What is the need for growth planning:
Companies generally go through multiple stages until they reach maturity and their business model stabilizes. At one of these stages, their focus and priority is raising monthly and annual returns.
Few managers build growth plans and insist on them when the company is experiencing its best conditions in terms of financial returns and sales, because they fully realize that continuity and expansion come with early planning before disaster strikes.
As for the majority, they fall into the trap of reacting and waking up late when sales decline and the company falters in the market.
Definition of growth planning:
Before jumping to the direct definition, we must drop the prevailing impression about growth planning, and this impression says that this concept is purely marketing and concerns marketers and salesmen.
In fact, the importance of this concept stems from the fact that it is a central issue that makes everyone concerned with it and everyone is required to play their active role in order for planning and implementation to succeed, and here in particular we find the role of the Growth Product Manager (GPM) to be the leader of this task.
Thus growth planning by definition is:
A strategic planning activity that aims to increase the company's financial returns through various means through a strategic plan that takes into account all parts, components and resources of the business, and covers a period of time within the range of 12-24 months.
Importance of growth planning:
Wake up early before it is too late and reduce future risks.
Exploiting missed, invisible opportunities.
Exploiting limited resources in the most optimal way possible.
Maintaining an advanced position among competitors.
Ensuring continuity and continuous expansion.
Growth planning strategies:
There are many strategies and we mention the basic ones as follows:
Marketing only: Here we work to improve marketing tools to obtain better sales.
Sales only: We work to improve the offer presented to the customer to obtain a higher rate of acceptance among potential customers, and we mention here the concept of assembly and disassembly.
Product only: Here we build a new product targeting a new market, or modify the current product to target another segment, or finally improve the current product to raise customer satisfaction, which will be reflected in sales and reduce the customer dropout rate.
Target market only: Here we keep the product as it is, and try to introduce it to completely new markets.
Cost only: We express it in another word, which is improving internal processes in a way that reduces financial or time costs.
A plan can be built that combines some of the previous types.
Important conclusion:
The growth planning process is preceded by an important stage, which is collecting information and analysis. We collect information about markets and competitors, information about our company, its sources and strength, and we analyze strengths and weaknesses...etc.
Then we set logical goals, and from this we can determine the appropriate strategy for us, and it is a decision in which all team members must participate