How do you plan to grow your business over the next year? Are you:

• Expanding market share within a specific industry?
• Up/cross-selling to existing customers?
• Bringing new products to market?
• Entering new markets with your current products/services?

In many cases, growth may be dependent on a combination of these (or other) objectives.  But regardless of how you want to grow, I’m willing to wager that growth is a top priority.  Why? It’s the primary metric that is used to measure success with customers, as well as the progress of your business over time.  Even companies that are looking to divest parts of their business still want to grow what they are keeping.  But as with anything that is highly desired, the realization of the objective can be difficult to achieve.

What’s your growth strategy?

Each organization has its own priorities, opportunities and challenges – strategically growing your business depends on having a plan that addresses them together. This is an important point, because too often growth is handled without assessing how each of these issues affects the others. Additionally, the typical growth planning focuses heavily on the external market but doesn’t give enough attention to the supporting internal factors: making sure you have the right people, the right processes and the right data that will allow your organization to effectively carry out your growth plans.

The Data.com team has put together a growth framework based on interviews with a variety of Salesforce customers. Even with the unique aspects of each organization, we were able to identify four typical categories of customers, based on a set of common business priorities.

By uncovering the challenges that frequently occur within each of these categories, we have identified a set of best practices to help businesses improve business results by aligning their people, processes and data to take on these challenges.  By identifying where your business (or your part of a business) most closely fits within this framework, you can create a growth strategy that both takes into account your current and future circumstances.

Want to Learn More?

Join us on a January 23 webcast  to find out more about the growth framework and hear from Salesforce customer Meridian Group International, who has implemented a set of best practices from this framework to tackle their growth challenges.