Continuing on from previous post the following brief descriptions set out what each of these growth stages looks like.

Create Stage:
Take an idea and experiment. Get feedback, lots of feedback from lots of people and make adjustments. Are you sure there is a problem that needs solving? Understand deeply who needs to solve it and why. What options are there to solve the problem and which ones are you best placed to offer? Do sufficient numbers of the people with the problem value your solution over alternatives enough to pay you for it? Test how they would pay you, how much and how often. Decide on a creation (product and/or service offering) that you are ready to verify in a chosen market.

​Verify Stage:
Prove you have a sustainable business (the business model). Do you know how to attract the right talent to help you today? What actions are needed to provide an ongoing stream of paying customers? Secure paying customers; the innovators and early adopters you need to help prove your idea. Do you see a point in the future where your returns will exceed your costs and what options do you have to bridge the gap between now and then? Do you have a workable plan that differentiates you from current competitors and do you understand what future competitors will do in your market? What are the most important measures you’ll track over the next 12 months? Execute your plans, monitor and adapt.

Cultivate Stage:
​The things you did yesterday gave you knowledge but are unlikely to be what you’ll do tomorrow to ensure growth. Your creativity now needs a level of order to enable it to move from proof of concept into growth mode. This order and coveted repeatability needs process structure to turn inputs of labour/time and materials/code into quality, desirable outputs. These processes need to be coordinated and aligned to well-articulated goals by teams. Teams and the individuals that make them up need to be accountable to each other as hierarchy in growth companies is kept to a minimum. However teams need to be supported by passionate leadership that have an intimate understanding of where the company is going. This leadership communicates regularly about what success looks like to maintain excitement about the future. Phases of revolution and evolution will be triggered by growth in revenue and consequential growth in team numbers. For example increasing leadership, likely to be a disruptive revolution for a creative team, will provide direction but limit autonomy, autonomy can be improved by delegation but this limits central control which in turn can be resolved by more coordination. 

These phases are natural as an organisation grows, anticipating them, making decisions about what you will and won’t do and the actions you take will determine your path to growth. Growth by definition consumes cash, the more ambitious the plan the higher the need for cash. Track its use, forecast future needs and verify every decision needed to spend it for a tangible goal-achieving return. Good cost management often just needs an innovative approach to acquire what is needed at a lower price, ingenuity is the key.

Scale Stage:
Time to pick up the pace and get serious but you are already feeling the stretch that your growth to date has created. To execute scaling up successfully, focused steps are now needed. Every movement forward builds on the last with a relentless quest to push the organisation forward toward the achievement of the next big goal. This change can impact culture and unsettle people as their roles begin to narrow and the reasons they joined the journey look to be disappearing (See Steve Blank’s excellent post on founding employees feelings of loss).

It’s critical that every stakeholder understands what the big goal is. This means framing the narrative for each audience; internal teams, customers, partners and even positioning this for your competitors. Each next step needs to be intimately understood internally with it being the focus of the next 90 to 180 days of effort and measures while still remaining focused on the big goal the company is shooting for. There will still be many things that need fixing but each of the steps you decide to take must matter to customers and build on your position and resilience in your chosen market.

Stages of SME Company Growth– How do you know where you are and what’s coming next.

Small and medium size companies (<250 staff) in high growth mode that are scaling at speed are exciting, fun and very rewarding places to be. They provide amazing opportunities to learn rapidly and offer individuals a chance to change the world.

In my time working closely with companies aiming for high growth I have observed four stages that all these companies seem to move through; a Create Stage, Verify Stage, Cultivate Stage and a Scale Stage. When experiencing high growth, companies need to learn how to survive the turmoil that comes from the transition between these stages and the inevitable revolutionary and subsequent evolutionary circumstances high growth subjects them to.
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Understanding where you have come from helps to identify the most pressing questions that must be answered to take you through the next phase of growth. Questions such as; what leadership skills do we now need, do we establish more rigorous processes, do we change our financing approach, does the next growth phase demand revolution or evolution, what’s new that we need to communicate and to whom, what lead indicators are we to measure, is revenue the target or margin, do we need to re-communicate our purpose to our teams, do we invest in expanding our teams skill sets now, what incentives do we need for internal and external stakeholders, do we change our structure to support our strategic plans, etc.

​The answers to these questions will form the basis of your transformation plans.

Approximately 60% of all paid employees in OECD countries are employed by small and medium sized organisations. For companies wanting to grow, the benefits to their community and the wider economy is obvious with increases in productivity, average wage per employee, education, tax take and capital availability. 

The very first step towards this growth is understanding where you are. In my second post the Create Stage, Verify Stage, Cultivate Stage and Scale Stage stages will be described to help you decide where you are now and what your next big growth step is likely to be.

The previous four steps would have helped you take stock of what you have in your sales tool bag and you will now be ready for Step 5 of the Five Steps to Sales Growth. The points outlined below won’t tell you how to sell your specific products and services however they will strengthen your sales approach, remove ambiguity from the sales process and help you successfully lead your sales team. 

STEP 5: Selling the Story

• Optimised sales process to support the “business model” – For example; if your strength is manufacturing and your business model relies predominantly on channel sales ensure you have processes that reach as deeply into the channel as possible allowing visibility of the sales pipeline right through to the end customer. However if your business is generating a large volume of leads of varying quality, break your teams up based on capability (hunters, developers, educators, closers, farmers) to address the different stages of your pipeline and the relationship journey your customers want to have with you. You should also look for ways to incorporate the winning habits of your top sales performers into each step of your sales process. Bob Apollo of Inflexion Point wrote an excellent summary of an effective sales process. It can be read here.
• Capture leads and track deals using a CRM – A seemingly obvious step, however two things tend to happen. SME’s frequently take too long to develop solid CRM skills across the team, while many large companies take too long to understand the importance and power of maintaining the discipline of pipeline accuracy. Customer Relationship Management tools and processes have been shown to produce real results including sales up 32%, sales team productivity up 40% and sales forecasting accuracy up 45% (Salesforce.com). Highlighting these benefits to the sales team can reinforce the importance of CRM and process compliance, setting a foundation from which they are likely to win more business.
• Build & retain the right sales capabilities – Once you understand your selling type, and it may be a combination, you can then consider the specific skills needed, broadly categorised as hunters, developers, educators, closers or farmers. So what type of selling do you need to be doing?

1. Product selling; transactional sales generally shorter cycles, sometimes commodity sales that need farming skills
2. Solution selling; added value bundled selling, relationships may not be as important as solution fit, or
3. Consultative selling; often customised solution to address a unique need and longer sales cycles.

Once you understand your selling type you can then consider the specific skills needed: hunters, developers, educators, closers or farmers.

• Align your sales tools to customer journeys – Hopefully by now you will have mapped the common customer behaviours to a customer journey view. Your sales team will have sales tools they use to help them close business including standardized email templates, pitch decks, benefits realisation assessment, pricing configurators, spec sheets, case studies, white papers, Non-Disclosure Agreements, etc. Ensure you have a common view of where and when the optimal time is to use each of these tools and embed them into your sales process. In some cases you should consider not allowing a deal to move forward in your sales pipeline without confirmation that one or a combination of these tools have been deployed, i.e. the benefits realisation assessment must have been completed before a deal can be set to the 60% likely to win stage.
• Test capability to communicate your value – Make time regularly to allow your sales people to learn. Not just what you are selling but also learn from your best practice sales people; what they need to know, do, use, share and avoid at each step through the sales cycle. Use role playing to improve buyer identification, listening skills, messaging, objection handling and closing techniques.
• Focus on reliable forecasting – Sales leaders should not simply run CRM generated sales forecasts and call it done, they need to prove to themselves that each deal is real and has an accurate stage and probability assigned to it. If you know your customer buying behaviours well and your sales are transactional this can be highly automated with rules relating to contact attempts, sales tools deployed and cycle times.  If your sales are not transactional, leaders need to be talking through deals with each sales person to ensure an objective view of stage and probability is recorded. Forecast accuracy will be greatly improved if you can achieve “your minimum standard” of sales process compliance across your sales teams while ensuring each stage in the sales process is associated with at least one observable milestone that confirms that the prospect’s buying decision process has moved forward. Sales activity alone does not represent a prospect’s progress in their buying decision, look for real evidence that they have advanced. Sales forecast accuracy at a macro level can only come from accuracy at a deal level.
• Align sales incentives to strategic goals – Incentives need to consider the current goals of an organisation i.e. a start-up may be focused on customer acquisition numbers where as a privately held mature company may need to focus on new high margin sales.  The sales model will also determine the types of incentives. For example, direct and indirect channels need different incentives, ongoing ownership of the customer relationship may also constrain how incentives can be designed.  The simplest incentives are often based on a percentage of sales revenue given as a one time only payment. Paying on margin is often more complex but has the benefit of sales cost clarity. Another factor that often needs consideration is lifetime value of a sale, this might be to do with support contracts or ongoing licence / SaaS / subscription revenue. There are no generic sales incentive plans as they need thought and consideration to make them work for your specific circumstances. The statement that “you should be careful of what you measure as that is what you will get” could not be truer when it comes to sales incentives.

​If you have managed to stay with me over the past five or so posts you hopefully will have taken on a few ideas about how to address your own issues within each of the Five Steps to Sales Growth. Drop me a line if you’d like to discuss any of these steps in more detail or if you think you could benefit from an objective outside opinion on your current sales strategies.

Foot note on process feedback loops as learning opportunities:Learning Loops –A major Loop from Step five back to Step One exists that can generate product/service improvements which marketing, R&D and manufacturing can lead. There are also minor loops that provide learning opportunities from each step back one.Selling Loop – from Step Five back to Step Two to generate repeat sales and referral business.

Now we are getting to the sharp end of the Five Steps to Sales Growth where you design and execute your one-to-many market communications. If you have taken the opportunity to work through Steps One and Two and then Step Three, you will find you have all the material you need for Step 4: Telling the Story.
STEP 4: Telling the Story

• Create the messages – By now you will know who the buyers are within your target market and what’s in it for them. Focus on the pain, the gain, how you compare to competitors and what sets you apart. Why are you better and what’s your proof? Fold this information into all forms of your messaging and lock it in, creating your elevator pitch, tag lines, value proposition statements, branding, etc.
• The customer journey - Map the Common Customer Behaviours to a customer journey view, pre and post-sale. Consider also if there are different journeys for different segments or personas. This will guide you on when and where to use your different types of messaging, i.e. at trade events, when networking, when blogging, in email campaigns, etc.
• Create the ideal list of artefacts needed to communicate the story – This is the opportunity to get your marketing and sales functions to work collaboratively. The sales folks can bring real world, anecdotal feedback from customers offering advice from what works in the field. The marketing team can keep the focus on a one-to-many approach to ensure the message works at scale but can still be executed in the field in a one-to-one situation. 
• Align messages to customer journey stages - Designing a library of collateral and other artefacts with your sales team's input enables you to accurately map each sales artefact to the different phases of the customer journey.
• Where to place the message – With the clear understanding you gained from Steps 1, 2 and 3 you will be able to map why, how, where and when you need to communicate your message. This will also help you make sense out of the many options (online ads, social media, trade events, print, email, blogs, etc.) and the investment required. Now execute your plan!
• Communicating with your channels – The sales channels you use will need to understand your customer journey/s, messaging, etc. They may also need their own separate portfolio of messaging that is adapted to their sales needs i.e. localize language, pricing information and affiliated branding.

Once you have worked through the above issues you will have a considered set of communication artefacts that provide clear guidance for your sales teams and sales channels to use with confidence. Carrying out Step 4 thoroughly provides a strategic marketing framework that you can adjust as you receive feedback from real in market failures and successes. In my next post I’ll outline the final step, Step 5: It's Time to Start Selling.

My last post focused on understanding how relevant your products are to your customers (Step 1 & 2), Step 3 below is about sizing your target market and quantifying what the current opportunity is. These are the key questions you need to consider as you work through sizing your opportunity.

Like Step 1 and 2 you’ll get more out of this step if you can get your sales, marketing and product teams working through these issues together. As a reminder all the Five Steps to Sales Growth are summarized here.

STEP 3: Current Market Opportunity

• When are customers ready to buy – are there market conditions that drive buyer readiness such as legislation, technology adoption or fundamental industry change on the horizon?
• Customer locations – Sizing the market by location can highlight future office sites, where to hire, where to build brand awareness, etc.
• Segments with identifiable value propositions – Do segments offer opportunity for separate lines of revenue, for example; new brands or bundling of products. Are different value propositions needed for each segment?
• Personas and motivations to buy – Humanizing demographics with the use of personas provides you with clear examples of the typical ideal customer (Buyer, User, and Influencer). This brings focus to conversations for your team about markets and customers.
• Size the Total Addressable Market – This is a numbers based exercise with as much real world data as can be gathered. Drilling down on the actual number of buyers will be useful here. Clear assumptions of size, sale price and forecast quantity purchased should be presented for debate and reviewed as more information comes to hand. This information is critical for any business case or investor pitch.
• The ideal sell price – There are many ways to set a sell price from the heavily research to the suck it and see approach. Find a pragmatic balance for your situation using an appropriate amount of market testing and then get on with releasing it to market. Always leave yourself room to change this in the future, including ensuring your customer contract T&C’s enable price changes. If unsure start high, customers will not resist price reductions. Note also that a low price can translate to perceived low quality for some buyers.
• Assess customer Lifetime Value – Understanding your Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) and Lifetime Value (LTV) will also be critical for any business case or investor pitch. For this you will need to know, or assume recurring revenue, gross margin, churn and discount rates. As an example of a SaaS business, if LTV is 3X or greater than CAC, it is a good sign the business model will work.
• Position against key direct and indirect competitors – Understanding your competitive landscape will be an exercise in ongoing intelligence gathering, however getting a broad fix on this early is important. Data from large competing companies is relatively easy to obtain and often where most stop. You will need to dig around for data on the mid-size and small competitors as these can be significant in number but may not have the public presence. Using locals to gather data, customer contacts and industry insiders will improve your competitor data quality.

​The level of quantification each business needs to size its target market will vary considerably depending on your sponsor’s and stakeholder’s requirements. In most cases I have found market sizing is a combination of facts, hypothesis and assumptions. Get comfortable with the level of ambiguity you will accept and move forward.

What are some of the challenges you have experienced in sizing your target markets, does any of the above sound familiar?

In my next post I’ll provide more examples and thoughts to help you tell your story – Step 4: How Are You Telling Your Story?.

Following on from my first summary post on the Five Steps to Sales Growth below are key questions, examples and thoughts to help you tackle Step 1 and Step 2. Ideally you will want your sales, marketing and product teams working through these issues together.

STEP 1: Service / Product Understanding

• What it does (today) - It’s important to understand what it does / creates / delivers in its most basic form. For a tangible product this will be a simple feature list, for a service this may be a clear statement about deliverables the customer will receive.
• Immediate and obvious benefits to customers – This is a one or two sentence statement in customer language about the problem solved and forms the beginnings of your value proposition statement. You will want to ensure messages about these benefits and what it does are consistently used in your sales team’s conversations with customers.
• Production / scale barriers – What are the prerequisites to offering your product services to customers. Are there constraints such as legislation, geography, maximum production capacity, language, market segment, etc?
• Manufacture, build, delivery and support costs – Build an understanding of your true and full costs from the beginning as it is much easier to develop processes and systems to capture this data early rather than once you are selling. This cost information will be key base data for future business analysis that you will be called on to do by multiple stakeholders.

Note: These points assume you already have customers using your product/service. If not and you are still defining what you will offer you should swap Step 1 and Step 2 around.

STEP 2: Customer Need Understanding

• Do customers know they have a need – Is your solution to the customer’s problem so obvious that they will buy without being educated or do you need to “train the market”?
• Confirm and test - Who is the actionable group of buyers within your target market and what’s in it for them? How do you compare to other products they know, what is it that sets you apart? Why are you better and what is the proof to your claim?
• Holistic view of stakeholders – Are there other stakeholders outside of your target buyers who may influence buyers, benefit from a buyers purchase, or create barriers to purchase. These could be officials that monitor legislation in a market or they could simply be the children of the people who buy your products.
• Common customer behaviours – What triggers the need to buy, how do buyers research, what is the cycle time from, need recognised to purchase made. What are the buyers' after sales relationship expectations, i.e. technical support, account management, loyalty discounts, etc.
• Common situational issues – Are there seasonal factors that you need to take into account such of end of financial year, stocking for Christmas, etc.

These are just a slice of the issues you may need to address for each step. Feel free to add comments from your own experience within your markets, products and services.
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In my next post I’ll provide more examples and thoughts to help you address the challenges of assessing your market size in Step 3: How Big is Your Market Opportunity?

​Over the past 17 years I have consulted to, managed and coached dozens of businesses from multinationals to early stage start-ups. "We need more sales" is often what I hear and at the core of the many answers to this question are the following five steps to sales growth.

​At times only one of these steps is top of the business agenda and that’s ok as long as it is in context with the other four. The biggest failures, however, occur when improving just one of these steps is considered as the full sales strategy and therefore relied upon to deliver sales growth. To build and maintain healthy sales, each step must be considered as being interdependent. 

Businesses often find that they are in a continuous evolutionary state with respect to almost every step listed. I can’t stress enough the importance of acknowledging each step as a fundamental component of the full sales strategy. Taking the time to audit where you are at with each of these steps is a far better investment than reacting to underperforming sales results by firing, hiring or changing incentive plans for your sales teams.

In this age of new digital sales techniques, tricks and skills being touted as the next best thing it has never been more important than now to develop a considered and holistic sales approach.

In my upcoming posts I hope to help your understanding of these issues by drilling down on each of the five steps with practical clues and share examples on how to execute for your business.

Details for each of these steps can now be found at the following links; Step 1 and Step 2, Step 3, Step 4 and Step 5 here

​A checkpoint on your current organisational measures.