively solicit customer feedback and then ask happy customers for testimonials.

Ideally, these testimonials should include that person’s photo, their full name, and a quote from them that mentions a specific result that your product or service has helped them achieve.

Also, consider taking your most impressive testimonials and turning them into full-blown case studies if those customers are down for it.

Your goal should be to acquire as many testimonials and case studies as you possibly can so that you can then leverage that social proof to increase your conversion rates across your entire sales funnel.

There’s no need to wait until you have a ton of it, though: the moment you get a decent testimonial, you should leverage it by featuring it on your website, sharing it on your social media, and including it in your cold emails.

The power of social proof cannot be overstated so don’t hesitate to use whatever you have, even if it isn’t something particularly impressive!

#5: Allocate Time for Building Traffic-Generating Assets

Once you establish a steady stream of revenue with cold outreach, you want to take a look at your schedule and allocate some time every week for:

• Social media marketing
• Email marketing (newsletter)
• Video marketing (YouTube and TikTok)

We recommend focusing on building a social media following first, then leveraging it to grow an email newsletter and then finally leveraging them both to grow YouTube and TikTok channels.

Building these digital assets will take time but if you stick with it, it’s going to be worth it because eventually, you’ll be able to use them to generate free traffic for your business!

#6: Build a Value Ladder Sales Funnel for Your Business

A sales funnel is a system designed to convert visitors into leads, leads into customers and customers into repeat customers.

We believe that the best way to sell anything online is to create a Value Ladder sales funnel and drive traffic to it. That’s how we grew our software company to nine figures!

Here’s how it works:

1. You offer the potential customer a freebie known as a lead magnet in exchange for their email address.
2. You then pitch them increasingly more valuable and expensive offers via email.
3. You also set up some sort of continuity program that enables you to generate recurring revenue.

Whatever it is that you sell – services, physical products, digital products, software, memberships, you name it – the Value Ladder sales funnel can help you sell more of it!

#7: Maximize Customer Lifetime Value With Downsells, Upsells and Cross Sells

Bait, Frontend, Middle, and Backend offers are the core offers that you should create first.

Then, if you want to maximize customer lifetime value (CLV), you should add three types of additional offers to them:

1. Downsells – This is something that you pitch to the potential customer after they have rejected your initial offer. It should be a downgrade on it.
2. Upsells – This is something that you pitch to the potential customer after they have accepted your initial offer. It should be an upgrade on it.
3. Cross sells – This is also something that you pitch to the potential customer after they have accepted your initial offer, but instead of being an upgrade on it, it should be complementary to it.

For example, McDonald’s used to have its infamous “Would you like to supersize that?” upsell and is still using its equally well-known “Would you like fries with that?” cross sell. 

Think about it: if the potential customer is at the counter about to buy food, they are probably hungry. So it’s the perfect time to pitch them more food!

You want to do the same thing in your sales funnel. The best time to sell someone more stuff is when they have already decided to buy something from you and are about to proceed to the checkout. 

As for the downsells, if the potential customer has made it to the sales page of your initial offer, it means that they were at least somewhat interested in it, even if they ended up rejecting it. So why not pitch them something similar but cheaper? You have nothing to lose at that point anyway!

Adding downsells, upsells and cross sells to your sales funnel can help you increase your customer lifetime value (CLV).

That will enable you to afford higher customer acquisition cost (CAC), which can give you a competitive edge.

Remember: as Dan Kennedy put it, whoever can spend the most to acquire a customer, wins!

#8: Learn How to Run Paid Ads and Start Driving Paid Traffic to Your Value Ladder Sales Funnel

We recommend waiting until your business is consistently generating profit and then reinvesting that money into learning how to run paid ads.

Which platform you should advertise on is going to depend on your business model but if you can’t decide, Facebook ads can work well for the vast majority of businesses.

Find a reputable Udemy course that focuses on your platform of choice and then go through the entire thing. You can wait for the next sale if you want a discount.

Then, start playing with small ad campaigns just to get the hang of how it all works, with a daily budget of maybe $5-10. This approach should help you learn the basics of paid advertising without losing a ton of money.

Once you have mastered the basics and built up some confidence, create an ad campaign for your lead magnet and start optimizing it.

Finally, once you get to the point where your lead magnet ad campaign is consistently profitable, start gradually scaling it by reinvesting some of its profits back into it!

#9: Prioritize Customer Retention Over Customer Acquisition

We have noticed that entrepreneurs often make the mistake of prioritizing customer acquisition over customer retention because the former is exciting and the latter can be kind of boring.

However, this can create a leaky bucket situation where your business stagnates despite you pouring a ton of resources into customer acquisition because you can’t keep the customers you already have. So what can you do to avoid that?

• Proactively solicit customer feedback – Make sure to talk to not just happy but also neutral and even unhappy customers. That will help you get different perspectives, identify what needs to be improved, and calibrate your ad targeting.
• Prioritize what’s important to your customers – If customers keep asking for a specific feature, that’s what you should add to your product next, not something that you think would be cool that no one actually wants.
• Provide excellent customer support – Let your customers know how to contact you if they need help, explain when they should expect a response and make sure to respond within that timeframe.

You can also increase customer retention by using a weekly newsletter to stay top of mind with them. If you want to learn more about this, read our article “How to Grow an Email List from Scratch”.

#10: Scale Strategically Instead of Chasing Growth at All Costs!

It’s important to understand that scaling too early can cripple your business. So how can you know if your company is ready?

First of all, you want to wait until you start seeing a steady increase in sales that cannot be attributed to an increased marketing spend.

For example, if you have been spending $1,000 per month on marketing for the last six months and your sales have been steadily increasing during that time, that’s a good sign.

This pattern indicates that your business has positive word-of-mouth, meaning that your customers are so happy with your product or service that they are recommending it to other people. That’s the most likely source of these unexplained sales.

Meanwhile, the reverse pattern where you are spending more and more money on marketing but your sales are declining indicates negative word-of-mouth. Not only are your customers not happy with your product or service but they are also warning other people not to buy it. If you start scaling in that situation, you might end up completely ruining your brand!

Next, before you start scaling, you want to streamline your business workflow by automating everything that can be automated and developing standard operating procedures (SOPs) for everything else. This can help you save a lot of money because you’ll be able to achieve the same results with fewer employees.

Then, you want to use historical data to create sales projections and model various scenarios. This will help you get a better idea of what’s possible. We recommend reading our article “Sales Forecasting Methods – The Complete Beginner’s Guide”

Finally, you should set a realistic sales target, create a plan for achieving it, and then start scaling your business by gradually increasing your marketing spend, which should result in a corresponding increase in sales.

Just make sure that your company is prepared to handle the new sales volume!

Want to Learn How to Build Sales Funnels That CONVERT?

Our co-founder Russell Brunson used sales funnels to take ClickFunnels from zero to $100M+ in annual revenue in less than a decade. Our co-founder Russell Brunson used sales funnels to take ClickFunnels from zero to $100M+ in annual revenue in less than a decade.

He is now widely considered to be one of the top sales funnel experts in the world. Want to learn from him?

His best-selling book “DotCom Secrets” is the best place to start because it covers everything you need to know in order to build sales funnels that convert.

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