10 Positive Business Growth Habits Every Startup Needs

As the pre-eminent Growth Engineering company, Newton Day is in the business of helping tech-centric B2B businesses grow. We figured, the best way to do this is to install the right behaviors into sales and marketing habits, fail fast, learn quickly, and improve. We've come up with a series of positive growth habits that we instill into our clients that help them to build their businesses in a progressive, planned, and effective way to fuel shareholder value.

10 Positive Growth Habits

1. Be purposeful. Don’t forget what you are or lose your authenticity. Define the Root of your Why.

2. Be forensic about who your buyers are and why they buy. Define prospects by what they want not who they are.

3. Spell out what you do and why you are a better choice than other options that solve the same problem/issue. Know your competition and don’t settle on a weak sales pitch packed with hyperbole and acronyms designed to impress industry insiders.

4. Always have a plan and aim to fail fast. Campaigns can succeed or fail, but don’t stutter or stop halfway through—if you never finish, you'll never know what works and what doesn’t. Break your activities into quarterly periods. Ensure outcomes are time bound, and the operating/review cadence allows you to progressively learn over time.

5. Work out where your sales leads CAN come from and define some measurable lead buckets. In doing this you can work out which sources of leads work best.

6. Form your customer conversations into joined-up paths and campaigns and do everything you can to make them two-way. This allows you to better understand the conversational journey, points of engagement, behaviors of your audience(s), and frames activities into measurable campaigns—so you know what good looks like.

7. Amplify your brand while you build your sales pipeline. One without the other builds a boom and bust cycle with no after-tail.

8. Capture, automate and measure everything you need. Automation minimizes effort and increases predictability—and if you can’t measure, you can’t manage or improve.

9. Focus on all four phases of your customer lifecycle, not just acquisition, or you might end up with a leaky bucket business model.

10. Be relentless in your recycling of learning lessons. If you are going to improve, you need tenacity in your customer conversational agenda and accept that improvements don’t happen overnight.

You need growth engineering, not marketing

These habits don’t just arrive at your door—you will need a team of people with ten different skill sets to make it work. For most startups insourcing that number of roles isn’t an option. That’s why Newton Day developed its unique services and delivery model to give smaller companies a fighting chance of competing with the big boys in their space.

You don’t need a marketing department to blame when the sales lead target you dreamt up didn’t happen. After all, if your marketing fails, so does your business. What you really need is Growth Engineering.

Growth Engineering is about designing, implementing, and resourcing a production line for brand amplification and profit growth across the four phases of the customer lifecycle. To learn more read our article about Growth Engineering and why you need it.

Further Reading