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A lot has changed in the past year. The global pandemic has upended entire industries and many businesses have scrambled to pivot to accommodate massive losses, massive growth, or just massive changes. Fortunately, the Scaleur practices that we cover in this blog can help entrepreneurs and businesses weather storms like these far better than their competition. 

That’s why we think it’s the perfect time to revisit the fundamentals: The 4 S’s of Scaling. 

To truly scale, you must upsize your strategic practices, implement new marketing strategies, find new ways to build your team and expand your mindset to break through whatever is keeping you stuck at the same level. Then you must be willing to take the leap into the giant unknown. After 2020, piece of cake, right? 

1. STRATEGY

The first “S,” strategy, helps you to set firm foundations and know who your target is and how to go after them. It will also help you identify the exact steps to follow every time in order to acquire customers.

Customer first

Dive in and try to understand who your customer is (and is not). Get away from your desk, and talk to your prospects and customers to find out: 

• Who are they?
• Why are they buying your product? Or not buying it?
• How much is your product worth to them?
• How much is your product saving them?

Think like a scaleur

As an entrepreneur, you are on the mission to create predictable growth. Talk to smart and like-minded people and be the one who has a growth scaleur mindset.

This will impact not only sales, but attract the right people, reduce stress and decision making, create a culture, and help you be nimble and flexible. Put these people on your website. Make sure your team knows them, and make sure you follow them and interact with them online. Ultimately, know what you stand for before you try to scale.

Make your marketing playbook or roadmap

Your playbook and roadmap are essential for your business. You’ll need these to win new business/ leads. It’s never too early to start constructing your playbook.

2. SYSTEMS

Once you have the stages and steps defined, you can build a system around it to facilitate, monitor, and optimize your process. Find out what marketing automation tools work.

Define your values 

Every company needs a clear set of values. Talk to people around you. Go to networking functions and never eat lunch alone to find like-minded scaleurs; pick their brains about what processes work. Use this to refine your marketing playbook or roadmap!

Set up mass emailing

Short and sweet email templates work for a top-down based approach. It helps you find the right person, which is a crucial part of the process. Don’t ask for the sale, ask for the person – can you direct me to the person on your team responsible for…? Be human, not sales-y. 

3. SCALEUR

If you have the right foundation, system, processes, and roadmap established, it makes it easier to hire the right people who can execute for you.

Optimize the ‘free trial’ of your product

A free trial is a great way to let your product sell itself and lower your sales costs. If you’re going to do this, think of the steps that a customer takes to get to the ‘wow’ moment as a funnel.

Team

A core group of fun, creative, hardworking, and intelligent people / scaleurs is your number one priority. If you get this part right, everything else gets a lot easier.

Hire the right kind of scaleurs in terms of personality types and culture fit. That means coachability, adaptability, curiosity, and a strong work ethic, having that scaleur growth mindset.

Make sure you hire scaleurs and people who like to get their hands dirty. It’s all about the hustle.

When hiring, the best predictor of future success is past performance. Your hiring process starts by clearly describing what skills are critical to succeeding. Important questions to ask:

• Describe how you rank your leads?
• How did you build a pipeline?
• Describe your email strategy?
• How do you use social media to connect with your prospects? 
• What KPIs did you use to manage your activity?

4. SUCCESS PANEL

Once you have everything in place. You need to ensure consistent results by looking at the numbers and determining what’s working. Review every step of the marketing funnel to determine where the holes are.

Analyze your funnel

Analyze your marketing funnel with three metrics:

• Flow: break your marketing funnel down into it primary units. Monitor how many people are moving through each step in the funnel
• Conversion: measure things like free trials, conversion rate, deal closed in a time-series graph. Ask how you can improve each step.
• Profitability, or customer acquisition cost (CAC). What is your cost of acquiring a customer?

Focus

Don’t go crazy trying to track everything. Figure out your best metrics by observing what led your best customer to purchase. A sales demo? An email? A free download? A visit to your website? Focus on the right metrics.

Product-market fit 

Analyze the product-market fit. It’s a waste of money to have people selling a bad product. Fix your product problems first.

Your metrics will likely change over time. What indicates success at one time may mean something entirely different at another. Be committed to being responsive as you get new information.

Looking Forward

If you can apply the 4 S’s of Scaling: Strategy, Systems, Scaleur, and Success Panel, your business will be more prepared than most to not only weather any unexpected chaos that comes your way but will be set up to thrive. So get started today and make 2021 your best business year yet! 

Keep a Scaleur’s Mindset

Moreover, never forget that the starting point for scaling lies not in your capital, resources, infrastructure, clientele, or workforce, but within you: the scaleur’s mindset. That means having the energy and desire to scale, and possessing a “growth mindset” that embraces change and uncertainty, thrives on challenges, and learns from failures. 

If you’ve cultivated the right mentality for scaling, you are ready to ascertain whether your existing processes can be scaled. Existing processes will be under heavy strain as your output increases exponentially — can you align and standardize them to accommodate an explosive period of growth? 

Invest in your Team

In almost all cases, scaling will require automation, which is largely a function of the right tools and technology. But processes also depend on people — and scaling, as with almost any function in business, demands that you have the right team in place. In a broad sense, this means having a team that lives and breathes the company values and gels with the company culture. You need the right mix of generalists and specialists to cover all the bases. Areas that in-house staff can’t cover must be filled in by outside help (freelancers, contract labor, outsourcing, etc.), or you’re going to have a rocky time with managing a corporate growth spurt.

Remember the nine core marketing positions that comprise your “A-team.” In smaller organizations, the same people may play more than one role, but fulfilling all of them is a key step toward successful scaling.

Stay Different 

Meanwhile, you must emphasize your differentiators as a company. Scaling is not achieved from wishful thinking or sheer will — if you wish to scale up, you must have something original, compelling, and marketable to entice a vastly expanded clientele. A differentiator, you may recall, fulfills three criteria: It must be true; it must be valuable to potential clients; and it must be provable.

Become a Successful Scaleur

Scaling is a strategy that can only be mastered by a scaleur who is a dedicated learner and considers real-time business priorities. I hope the article above has helped! Marketing Scaleurs is a scaling company that helps entrepreneurs scale their marketing efforts. We’re experts in growth marketing, product development, and more, creating custom growth plans for startups, entrepreneurs and scaleurs in order to help them gain traffic, generate leads and increase their revenue. 

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time!