What does growth mean?
It's interesting, but diffrent people understand growth differently and chose different focuses in their growth strategy. The growth priority may change depending on the market, company development stage and financial situation.
Accelerating sales growth
Being the main commercial KPI for many businesses, sales growth needs to be measured more in relative than in absolute way. A healthy business needs to grow faster than the competition and it needs to grow profitably.
The permanent diversification of sources of growth is also important - product and category performnce make their contribution into overall growth.
Higher profitability
Higher profitability in absolute and relative value is the basis of healthy long-term growth.
Can profitability grow faster than sales? Yes, definitely if the critical mass of business is achieved.
Can profitability grow when sales don't? Yes, if the costs are managed properly and productivity is increasing.
Can profitability growth be sacrificed ? Yes, sometimes when there is a need to fuel other types of growth.
Distribution expansion
Expanding to new geographies, new formats and new customer segments sometimes can be crucial for business growth. Entering new geographies and channel first can help to win the market.
On the other hand in certain cases distribution downsize can help to achieve higher productivity and help to grow in more effective way.
More users
In some cases winning the hearts of more users is more important than achieving higher sales. Some start-ups need this traction to attract investors and continue developing their services.
High number of users help to arttract additional monetisation opportunities.
To drive the number of the users, a product/ a service need to respond in the best way to the customer's unsatisfied need. It should be easy to find and easy to use. A great example of such growth is Google Search or WhatsApp.
More buyers
Sometimes more buyers and more users is the same type of growth, but not always.
In the gift category, baby products or business services we are dealing with different people. The users and the buyers are connected and impact on each other's decision, but they need different approach in comminication.
As well as in community based services buyers and users may be 2 absolutely different groups, and 2 different startegies need to be applied for their engagement.
Higher life-time customer value
It's a fact that it's often cheaper to retain loyal customer than to win a new one. Therefore customer satisfaction, usage pattern, purchasing pattern, frequency of purchse, customer retention and average ticket are very important building blocks in driving lifetime customer value.
Sometimes companies forget about existing customers while enetering new segments and territories, and it's becoming much more complicated and expensive to get the lost customer back. Indeed it's much easier to retain them.