Top Business Growth Strategies to Drive Success and Scalability

When you’re in growth mode, it’s an exciting time. Onboarding new customers, generating additional revenue, and growing your market share are all positives. But, who’s watching your bottom line?

Growth strategies typically increase spending. If you’re expanding markets and serving different customers, you’re creating more work for your team and it can cause significant growing pains — especially if you’re doing things manually.

You must make sure your spending aligns with your business growth strategy. Creating an efficient infrastructure to maintain financial controls will be crucial to your success.

What Are the Main Business Growth Strategies?

There are multiple business growth strategies and many companies choose one or several of these pathways.

Market Penetration

Market penetration aims to boost your slice of existing markets with current offerings.

Grabbing customers from your competitors can grow your market share. This might include offering price incentives, increasing marketing efforts, and providing a better customer experience. Companies deploying this strategy focus on extracting maximum value from established markets.

A McKinsey analysis of 4,000 companies showed that about 80% of growth across multiple sectors all involved maximizing core business accounts.

Product Development

Introducing new or reimagined offerings to your established customer base capitalizes on existing market knowledge to address unmet needs. It might include upsells or add-ons to your existing products or new product lines to expand your offerings.

Market Expansion

Small business growth strategies often include market expansion to take your proven products into new areas or market segments. This might target different types of customers or territories. By focusing efforts on your existing strengths and applying it to new markets, you can grow your customer base.

Diversification

Diversification moves beyond your traditional boundaries, either building on existing capabilities or charting completely new territory. Pivoting your business, realigning your focus, or establishing new value propositions can open up new customer segments.

Mergers & Acquisitions

Strategic M&A can accelerate growth by instantly adding new assets, technology, market access, and talent. Unlike organic growth, M&A provides immediate scale, However, it also demands more robust financial controls to integrate culture and operations.

Strategic Partnerships

Alliances between independent organizations can produce collaborative arrangements. By leveraging complementary strengths without giving up control, you can tap into each other’s customer base to grow revenue.

Vertical Integration

Vertical integration strengthens your ability to streamline operations and control outcomes throughout the value chain. By absorbing upstream suppliers (backward integration) or downstream distribution channels (forward integration), you can secure critical components of your ecosystem.

Each of these business growth strategies has its pros and cons, but one thing is consistent. They increase complexity. Automation and integration will be key to overcoming the pitfalls in growth.

How Does Automation Influence Business Growth?

When you’re a growing business, a lack of efficiency is your enemy. It can overwhelm your employees and stop growth in its tracks. For example, if your onboarding system or customer success team can’t handle an influx of new customers efficiently, you can quickly lose customers before they get started. If your expense tracking and expense management system can’t automate workflow, approvals, and fraud detection, you could be losing money and not even know it.

By reducing your reliance on manual processes and automating key components of your finance operations, you can streamline the administrative burden on your accounting team and enable them to focus more on strategy rather than simply managing the process.

Here are some of the key ways automation influences business growth:

• Boosts efficiency: Automates repetitive tasks, reducing manual workloads and freeing employees to focus on strategic growth.
• Enhances accuracy: Minimizes human error by automating financial processes, ensuring consistent and reliable data.
• Improves scalability: Supports business expansion by handling increased transaction volumes without adding headcount.
• Strengthens customer experience: Speeds up service with automated support and streamlines order processing for faster fulfillment.
• Enables data-driven decisions: Provides real-time insights, helping businesses make smarter, growth-oriented choices.
• Reduces costs: Lowers labor expenses and operational inefficiencies by streamlining processes.
• Future-proof operations: Ensures adaptability by integrating with emerging technologies, keeping businesses competitive.

What Is the Role of Efficient Expense Management in Business Development?

The number one reason businesses fail? Cash flow. Or rather, lack thereof.

If you aren’t managing your expenses efficiently — especially during growth periods — it can lead to poor decision-making or unnecessary risks. Your business development growth strategy must include expense management.

Clear policies and digital spend management can help you avoid mistakes many growth-oriented companies make, such as:

• Unclear forecasts: Relying on outdated methods to predict future expenses can leave you in the dark about whether their growth plans are feasible.
• Insufficient auditing: Neglecting regular audits allows errors and fraud to slip through, costing you money and potentially increasing your liability.
• Underutilizing automation: Failing to automate workflows and integrate advanced tools can result in inefficient processes, leaving your staff bogged down with tedious tasks instead of focusing on strategic growth.
• Struggling with data: Having vast amounts of data but lacking the tools or expertise to analyze it effectively produces missed opportunities.
• Overpaying taxes: Ignoring complex tax rules, especially when operating internationally, can result in overpaying and missing opportunities for VAT tax reclaim.

Streamline Expense Management to Fuel Growth

So, what steps are SMBs and business decision-makers taking to drive growth and manage costs?

Integration and automation.

Especially when you are in a growth period, you need software that streamlines your travel, expense, and invoice management. This provides you with a more complete, accurate picture of your finances and helps you stay on track.

SAP Concur provides solutions that simplify financial and operational management, contributing to business success and enabling you to optimize your business growth strategies. Download our report, Building Efficiency, Targeting Growth, to see how integration and automation can generate more value and less time, helping you scale.