There’s a cautionary tale about growth that many business people will be familiar with. An entrepreneur launches a new company around an exciting new product, service, or app, and they’re an overnight success. People love it, interest is high, and it’s all the company can do to keep up with demand. So, they hire new staff, expand aggressively, and start to assume the growth will continue indefinitely.
But all of this growth is expensive, and the customer base starts to taper off. The overhead starts eating into the profits, and without new customers, the costs start spiraling out of control. Within a couple of years, the company is bankrupt.
In the world of business, this problem is known as “scaling.” Scaling refers to the added logistical support needed to maintain growth, and the challenges that come when income is growing and infrastructure is not keeping pace.
Scaling problems usually involve a mismatch in how much support is necessary to meet demand, which means that scaling effectively is often a fine balance between investing in future growth and ensuring the company does not become overextended.
Scaling and Sales
As you might expect, sales is an integral part of the scaling process. Many classic scaling case studies involve companies who let marketing get ahead of production capacity, leading to greater demand than could realistically be met.
But, while many business experts caution entrepreneurs to balance marketing efforts with expanding logistic capacity, it is equally important to make sure you have a sophisticated sales and marketing strategy geared around building long-term demand rather than short-term buzz.
This isn’t so much a question of how much marketing do you need, but what kind of marketing you are doing. For this reason, hiring an effective sales team that has the know-how and experience to build a dedicated customer base is essential if you want to avoid a catastrophic drop-off in demand after the initial period of excitement.
What an Effective Sales Team Looks Like
For any entrepreneur, putting together a good sales team is one of the most important things to get right in the early days of growth. Unfortunately, many inexperienced business people cut corners by looking for the cheapest labor they can find and not treating their team as an investment in human capital.
If you look at how most successful corporations run their marketing divisions, you will find that they actually put significant resources into hiring top sales talent that will represent their brand and build durable relationships with customers and partners. In most cases, they work with an experienced recruitment agency specializing in sales to identify the best candidates for new positions in their team.
Veteran salespeople don’t just spend their days cold-calling numbers culled from the phonebook — they follow high-quality leads and cultivate the kinds of relationships that turn one-time buyers into lifelong brand enthusiasts.
Entrepreneurs who want to avoid falling into the common scaling pitfalls need to manage a delicate balance between moving too quickly and falling behind, between being too ambitious and not ambitious enough. Doing this often means surrounding yourself with a dedicated team who can share their wisdom and experience with you.
Working with a sales recruitment agency to fill key roles on your sales team will help ensure that you will be able to put your strategy for growth into action, and can scale in accordance with your capacity while building the kind of long-term customer base that all successful companies ultimately rely on.
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