Guest Contribution by Sherryn de Vos
Whether your business is big or small, smart growth is vital to ensure a concrete future for the company. Scaling your business means to grow the business sustainably. If you increase your sales, you must make sure that the business can handle the challenges that come with growth.
Scalability is based entirely on both capacity and capability. You must first ask yourself the following questions: does the business has the growth capacity? Can its infrastructure and systems handle or accommodate this growth?
This way, you won’t grow your business, to fail again because it cannot sustain that growth. So, what are the ways that can help you scale your business faster?
1. Create a Website
The primary purpose of creating a business website is to make your business or product known. It is a promotion tool to help create awareness of what you offer, as well as how you position against your competitors. Therefore, a good website is an essential tool in growing your business.
Since the website will act as one of the digital marketing strategies, you must build an easy to navigate website to give customers an easy time. Get a website design proposal that makes sure your website provides insights about the product you offer, as well as what the product provides to the customer.
You should know that your company’s web design reflects how your product appears to your potential customers. Therefore, it should offer the best user experience, that will satisfy your potential customers. You don’t want a website that is very slow in loading and contains numerous unnecessary plugins.
If your web design is challenging to maneuver, this will negatively affect the number of visitors to your site. This, in turn, can influence your sales.
2. Source for Money
When it comes to scaling your business, money is always necessary. With adequate funds, you will be able to cover the expenses that will occur in the scaling process. The growth plan for your business may require the hiring of new staff, implementing new technology or even purchasing new equipment. For all of these things, you will need to have some extra money.
However, many may wonder how they are going to get this money to invest in their growth. Well, there are several ways. The ideal way is through bootstrapping. However, this process may take longer to get the necessary amount.
Therefore, since you may need the money fast, you can opt to look for a loan through your bank or any other line of credit. This way, you will get what you need in a good time.
3. Understand Your Customers
Any growth strategy will come into fruition only if you can offer your customers the products they want. Therefore, it’s essential for any business to comprehensively understand their market so that they can bring in what the customers want.
To know your customers and their needs, you must conduct a few surveys both for the product and the company. This will help you get a clear picture of what the customers think about your company and products and if they actually think your product is good enough to be recommended to others. Also, you will learn what the customers may require you to change to serve them better.
To enable this, you must get the right survey templates, that will ensure that you tackle all the critical questions and get helpful answers. With the right survey template, you can easily acquire demographic data, opinions, and attitudes that you can use both in employee and customer satisfaction. When these two are satisfied, you can expect growth in your business.
4. Secure Your Sales
Achieving higher sales is one part of scaling your business. Therefore, you must have an effective structure that will enable your business to increase sales. To generate more sales, these are some areas in your business you must look at:
- You must have adequate leads pipeline to ensure the generation of enough leads.
- Effective marketing systems that will enable you to track, as well as manage your leads.
- Sufficient workforce (sales reps) to make follow-ups and close deals.
- A robust sales orders management system.
- You must also have a proper billing system, as well as a receivables function that guarantees the timely collection of invoices.
5. Embrace Technology
If you want to scale faster, then you can’t afford to ignore technology. Technology helps businesses to operate efficiently and at lower costs. And although you might incur high initial charges, the long-term benefits are immense.
Some of the things you should invest in are having an effective CRM, sales management system, marketing automation and more. For example, to ensure the increased performance of the sales team, an outreach automation tool is necessary.
An excellent example of such a tool is the outreach tool for Gmail. This tool helps your business to achieve higher performances at each sales level of your sales cycle. The tool helps you to perform various activities such as:
- Links you to Google sheets
- Sends mail merge promotions with automated follow-up emails through Gmail.
- It comes with a feature referred to as the killer feature which allows you to establish automatic follow-up emails that are sent sequentially to customers until they reply.
- It helps you to generate comprehensive email lists from search results.
Key Takeaway
Scaling your business doesn’t mean just growing in sales and revenues. It means that as you grow, your business can handle the pressure that comes with higher sales, more staff, revenues, and more. Therefore, these five points will help you to get it just right.
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Sherryn de Vos is living in the beautiful city of Cape Town. She worked with a startup brand that launched in South Africa called GoBeauty where she was assisted with content generation, as well as conceptualized events focused on women’s health, entrepreneurship, careers, and tech to run alongside the brand. She has extensive experience in writing and uses a lot of her practical experience to create useful content in the business, finance and marketing world.