Confident and Sales-Focused: A Look at the Entrepreneur360 'Classics' The companies in this category tend to be sales superstars.
Through surveys and available data, we've examined hundreds of small businesses and come away with six archetypal sets of practices and characteristics that we believe are representative of most growth companies operating today.
The qualifications were simple: Companies had to be domestically owned, privately held, for-profit and have shown net capacity growth over at least two years, with an employee size in 2015 of 10 to 1,000.
Below, we examine the traits of Classics, one of the six archetypes of the Entrepreneur360™ Performance Index. To see the other five archetypes, click here.
Classics place an emphasis on sales but glue themselves to the middle of the road when it comes to most management practices. Because of their sales focus, Classics express confidence about continuing growth, and their sales, marketing and HR teams handle the growth in stride.
Key characteristics
They express relatively high confidence in growth, apparently because they are sales-focused, seek customer input in planning and work hard to communicate success to customers. Even their charitable contributions are seen as supporting customer relations.
They solicit input from employees in business planning.
Takeaway
In spite of all we hear about leading-edge management practices and disruptive companies, there is still plenty of room for more conventional companies to notch growth year after year. Markets don't award extra points for being flashy, and success can be built around a mastery of sales.
Read more about each archetype:
For Entrepreneur360 'Data Champions,' Success is Steady, Plotted and Planned
What Entrepreneur360 'Controllers' Know: Watch Markets and Keep the Customer Happy
The Success Secrets That Helped the 'Best Practicers' Land on the Entrepreneur360
How Staying in Front of the Pack Helped the 'Forward Thinkers' Nab a Spot on the Entrepreneur360
Growing Against the Grain: Meet the Entrepreneur360 'Contrarians'
