What is Revenue Growth? How to Calculate and Improve Yours

Revenue Growth Trends to Anticipate

It’s called “revenue growth,” but let’s be honest: Sometimes, your revenue may dip or remain stagnant.

All businesses should expect to go through stages, and revenue expectations are different in each:

• Startup: Everything is brand new, and you’re still learning how to run the business. Most businesses don’t see revenue growth during this and, sadly, close down. (Getting third-party support can assist with revenue growth and other business struggles.)
• Growth: Your company is established enough to have a business plan and time to focus on more than internal struggles. Revenue may be stagnant or shrink, as you need to seek investment capital.
• Maturity: The business is now several years old, and you might feel secure in your business plan and revenue growth strategy. This is when revenue is likely to become predictable, perhaps increasing by around 5% per year.
• Renewal/Decline: This period can sneak up on you. Revenue rises and falls in any business. But if your revenue has consistently declined for at least three quarters, the problem likely began years earlier, and you may be in trouble.
  • This period is preventable, but if you find yourself in this situation, with revenue consistently falling rather than growing, you need a plan to adjust quickly.

In other words, it can take years to reach relatively consistent revenue growth. So, continue to monitor your revenue growth, create new strategies, and always be willing to learn so your business can thrive.

That’s the big picture. Revenue generally fluctuates every month, quarter, or year, no matter where you are in your business life cycle. Instead of viewing the dips as negatives, view them as opportunities. How can you strategize to increase your revenue growth?

Keeping an eye on your revenue growth can keep everyone employed, customers and investors happy, and your business growing—even with short-term dips.

This is why revenue is a strategy and not a goal. You can’t necessarily control the market, but you can control your response to it—and that response is your revenue growth strategy.

3 Strategies for Increasing Revenue Growth

Revenue growth strategy should be proactive rather than reactive, so get started now and reevaluate whenever necessary.

If you wait until there’s a problem, you may have to go into emergency profit strategy mode. Unfortunately, this focuses more on cost-cutting than growing revenue—which will likely make employees, investors, and customers nervous.

Though the best overarching strategy for revenue growth is ensuring each team is working together, there are more specific strategies for increasing revenue growth. Here are three of them.

Invest in Your Employees

As teams are made up of people with different opinions and concerns, the first step in any revenue growth strategy is to get buy-in.

Motivate your employees to buy in and do their best work by showing them you trust them (no micromanaging!) and providing them with professional development opportunities.

When your employees feel motivated—not to mention more competent thanks to the professional development—they may be more willing to listen and adjust to new methods.

Find New Ways to Reach Customers

To expand your market and keep your current customer base engaged, find new ways to reach your clients. Outreach methods can be part of your marketing, sales, or customer experience strategies—but ideally, the teams would work together for this.

These new ways could include developing a well-written blog, maintaining an active email list, investing in social media campaigns, or using paid advertising.

Use Technology

As business technology has evolved over the years, many companies have found themselves piecing together technology as needed.

Perhaps it started with word processing and spreadsheet software. Then came email. A basic website. An internal chat software. A more advanced website. Some social media. A customer relationship management system.

Suddenly, you have a ton of different programs and apps at your fingertips. Often, these things don’t communicate well with one another, and your employees must learn several different systems to get one project done.

Using the right technology can improve efficiency and, by extension, revenue. Research all-in-one systems to automate your processes, speed up communication, assist with marketing, and manage customer relations.

These types of revenue growth programs may look expensive at first glance. However, think about how much you spend on the separate systems you currently have—both on the programs and the time training and retraining on them.

Perhaps it’s time to simplify.