4 Strategic Levers to Pull for Profitable, Efficient Growth

During various economic booms and bubbles, businesses had a “grow at all costs'' mentality. That’s not the case anymore.

As we near the halfway mark of 2024, our team at NetSuite has found that high-performing businesses are more focused than ever on exactly where money is spent—and adding value only where they see the biggest growth opportunities. 

In other words, they’re focused on profitable growth versus growth at any cost.

Working with tens of thousands of organizations across all industries and of all sizes, we’ve seen that the most successful ones are driving profitable, efficient growth by pulling four major levers. 

1. Capitalize on your top opportunities.

This growth lever involves focus—understanding what’s working and what isn’t, then aligning resources around those insights. 

This can look like shifting salespeople out of low-performing territories, or discontinuing unprofitable products to focus ONLY on offerings that actually drive profits. These decisions may be difficult, but they can catapult you to that next phase of growth. They can also help you maximize the parts of your business that deliver the highest ROI, so you can create MORE with the same amount of resources (money, people, time).

To make these decisions, however, you need insights—on profit margins, customer acquisition, workforce utilization, and many more metrics across your business. 

That’s why we’re seeing customers prioritizing initiatives to centralize ALL of their data (from NetSuite, legacy systems, and other applications) in NetSuite Analytics Warehouse. They’re using AI-powered analytics to highlight data patterns so they can identify their core drivers of revenue growth and pinpoint their most profitable geographies. Meanwhile, solutions like NetSuite SuitePeople Workforce Management and NetSuite Field Service Management help them deploy talent and other resources at peak effectiveness.

 2. Expand your offerings. 

While focus may cause you to jettison efforts that are NOT working, expansion often requires exploring NEW strategies. Some of these will become your big opportunities down the road. 

You might do this by discovering new offerings to sell your existing customers. If you’re a products-based company, you might offer services on top of that. Others have adopted a subscription business model as a way to not only grow more, but also grow more predictably. You might also add adjacent products to capitalize on the popularity of your strongest performers.

One particularly fruitful route is expanding your target market. This can mean going after the same target customer but in a new geography, or tailoring your core offering for a different target customer—perhaps offering a “lite” version. 

Making these changes requires both insight (to predict which new markets or offerings will yield the highest returns) and agility (to execute each new expansion). With capabilities like NetSuite OneWorld for international operations and our powerful SuiteCloud extensibility platform for tailoring your instance of NetSuite, the system is uniquely capable of accommodating each new approach you pursue.

3. Build processes that scale.

To do all this—to get the highest ROI from your current opportunities and to capture value from new ones—you need processes that can scale.

The biggest contributing factor to scalable processes is automation, particularly automation which delivers productivity on an as-needed basis as you grow. That’s a core benefit of the suite. Automation (and increasingly, automation supercharged by AI) is the key to speeding up and boosting the accuracy of both individual tasks and entire processes, so you can scale those processes by orders of magnitude.

Scalable processes also require collaboration between individuals, departments, and technology solutions. It’s no secret that the more you grow, the more potential for siloes you introduce in each of those areas. If your processes and systems aren’t DESIGNED to facilitate collaboration, then the changes you attempt to execute won’t be uniformly successful. The fact that all stakeholders in your organization are working from the same system, using the same source of data, with the same UI, is how NetSuite facilitates this critical collaboration.

 4. Get more from your existing technology.

If you’re going to effectively pull each of these growth levers, then your technology solutions cannot exist independently of each other. They must work seamlessly, talk to each other, and inform each other. This has been our mission since day one: Provide a unified and agile application that businesses can rely on to grow.

It’s also why we see our most successful customers “suite up” —bringing more functions into the suite as their businesses grow more complex. They’ve told us that they get the most out of NetSuite when they’re using all parts of the system across their business, creating those exponential benefits in terms of insight from ALL of their data and agility, collaboration, and control across ALL areas of operations. These benefits become a growth lever in themselves. They fuel expansion, maximize productivity, and drive ROI while opening up new opportunities for growth.

As you pull these growth levers across your business, NetSuite is here to support you not only with technology but also with expertise from more than two decades of working with businesses like yours on their growth journeys. Our greatest success is helping YOU achieve yours. 

Here’s to pursuing efficient growth, together.