For Brokers: Creating a Predictable Pipeline with Organic Growth
Quick look: Despite its many challenges, 2020 gave brokers a chance to pause and reset their strategies, with many returning to the familiarity of organic growth. Building organic channels puts you in a better position to weather economic hardships and sustain more predictable sales pipelines moving forward. It all begins with cultivating lasting relationships.
The 2020 coronavirus pandemic put the brakes on business plans and caused organizations of all sizes to reprioritize what they deemed essential. With reduced marketing and advertising budgets, many businesses—including brokers— decided to double down on their organic growth strategies.
Organic growth involves cultivating an audience with a genuine interest in your brand and the products or services it offers. It is driven by delivering ongoing value, despite ebbs and flows, and helps to ensure a steady stream of quality leads.
There are several ways to implement a strong organic growth strategy and build lasting relationships with clients. Search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, and online reviews are all used to create consistent messaging, which highlights key value points. These efforts increase visibility for your offerings, promote engagement, and instill a sense of trust among your prospects—without the need for ad spend.
Paid channels are often considered higher risk with the potential for a higher reward. However, while organic growth has a lower risk with the promise of lasting reward. Both are effective, but the latter allows you to benefit from what you’ve built, no matter what additional challenges come your way.
Learning to Pivot as Customers’ Needs Change
Over the past year and a half, brokers have had to brainstorm creative ways to present their services and products while delivering a meaningful experience from afar. In-person trade shows, meetings, and conferences were off the table. Instead, there was a larger focus on website updates, email marketing, and hosting virtual demonstrations, webinars, and events.
Although originally perceived as a setback, those who could quickly pivot embraced this opportunity to rebuild and strengthen customer relationships by building rapport through a shared, albeit challenging, situation. Even as the mode or model changed shape, the intent and message remained the same. What small and medium-sized business (SMB) clients longed for more than ever was a human-to-human connection, which is the pinnacle of organic growth.
Today, as normalcy slowly resumes, many brokers are diversifying the way they communicate by implementing a hybrid of in-person and virtual interactions. Regardless of the varying strategies, everything continues to revolve around meeting the essential need: providing viable solutions for SMB leaders.
Creating a Renewed Sense of Stability
Adapting to operational changes wasn’t the only thing causing turmoil in 2020. People were also figuring out how to adapt on a personal level as well—in their homes, with their families, and on the job. This required presenting confidence externally by stabilizing disruption internally.
SMB leaders, in particular, experienced the ups and downs of multiple furloughs and meeting compliance for ever-changing health and safety protocols. They had to reconfigure workflows to meet virtual requirements, while also prioritizing employees’ physical and mental health.
By partnering with a professional employer organization (PEO) like ExtensisHR, these responsibilities were handled by experts whose focus is to create stability from the inside out. ExtensisHR offers expertise, guidance, resources, and solutions to help companies save on administration costs, lower employee turnover, and grow faster.
Building Sustainable Growth
Every company has its own processes and path to success, but ultimately, cultivating relationships is what leads to sustainable growth. Our latest webinar invites an expert panel to discuss the importance of creating long-lasting connections and why setting up a strong foundation is essential to your long-term goals.
For insight into setting up or strengthening your organic growth strategy, watch our webinar “Shaped by 2020: Creating a Predictable Pipeline with Organic Growth.”
