If you’re trying to grow your business these days using old, costly, inefficient methods, you’re probably doomed to failure, admits Dan Adams, president of Advanced Industrial Marketing Inc. and author of New Product Blueprinting: The Handbook for B2B Organic Growth. He says implementing cheaper marketing tactics is crucial for growth, as is customer relationship building. Adams offers these three small-budget ideas to boost your business:

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1. Find out what your customers really want. Profitable, sustainable organic growth starts when you have a deeper understanding of customers’ needs than your competitor has. Many companies develop products that interest them, not their customers.

2. Conduct customer interviews remotely. Jetting around to interview customers is understandably unpopular when travel restrictions are all the rage. Consider Web conference–based customer interviews, using a service such as Live Meeting, WebEx, or GoToMeeting. Is this technique as effective as a face-to-face interview? Well, no, but it is better than no interview at all — and there are some benefits to interviewing customers remotely. For example, you can have more people from your side in a remote interview than would be comfortable or practical in a face-to-face meeting. And if the customer’s key buying influences — manufacturing, technical, marketing, and so forth — are located in different facilities, a Web conference makes it much easier to include them all in the meeting.

3. Get everyone listening to the voice of the customer. Most growing businesses chalk up thousands of face-to-face customer meetings during the course of a year, as sales reps, technical service reps, and others go about their normal duties — so why not train these people to become your “voice of the customer” experts? They’ve already gained the customer’s trust, they know the customer’s language, and there’s no extra travel cost. Best of all, you’ll develop a reputation among customers as “that supplier who really listens to us.”

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