While often used synonymously, growing a business and scaling a business are two different concepts. Growth in an organization can mean the addition of new resources and a slight increase in revenue as a result. But scaling refers to when a business increases revenue without any significant addition in resources, and hence, it requires careful planning.
But can the rapid scaling of a business be a good thing? Statistics point to premature scaling as the most apparent cause of startup failures. Nathan Furr, professor of strategy at INSEAD, says, “most startups are dying, and they are dying because they are doing good things but doing them out-of-order.”
To avoid such blunders, you need a data-driven strategic plan to scale your business successfully. To make the journey easier for you, here is a comprehensive guide describing the focal points of the process.
How To Create Business Systems To Scale Successfully
A four-prong approach is needed to scale your business:
- Marketing
- Sales
- Employee management
- Fulfillment
1. Marketing System
SWOT analysis
To create a proper marketing system, businesses must assess the current and future possibilities that may impact it. A SWOT analysis is a must — strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It can help you find, analyze, and document the company’s internal strengths and weaknesses. You can pinpoint areas within your control and external opportunities and threats.
Equipped with such insights, you can adjust your marketing strategy whenever your business hits a bump. You can work out the difference between your and your competition’s marketing objectives and counter the limitations preventing you from leveraging opportunities.
Establish a process
Once you have all the necessary insights and a solid marketing objective, it’s time to establish a standard and effective marketing process that reflects the company’s mission and vision. Create a plan that summarizes how the marketing team will need certain resources, the proper way to take certain actions, and set specific goals over the year.
Create a buyer’s persona and build campaigns around it. The key to a successful marketing campaign is social media. Ensure to update the online content frequently to keep the information up-to-date.
Monitor progress and tweak as needed
The marketing team’s work does not end with placing a roadmap to the marketing structure. Marketing campaigns are now more personalized and data-driven than ever. Companies must track a campaign’s progress and other marketing KPIs for constant improvement. Constant monitoring helps you identify the roadblocks and tweak the strategy accordingly.
Source: Joe Speiser
To monitor campaigns, specific metrics are of absolute importance. Content metrics like conversion and bounce rates can show you where to improve to gain more audience. Other notable ones are email metrics, social media metrics, advertisement data, etc.
2. Sales system
Create a repeatable sales process
Sales representatives deal with hundreds of customers weekly. Hence, finding crucial information might be difficult for them without a repeatable sales process. It outlines the responsibilities of each job, giving sales reps something simple yet effective, like a sales repeatable plan.
Source: AJ Sales Coach
When designing your sales process, be sure to take into account all of the different stakeholders involved and their specific needs.
Use a CRM for process automation
In a scaling company, the sales team faces an increasing customer base. Opt for efficient CRM — customer relationship management software to address all their queries without overworking the workforce. It is a tool that handles contact, sales management, agent productivity, and customer relationships. Such software increases your business’s capabilities and allows you to improve the customer experience at every step.
CRM automatically stores customer information such as how long they have been a customer, their purchase records, and other notes. This information helps sales reps optimize customer interactions and improve the employee experience. It also helps create proper account receivable collections, save time, and maintain the business’s cash flow.
Remain aligned with marketing and sales rep teams
Focus on aligning sales and marketing teams to grow your company successfully. It ensures these departments are on the same page, effectively targeting the right customer base, creating more conversions, and driving more revenue. If both those departments prioritize different goals, marketing-generated potential leads are unlikely to show an impressive conversion rate.
On the other hand, statistics show that a company with strong marketing-sales alignment has leads who spent 47% more than those left to make purchases on their own. Integrated marketing and sales strategy will make the filtering process quicker and communication and collaboration much easier.
3. Employee management system
Learning and development programs
Source: Mark Jordan Murray
We are currently experiencing a knowledge-based and digital-first economy. Scaling companies in such a landscape demand constant upskilling and reskilling of the workforce to stay in the competition. Hence, improvements in learning and development programs are imperative to meet changing business needs.
Through proper training programs, employees learn new skills, which they can apply to accommodate the changing requirements of a growing business. You can also use collaborative learning to create team synergy and boost productivity.
Mentorship program
One of the main pillars of a scaling business is an engaged workforce. However, a new hire naturally finds it difficult to fit into the workflow. A mentorship program eases this transition by keeping them engaged from the first day. Such initiatives support a learning culture and allow new hires to express their doubts and queries freely.
Mentorship programs bring improvement in the onboarding process and overall productivity, preventing any major stagnation in the workflow. New employees learn their duties faster, producing quality work and contributing to the business growth.
However, to facilitate a culture of constant enhancement, assessing the impact of your company’s mentorship program is vital. With an effective mentoring tracking system, you can identify weak areas in the mentorship plan and update them as required.
Support growth
To grow an organization, you must also support and celebrate the growth of your workforce—whether professional or personal. It encourages them to thrive at their jobs and opens paths that lead to acquiring new skills. Offer relevant courses to upskill your employees. Encourage them to cultivate interests in different business aspects, and give them the autonomy to make that choice themselves.
Darshan Somashekar, who runs Im-a-puzzle.com, gives his team a learning budget. “We want to support our team in all aspects of growth. We give them a learning stipend which has been used to learn data science and even foreign languages. Ultimately, it shows that we both care and trust our team.”
4. Fulfillment system
Integrate technology
Scaling a business is a challenging task. However, the integration of technology makes handling the growing pressure much easier. Customized and scalable software gets you ready to handle increased demand, trends, and the rise of any new competitors. It saves time, and teams can invest in more strategic business ideas.
Implementing technology in your daily business operations can increase your customer base through online advertisements, pop-ups, and sign-ups. In an era where many businesses are fully digital, ensure you choose systems capable of accommodating growth.
Embrace automation
According to a McKinsey report, 85% of companies have increased digitization, with 67% specifically adopting AI and automation technology. To stay relevant among the competition adopting automation is the way to go.
Leveraging automation technology lets you use your resources judiciously and with precision. Automation eliminates manual and repetitive operations, freeing up the workforce’s time, which they can invest in working on innovative ideas for future growth.
Employees avoid overwhelming workloads, becoming more engaged and producing better work. Automated workflows also minimize mistakes, saving the company from mishaps.
If you are a solopreneur or running a business with a lean team, you can automate less impactful tasks to focus on growth and development. You can automate social media management, recurring billing, payment reminders, and scheduling meetings.
By automating these and other routine tasks, you can free up more time to focus on the core aspects of your business and better serve your customers or clients.
Strategic partnerships
To be scalable in the current business landscape, a company must have a competitive edge — and one good way of achieving it is through building strategic partnerships. Such arrangements have a mutual understanding that involves improvements for both parties.
Strategic partnerships provide both companies a window to increase their customer base and, in turn, expand their business. Mutual collaboration between businesses encourages better teamwork and endurance, allowing businesses to deliver solution-oriented and improved customer services.
Conclusion
All four systems have equal roles in a company’s growth. Fast-paced growth can be alluring. It needs to focus on each system and adapt to the changing business needs. All the phases of business operations need constant monitoring.
You can achieve none of the above through manual processing effectively. Here, automation becomes necessary to create successful business systems accommodating growth. With innovation and the proper use of technology, businesses can grow rapidly into huge, scalable, and profitable ventures — and that too for the long haul.
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