Once a company has found a proven business model and has reached the scaling phase, it’s easy to leverage fresh capital to scale headcount and drive revenue growth. However, what does the future look like for a business using this methodology?
- Option A: A massive corporate bureaucracy with multiple management layers that helps facilitate communication across a large team.
- Option B: A lean core team with technology interweaved to streamline manual operational processes and provide information transparency.
If you want to take the latter path, before each new job posting, consider if you can utilize technology or adopt new processes to streamline employee tasks and increase efficiency. While this requires an upfront effort, you ensure a future where you only have critical hires within your organization and flexible capacity to accommodate quick shifts in your business for the new paradigm.
Optimize Your Sales Engine
The traditional sales hiring philosophy is “hire as long as a salesperson is profitable.” Challenge this by constantly re-thinking the entire sales flow with each new hire—leverage technology with cost-efficient outsourced capabilities to maximize revenue per employee.
Pro Tips:
- Automate inbound inquiry responses with a simple form to help qualify prospects rather than having an initial phone call. Intentionally dissuade prospects that are not a good fit for your product or offering, so no one wastes any time. Remember, sales time is expensive.
- Utilize international freelancers to help generate targeted lead lists with templatized outreach rather than buying generic lists or using your sales team’s time.
- Enroll ghosted and dead leads into an automated drip campaign with a combination of product updates, customer stories, and personalized touchpoints to drive re-engagement.
- Streamline contracts with neutral boilerplate language with the typical legalese coupled with key sections of customizability as negotiating points to minimize legal or finance contract review.
- Enroll closed leads in an automated onboarding flow integrated with Finance. This will help with finalizing paperwork, provisioning, automated payments, and virtual onboarding, so the sales team can focus its energy on new opportunities while enhancing the customer experience.
Enable Marketing to Quickly Adapt
Marketing is a unique function that is always evolving with new channels and a continually shifting landscape. Rather than operationalizing existing processes, enable the entire function to be dynamic and flexible to adapt to new channels, technologies, and strategies. Focus your internal team on strategy and coordination, and leverage external resources and technology for scalable execution.
Pro Tips:
- Simplify any manual metrics for data entry into Google Sheets combined with pre-written calculations to automatically generate up-to-date charts in Google Slides.
- Leverage boutique pay-for-performance agencies or high-commissioned affiliates to test new methods of scaling your paid media growth with less risk.
- Shift traditional media spend from impression-based costing to direct response television and direct response radio to ensure profitable campaigns.
- Combine SEO consultants with freelance writing talent to maintain a constant SEO engine.
- To capitalize on a remote environment, utilize simple video testimonial tools to capture casual customer stories to allow current customers to help convert prospects.
Streamline Your Finance Function
Finance is naturally a cost center within an organization, typically functioning as a supporting role to ensure the money keeps flowing and bills are paid.
Pro Tips:
- Combine contract CFOs with affordable freelance bookkeeping talent to design a granular chart of accounts with cost-effective financial statement upkeep.
- Explore accounts payable automation with robust, cloud-based solutions to minimize building out an accounts payable team, allowing for efficient finance scaling.
- Turn finance from a cost center into a revenue-driving function with an early payments solution, potentially adding incremental revenue for each invoice paid.
Empower People with the Right Tools
One of the most valuable resources in any organization is your team’s time. As a new paradigm evolves of asynchronous work, leverage tools that facilitate communication and collaboration.
Pro Tips:
- Leverage an all-in-one employee management platform to unify HR software and eliminate the HR administrative burden of onboarding new hires, rolling out annual changes, and distributing updated policies.
- Implement a cloud-based password management system to simplify login across platforms, improve productivity, and enforce higher security levels.
- Incorporate a unified, persistent chat-based communications platform with department channels to provide greater transparency across the organization and minimize inefficiency.
- Design an intuitive and structured cloud-based document management system across departments with real-time collaboration functionality to eliminate version control conflicts and improve productivity with easy access to past projects.
An executive’s responsibility is not just to focus on the bottom line, but to continually prioritize maximizing employee productivity while minimizing time spent on overhead and administrative work. And, with the right tips, tools, and technology, this goal becomes a reality.
