There’s no silver bullet to growing a business.
The actions you need to take are massively dependent on the size of your company.
Stuff that works for a six-month-old startup just isn’t applicable to a vast enterprise, and vice versa.
In my last article, I spoke about maximizing growth for businesses at that early startup stage, with annual recurring revenues (ARRs) of up to $100,000.
Now, I’ll be talking about the next stage – companies with an ARR of $100k to $1 million. I’ve got hands-on experience driving growth for a few businesses that fit this mold, like Mailshake and Right Inbox.
At this stage, your hustling days are behind you.
You’ve already hit on a couple of channels that work for you. Now it’s about making them scalable, building some processes, and hiring a team, because if you’re going to grow your business further, you can’t do it all yourself. That’s the opposite of scalable.
Hire Your First Salesperson
Look at your company or your product as a funnel.
You need visitors to your website. You need to get those visitors to submit their details via a contact form, or to sign up for a product demo or free trial. Once they’re in the signup flow, you need to get them to convert.
Having a sales function will help move your prospects through that funnel. They have the bandwidth to nurture leads who aren’t yet ready to buy, which is something you likely don’t have because you’re too busy running the business.
Hiring your first salesperson is a big step in the journey of any business. And it’s a very different task to (eventually) hiring your 10th salesperson.
Finding someone with the right persona is super important. You don’t need a sales manager at this stage – you need a doer. Someone who’s going to be hands-on and able to take action, even if that means building a whole new process or creating new sales slicks from scratch.
They need to take responsibility for everything sales-related so that you can focus on other areas of the business.
Hire Your First Marketing Person
You don’t have time to spend all day cold-calling potential prospects. And you don’t have time to handle all the marketing yourself, either.
You need to find a marketing person who can do that for you.
Their core strength or skill set should align with the core channel of your business. With Mailshake, our core channel is SEO and content creation, so that’s the sort of marketer we went out and hired. Someone with the experience to scale our content and SEO operation, so I as a founder could go and figure out some other channels.
On a related note, you want to be figuring out customer support at this stage.
There’s marketing value to customer support, because when you’re speaking to your customers, you’ve got the opportunity to generate growth from their accounts.
Maybe you launch a referral program. Or maybe you start driving them to engage more with your content by sharing helpful articles from your blog. That way, you’re not just some product they’re paying for – you’re a genuine expert that’s offering real value to their business.
One of the things that worked for us early on was linking to our latest article or webinar from our email signatures. It’s super scalable and low impact, and it got a bunch of new eyes on our content.
Is your business at this stage? What are you doing to maximize growth? Let me know in the comments below:
I build and grow SaaS companies.
“When it comes to marketing, Sujan is the best. I’ve never met someone with such creative tactics and deep domain knowledge not just in one channel, but in every flavor of marketing. From content, to scrappy guerrilla tactics, to PR, Sujan always blows my mind with what he comes up with.”
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