Focusing on your customers wants and needs is the first step to improving revenue growth. Instead of immediately looking to your profit margins, it pays to consider your customers are well served.

Once you understand your customers well enough, you’ll become familiar with their buying habits. You can then adapt your strategies accordingly.

We spoke to three leaders of businesses of different sizes and fields to gauge the revenue growth lessons we could learn from their experiences.

Challenge the status quo by innovating

Mark Bridgeman, UK managing director at EON Reality, says it’s all about challenging the status quo:

“EON Reality has scaled globally through innovation. As an organisation, we have conquered revenue growth management globally by constant process improvement. An approach which helped us to not just meet but exceed our clients’ expectations.

“It is mission-critical for businesses to constantly challenge the status quo with new, innovative ideas. It’s great if something already works, but can it work better? More quickly? More cost effectively? Even small things like cloud storage and file transfer add up, and ultimately make you more world-ready.”

Be systematic – test and refine

Scott Phillips is the founder of Rise Art. He reveals the revenue growth challenges his business faced and the market specific hurdles that he had to overcome to achieve best practice management:

“When we started Rise Art, generating revenues was initially a tough task. We are reliant on having great artists and customers interact on our platform. Without great artists, we don’t have a ton of inventory to promote. And without customers, artists would leave.

“We first focused on getting great artists to the platform, and where needed generating income for them to stick around by creating demand internally or via charity partners. Once we had a base line of artists, we then focused on the customer. By monitoring buying habits, we were able to develop channel partnerships, focus on customer relationship management and engage growth across multiple marketing channels.”

So what can your business learn from Rise Art’s approach to revenue growth management?

“Whilst nothing is easy, taking an extremely systematic approach to how you test channels and developing a rigorous set of key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure them is what worked for us. Engaging team members at all levels is something we’d certainly recommend. Ask your staff how they would define success on each campaign, then test, measure and learn from those findings. It’s a process that takes time but ultimately has driven great results.”

Keep your brand fresh, maximise reach and invest in your staff

William Scott Forshaw, founder and CEO of York-based high-end leather goods brand Maxwell Scott, states that expansion taught him a number of revenue growth management musts:

“Growing into new markets is necessary to get your brand out there and develop your business. We now have seven websites across the world – namely in the UK, US, Germany, France, Australia, Switzerland and Austria – and are preparing to expand into the east in the future.

“To manage revenue growth through these various global launches, we invested heavily in Pay Per Click (PPC). The ongoing maintenance of the backend of our website was also incredibly important, and allowed us to enhance customer experience and fine-tune stock management.

“As well as maximising reach, keeping your brand fresh is key. We rebranded in 2014, and redesigned our leather goods to match ensuring product and service quality was at the centre of every change.

“Employing the right staff also remains an important aspect of growing revenue and improving your business. After all you need professionals who are skilled at their trade and willing to work hard to get results.”

Phil Foster is the managing director at Love Energy Savings.