Many small business owners find themselves stuck in business, and their instinct is to invest more in marketing and social media, only to be disappointed by the lack of sales. Despite their efforts, they often find their marketing dollars are not translating to the growth that they envisioned. The problem: They skipped a crucial step in setting up their business.
I often share this analogy with my clients to help them understand three crucial steps to setting up a scalable business:
Imagine you are building a car. You first need a solid base (frame), drive train and tires. This is your product or service. Next, you build your power train, the engine, which will turn those wheels and make things happen. This is your sales foundation and your sales systems. Finally, you need the fuel. This is your marketing and lead generation efforts. Turning on lead generation, or fuel, when you have nowhere for it to go won’t get you anywhere and can even leave you with a “hazardous mess.”
3 Crucial Steps
There are three essential steps to establishing a business that can scale: setting up fulfillment, laying a solid sales foundation with sales systems and, finally, turning on marketing and lead generation.
Step 1: Setting up fulfillment. This first step is one that most small business owners have down. Early on in their business, they invest a lot of their resources in creating a product or service that they are proud to deliver to their clients. Time and money are spent on resources and delivery methods to ensure fulfillment is spot on and clients are satisfied with the product or service.
Step 3: Turning on marketing and lead generation. I intentionally skipped to Step 3 because that is what most business owners do. Anxious to begin generating revenue, excited founders transition their resources to marketing and lead generation. Moving from Step 1 to Step 3 seems like a natural progression. You get it. The service is so great that it sells itself — and guess what? It does. It does, until you realize that way of thinking is buying yourself a job, and not creating a scalable business.
Step 2: Laying a solid sales foundation and establishing systems. It is common to miss this second step in business. I have joined multi-seven-figure businesses that plateaued because skipping this step will eventually catch up with a business.
What Missing This Step Looks Like
Your business is trucking along with the normal ups and downs of starting a business, until finally you feel like you’ve got it down. You enjoy the hustle, and your business is growing! Then one day, you wake up and realize: You are stuck. You’re not growing. You may have positive cashflow, but your month-over-month and year-over-year sales are lackluster. The truth bomb is that this means this business you built with your blood, sweat and tears may not be able to support you ever exiting. It keeps you up at night.
Common Symptoms of Missing Step 2
- Unsteady cashflow: There may be up months and down months, leaving businesses moving money around to make payroll.
- Seasonality: This is often a tell-tale sign.
- Wasted time and money: Trying all the things to grow the business with no plan, hoping that something will work or be that magic bullet.
- Indecision: Wondering if you should hire a new sales rep, invest in a sales agency or sales training, or just continue to throw money into lead generation.
- Constantly trying new things: New messaging, new lead generation strategies and new tactics are all signs of distress.
Prescription:
- Set up a sales foundation: Have a clear and effective way to handle leads, talk to customers and close deals to create a clear path for optimization and automation. Take care to put in the work to avoid automating flawed or inefficient processes that will only magnify your issues.
- Optimize and automate: Use the foundation you have built to do things like streamline workflows, enhance customer communication, automate follow-up and be intentional with customer data collection and management.
- Leverage data: Begin to leverage the wealth of data accumulated to pave a way for smarter lead generation and effective growth strategies.
Tying It All Together
Hiring a marketing company when your business is stuck is an easy answer but, for many businesses, this may not address the root cause of their problem. Shoring up the sales foundation and implementing sales systems takes real work, but the reward of that effort is paid back in multiples, setting the business up for growth, allowing you to exit the business wealthy.
Serving as a director and sitting on the board of the Phoenix chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners, I’ve seen the importance of these steps firsthand. Our organization provides resources, training and support to help women business entrepreneurs build strong business foundations. One of our key initiatives is connecting our members with corporate sponsors who offer tools and technologies that streamline business processes. These partnerships ensure that our members have access to the best resources available, enabling them to focus on growth.
To learn more about NAWBO or to become a corporate sponsor visit NAWBOphx.org.
Wendy Cornell
Owner/Consultant
Steady On Tech
