How to grow tech companies beyond early customers (lessons learned for massive sales increase)

This article is for entrepreneurs that aim for sales increase to grow tech companies to the next level. You have most likely established your offering with early adopter customers, ready to scale.

• Are you frustrated why your sales does not take off at greater scale?
• Do your early adopter sales plateau and you’re ready to grow to the next level?

This guide is for you.

If you’re a tech startup still with limited sales, you may like to read this early sales article instead.

To growth tech companies with sales increase you will need more structure than in early sales

A key learning reading this guide is that you will need a structured approach if you aim for sales increase. I will therefor go through each of below step so that you understand how to grow tech companies, massively:

1. The biggest difference in early sales vs long term growth.
2. Why you need a structured approach for long term sales increases.
3. What else to grow tech companies – beyond customer segmentation and other sales increase initiatives?
4. Where to beyond customer segmentation to grow tech companies, long term.
5. How do I know when I am ready to grow sales to the next level?
6. Continue to serve current customers while aiming for larger customers?
7. How to organize sales to grow tech companies to the next level.
8. You need more than resources when to grow tech companies.
9. Partnership alternatives when to aim for sales increase in tech companies.
10. Communication strategies when targeting massive sales increase.

So, before we start, why should you read what I have to say?

• I have 25+ year of experience to grow technology-based businesses sales and operations.
• For the last 10 years I have been working with venture capital and private equity.
• I have USD 8+ billion in personal transaction experience buying, merging and selling technology businesses.

Today I advise and help ambitious technology entrepreneurs to grow their businesses with strategies proven in venture capital and private equity. My specialty is bridging entrepreneur stubbiness with investor methods and growth focus. I understand both languages.

Now, let’s get started!

The biggest difference in early sales vs long term growth

Early stage customers are your friends – they share your ambition

Your early stage customers are likeminded early adopters. Most likely your first customers fall into one of the following categories, considering that you as a startup had no sales and no sales traction [https://guidesandtemplates.com/sales-traction-important-for-value-creation/] before you started:

1. You knew your first customers. They are former colleagues or friends.
2. They are usually relatively small and agile businesses quick to decision.
3. Tech savvy and curious, often relatively small operations.
4. There is a real and present trigger that you happened to time, i.e. a strong need for a relatively simple solution.

The common trail, except for bullet number one, is that these kinds of customer are typical early adopters. They share your ideas, they are technology curious and visionary in their mindset. Most of all, they are agile, relatively fast to decision and not too risk cautious.

The challenge with early stage customers:

• Margin growth is a challenge. Additional orders, new features and other up-sales are unlikely.
• Most of these customers are relatively small making sales increase a challenge. Most likely you will end up with hundreds of ongoing small sales that eventually gets difficult to manage.
• Early adopters are few, relatively speaking. You need those for references but at some point, you need to adjust your growth strategy to sustain sales increases.

Before we continue with the characteristics of the majority of customers, those who are not typical early adopters, you may like to read more about early stage sales here.

Unfortunately, the majority of customers are pre-occupied, risk adverse and sceptic

Unlike your fast decision making, not too risk cautious early stage customers, the majority of customers are pre-occupied, risk adverse and sceptic. That makes them a much tougher sale and hence crossing the chasm to long term sales increase requires some changes.

These are the key characteristics of the majority of customers, those to target ones you have secured your early sales success:

1. Most potential customers are pre-occupied with their own things. They are used to sales calls, often polite but occupied with multiple internal initiatives of their own. The chances that your revolutionary offer will close fast and without prolonged effort is slim.
2. Selling directly to the owner of a small businesses makes one used to people with decision power. In larger companies thought, risk taking is seldom rewarded. A new business needs multiple early stage customers as references and to gain a certain company size. Predictability, delivery quality, proof of concept and doing what other does, attracts risk adverse, employed decision makers.
3. Many of your targeted customers will be enterprise customers where true decision makers with discretionary budgets are hard to track down. You’re likely to talk to the wrong person or to the correct person, but once that does not make the final decision.

All above makes the majority of customers much more sceptic than your early sales early adopter customers.

New features or productivity improvements are usually not enough to trigger sales with a majority of customers.

Because the majority of customers are pre-occupied, risk adverse and sceptic you need your early stage sales for references and to grow out of the startup phase. That creates comfort for you’re the majority of sceptic customers. It will be the foundation when you adjust your growth strategy for your next level sales increase.

Read more what makes a good sales strategy.

Another difference in early sales vs long term growth is sales volume and margins

Early stage customers are sweat. It feels good and we as entrepreneurs learn a lot from those customers. The sales increase challenges with early customers are volume and margins.

1. Early stage customers are usually relatively small hence the volume per customer is limited. When you aiming for long term growth you will need volumes to get a sustainable sales increase. For a standardized low prized product, you can scale with sales funnels and easy onboarding. For customized products and higher priced services, you need a more structured approach to sales to gain larger volume. More about that further down in this article.
2. The up sales potential is limit-ed with smaller customers. Your initial sale is usually what you sell to a specific customer aside from the occasional additional user or one more of the same product. For long term sales increase you need to find ways to lower your customer acquisition cost. That can either mean a highly standardized and automized sales and offering or targeting larger customers with up sale potentials. Up sale means higher margins per customers since customer acquisition cost goes down relative your revenue.
3. Early stage customers are a relatively easy sell, despite many entrepreneurs thinking the contrary evolving their product market fit. As you grow, sales become tougher since you will run out of early adopters targeting the broader market. A difference between early sales and long-term growth is that you need another type of sales process than before. Knowing when and how to redesign sales for long term sales increase is a challenge to many entrepreneurs. Stay tune, practical tips coming soon in this article.

Above three differences between early sales vs long term growth is sales volume and margins.

To grow tech companies long term

Long term sales increase can be gained with standardization and a high degree of automation. That’s a growth strategy often used with relatively standardized and low prized offerings.

Long term sales increase can also be gained with well-thought through relationship journey’s with proof of concept, entry sale and up sales. That is the common approach with many industrial products with customer specific designs or with more expensive products.

Both growth strategies differ substantially from most early stage sales. The most common challenge growing a business is to know when to change, or rather when to design and implement, a more structured sales process. It goes against what many startup entrepreneurs sees as entrepreneurship.

To grow as an entrepreneur when the busines is growing is the biggest challenge of them all.

Seeking the attention, interest and willingness to invest with the majority of potential customers is hard. That is a key difference from your early sales.

Managing an increasing number of outstanding sales offers will eventually be overwhelming. Adding more sales executives will not be enough and its now that you need to consider how to scale to the next level.

As already mentioned, for long term sales increases, with the majority of potential customers, you need a more structured approach to sales than you have had with your early customers.

Being more structured than before is where many entrepreneurs struggle. Structure is too often seen as the opposite of entrepreneurship. The most common reason for startups failing with their long term sales ambitions is the failure of the founder to grow with his business.

Now when you know the biggest differences in early sales vs long term growth, let’s dig into how to target next level sales increase. Let’s go beyond those early customer success stories.

Why you need a structured approach for long term sales increase (and how to do that)

The chances are that most of your early customers have been relatively fast to decision. Despite what you believe. To aim for sales increase, you will need a different approach.

Most likely your first customers have been curious, tech savvy, smaller businesses and prepared to test something new. The majority of customers are not like that.

Your next level growth strategy needs to reflect that most customers are reluctant to purchase

Few if any businesses are set up for the purpose of being your customer. Even if we sometimes like to believe that.

Beyond their own daily sales and operation, your target customers have their own agendas and priorities to cater.

You cannot build a solid growth strategy on luck. Targeting the majority of customers, beyond your early adopters, means that you need to have patience.  Sales will not come fast based on arguments such as efficiency improvement or lower operating cost alone.

In particular:

1. You need to nurse relationships on different levels with your target customers. You’re not alone trying to sell products and services to these businesses. They are pre-occupied with their own sales and operations and with multiple sales executives trying to sell them different solutions or products. To build and nurse a deep relationship is key to gain priority, trust and air-time.
2. Educate your customers. Don’t be to sales focused. Use proactive marketing as part of the growth strategy, meaning you establish yourself as an authority within your specific area. Doing so complemented with relevant case studies increases your chance to climb the priority lader.
3. Most importantly, you need to be present when your customers are ready to purchase. Unfortunately, you’re not always top of mind despite your relationship building. Those that have had the latest discussion with the potential customers has an advantage over others. Unfortunately, it is difficult to know when that purchase moment occur, hence the need for long term customer relationship journey’s. More on that a bit further down this article.

To filter through the noise of various daily operations, to do’s, plans, priorities and internal politics with your customers is key for sustained sales increase. A ground-breaking service or product is simply not enough.

Closing the sales at purchase moments is difficult, not even the customer will always know when to close

When you target enterprise customers you usually talk to product owners, category buyers, engineering teams, business unit heads and similar. If you’re lucky or particularly skilled you may have the chance to sit down in multiple discussions and workshops.

Gradually you build trust, interest and priority with your target customers. These three steps are key with reluctant customers, but it’s only the beginning. To gain a sale increases you also need deal closings.

Usually sales process takes more time than anticipated. That is the biggest difference between early adopter sales and long-term sales growth.

Not only is it difficult to know if your services and solutions are of highest priority within your target customer organizationss. It is also utterly difficult to know when decisions will be made, if so, and who the decision maker is.

Usually the decision process is not as straight forward as one would wish for. Relevant parts of your potential customers organization are certainly involved in understanding and evaluation your services or product. Often however, decisions are elsewhere by an executive or management group that you have not meet.

To complicate it even further, most businesses has multiple ongoing activities, initiatives and ambitions at the same time. You compete for air time, priority and implementation decision with all of those.

I once moderated an internal annual strategy conference and the CEO of a major insurance company confirmed with me that not even she knows when prioritized projects are ready for their go ahead decisions. Not only are internal evaluation often delayed and interrupted by more present tasks, other prioritized initiatives, internal political timing issues and soft factors come into play as well.

You need a structured approach to overcome these uncertainties. You need what I would call a relationship journey. More on that very soon.

Pricing strategy is key aiming for sales increase and to build customer releationship

Early sales customers are relatively straight forward from a pricing point of view. Believe it or not.

Beyond sharing your ideas and showing interest in a solution, most early stage customer’s need to know that their purchase makes financial sense. That’s usually a one-off type ROI analysis. Very different from what you will experience with larger enterprise customers.

The majority of customers are more complicated than your early stage customers also from a pricing strategy point of view.

Larger companies are usually much tougher negotiators and more price sensitive than smaller early adopters. It may sound contradictory considering the higher values and benefits at stake at larger enterprises. It originate however from internal budget processes, delegated decision power limits and price focused purchasing teams.

The secret to better margins with non-early adopters is the up-sale potential. It is with up-sales such as additional features, more users and consultancy services that you make your margin with larger enterprise customers.

Pricing strategy for most sceptic enterprise customers can be summarized as follows, as seen with many successful businesses:

1. Your entry sale will be heavily scrutinized and price pressure is real. Don’t get offended. Once on the inside with your customer, up sale potentials will get you your margins.
2. Customer success is super important to form a basis for up-selling additional training, additional feasibility studies and new features. Once you have done that, make sure to be price sensitive but price up sale with a higher margin than your entre sell. Once you’re on the inside and have delivered successfully, your customer becomes less price sensitive. His or her willingness to pay will be high as long as you (now) deliver additional value and convenience.

Pricing strategy becomes an art once your targeting sales increases beyond your early adopters.

The relationship journey (the solution to uncertain customer priorities and unclear decision makers)

The larger the business organization, the more complicated the purchase process. Ideally you like to have the initiative, not being exposed to Request for Proposal processes in competition with other vendors.

Having a ground-breaking solution is not enough to trigger a purchase. Trust, priority and timing is key in most sales situations. The challenge? Years of relationship building needed. I call it the relationship journey.

Three areas are important to the majority of prospective customers:

1. Trust – no one will listen to you or take your solutions and offering until trust established. Trust come in many forms: Credibility of your solution, relevance of your reference cases, size of your business (long-term sustainability), personal chemistry, etc. Develop these building blocks of trust, internally with your businesses and externally with your prospects, to make deal closing more likely.
2. Priority – most businesses are very much pre-occupied with various daily tasks and challenges. Most businesses also have a backlog of desired initiative. There is no chance you will make a closing unless you gain priority with your prospective customers. You need to culture deep relationship with your prospective customer to truly understand their pain points an adjust to those.
3. Timing – regardless of your offering, trust and priority, deal closing comes down to timing. This is tricky since timing is often non-logical. Internal politics, delays, shifts in priority and mindsets, operational disruptions all effect timing. You need to be present with your prospects all the time to be top of mine when that magic purchase moment suddenly occurs.

A relationship journey is a structured action plan with each of your target customers. Usually such a plan is 2-3 year long. Milestones include mapping of key customer individuals, meeting plans, authority building plans, pain point analysis, and a stepwise plan for marketing and sales.

What else to grow tech companies – beyond customer segmentation and other sales increase initiatives?

Growth strategy is useless unless your deemed relevant by your target customers

In our early sales we all segmented and niched down to be relevant, competitive and iterate to product market fit. Once sales increase, we learned what’s really important for a customer centric growth strategy:

1. Relationship building, as described in previous section, to build trust, gain priority and hit that perfect timing.
2. Getting to understanding specific pain-point is one of the underlying factors that drives priority and timing. Pain-points are partly generic but specific to each potential customer in terms of timing and preferred solutions.
3. Trigger points are key to close a sale. When the timing is right, the solution to a prioritized pain-point is agreed and you are the relevant vendor, you still need a trigger to get to sales closing. It’s hard but recognizing their importance is the first step to learn to identify trigger events and how to help push for them.

A fourth driver for sales increase is relevance. You will not close a deal unless your deemed relevant by your prospective customers. The relationship journey is the sales and marketing process for relevance. There are also housekeeping factors to determining supplier relevance, as described in the next chapter.

A relatively small IT vendor came second to none in a RfP evaluation I was overseeing at one of the major European commercial banks. The management team were about to award the contract to the runner up being a well-known international IT system provider. I had to stick out my neck and use my power to overrule that decision for the benefit of the smaller firm who won the evaluation. This example is all but unusual and shows the uphill climb small business faces.

Additional relevance factors – without these you will not see sales increase

You need to be relevant for your customers for sales to increase and your growth strategy to work. Relevant beyond product market fit, trust, priority, timing, relationship building, understanding the pain points and finding the triggers that close.

Here is a short list of additional factors that must be fulfilled to be deemed relevant by your target customers:

1. Sales, i.e. size of the company: Like with previous point, a certain size of your company indicates relevance. Size indicates that your trustworthy, can deliver on time and quality and is somewhat future proof.  It’s about perception, but a very important one. Size is less important in your early sales with small businesses and early adopters. As you climb the ladder size becomes increasingly important. $10 million in sales is probably a minimum size to be viewed beyond being a startup. $25-50 million is probably the minimum in most cases to be seen starting to grow out of being a small business.
2. Relevant reference sales – beyond your early adopters most customers dislike risks and prefer to do what others have done.  Generally speaking, you need enough of smaller early adopter reference cases to be relevant to bigger fishes.
3. Local presence – targeting overseas customers makes them wonder about you staying around. Establishing a local subsidiary will improve your relevance compared with partnering up with a local sales rep.
4. Delivery capacity is certainly key when customers evaluate your relevance to them. Reference orders and size are two components to this. Your team is another important component. Single individual dependencies in sales or technology is certainly not seen as positive by the majority of your potential customers. In particular those we would call enterprise customers.

Your senior team is key to achieve sales increase – one of the bigger challenges to grow tech companies

A limiting factor to sales increase is often the entrepreneurs hiring policy. Too many entrepreneurs seem to be overly tempted to hire junior employees rather than a few more senior executives. Cost and control needs are common drivers preventing senior hiring’s.

Hiring a few senior executives rather than many cheaper junior employees not only has benefits, it is also a necessity when aspiring for sales increase:

1. Less risk of the entrepreneur to become the bottleneck. Entrepreneurs tend not to see this, working harder than anyone else. In their logic they think about how to get their (junior) employees to work equally hard as they do.
2. Complementary know-how and leverage. Self-learning is part of entrepreneurship but sometimes it makes entrepreneurs suspicious about others. Try yourself but soon thereafter hire other senior executives to develop parts of your business.
3. Customer and investor trust are partly built on risk mitigation. A majority of customers and investors distrust companies with high single individual dependencies. There is simply too much of sales and operational risk involved.
4. Senior customer employees like to talk to likeminded senior people. Not to junior technicians or junior sales reps. To gain sales increase you need to hire senior sales executives and technicians.
5. Enterprise customers get concerned if they learn that one or two individuals show up in all kinds of capacities. It’s common for early stage startup’s that one or two individuals are instrumental in technical sales, onboarding and operations. But, to most prospective customers, this indicates a huge operational risk. I seen this. It’s hard to get around.

It’s tempting to hire junior employees. Early stage innovation, engineering and sales experiences often remain in focus despite ambitions to scale sales.

What to do: Invest in senior team members. Learn to let go to grow.

How do I know when I am ready to grow sales to the next level?

There are two answers to when you know when you’re ready to scale:

1. You’re ready to grow when you have enough annual sales. It may sound contradictory, but you need $10-25 million in early adopter sales to have enough relevant reference customers, a true product market fit and financial resources to invest in growth.
2. You’re ready to grow when you as the founder feel confident to trust others. This is a hard one. You will need to leverage on senior, self-going colleagues and advisors to gain next level sales increase.

Seasoned entrepreneurs and venture capitalists know that there are hard factors and soft factors determining when a business is ready to scale.

You that has taken venture capital investors onboard your company will recognize that venture capital investors work with distinct milestones: A-round, B-round, C-round, etc.

Each such milestone includes a number of sub-milestones that needs to be fulfilled in order to elevate to the level, the next financing round. There are hard factors like a Minimum Viable Product, product launch and sales milestones. There are also soft factors such as hiring milestones, process development etc.

You know when you’re ready for sales increase beyond your early adopter customers when you can tick off the following:

• Enough annual sales from your early adopters. Often that would mean a minimum of $10 – 25 million in annual sales to become trusted by many potential customers.
• Enough individual reference sales cases to prove your relevance, trustworthiness and delivery quality.
• Financial resources to invest in growth. Senior sales and technical executive’s are expensive. Relationship journey’s will take years in many cases. Opex, capex and working capital may be needed.
• You’re comfortable to involve other senior professionals in your business. This is very hard to many.

Are you ready?

Continue to serve current customers while aiming for larger customers?

One question I receive quite a few times is if to stop serving current customers when aiming for next level sales increase? The short answer is no.

Keep serving your existing, early stage customers even if you aim for larger and more enterprise like customers.

1. Your early customers are your references (annual sales turnover and as individual cases).
2. They contribute to your cash flow. They pay your bills and grow your cash at account. At least they should or you need to reconsider your early phase minimum viable product.
3. You can finetune your operations with your early customers. Efficiency is important for cash flow, quality and customer satisfaction when you grow your operations.
4. Quality and customer satisfaction are key when you aim for a sales incease. Practice this on your existing customers.

Having said that, you can continue to onboard new similar early stage customers if they buy your standard product. However, no more customization for this group of customers. No more proactive prospecting toward this kind of early stage customers.

All hands-on deck in marketing and sales. Here your team shall focus on your targeted new level of customers. This sales transformation is often key to growing to your next level, as described throughout this guide.

The key differentiator is when you land your first new, targeted enterprise customer (or next level mass market customer).

1. Up to this point you continue to trim your operation with existing customers.
2. Up to this point you only onboard early adopter customer on strict standard solutions.
3. From this point onwardyou need to reallocate resources to onboarding and customer success for your new target customers.
4. From this point your sales transformation goes in to its third phase: gradual up sale. But don’t rush it. Focus first on customer success with your initial sale.

One great way to organize from that first “next level customer” is to organize a cross-functional customer satisfaction team.

How to organize sales to grow tech companies to the next level

3 phases in your sales transformation to gain sales increase to the next level

As a startup your likely to have received your first early stage, early adopter customers through friends, colleagues and contacts.

But, to growth tech companies to the next level, sales need to transform and herein is one of the biggest challenges to early stage entrepreneurs:

Please note that the sales numbers in the table above and below are broad indications. Exactly where you are in each stage of business maturity depends on your industry, geography and businesses model.

What to do to transform sales for massive sales increase with a larger pool of customers

The needed sales transformation to reach a sales increase to the next level can usually be described as follows:

A common challenge targeting a broader sales increase is to rely on adding new representatives, only. Often they are free lancers or junior hiring’s in order to save money. Commonly, this does not pay off. You may generate some sales, but usually you end up disappointed.

Invest in a sales transformation to reach the sales increase you aim for. Invest in senior sales resources, a hands-on sales strategy, regular lead generation mining activities and milestone targeted sales journey’s.

This is also the time you may consider outside investors to fund your next growth. Unless you have built a relatively healthy cash flow and cash at your account from your early stage sales.

How to transform sales from early sales to reach sales increase with the majority of the market

There is a list of activities you can do to start your sales transformation for sales increase with a broader market:

1. Sales strategy: Identify target customers and markets. Evaluate and fine tune your offerings. Consider to sell cheap to opt up with up sales – be mindful about cash flow. Identify potential triggers to pro-actively trigger – be realistic. Prioritize.
2. Identify prioritized target customers: Map their decision makers, your entry contacts and try make an guestimate of relevant paint points.
3. Productize: make a product or content audit, identify your edge. Map current offering and packaging. Possible re-arrange or sharpen new packaging (geard towards enterprise customers – step in product, up sales, cross sales, volume growth, prizing).
4. Design sales journey’s with your top 20-30 targeted customers. Three year to closing, per customer, is realistic. Faster closing includes luck and you do something wrong if closing take four years or longer.

Practical sales strategies and action plans include multiple key relationship journey’s, including their targeted milestones.

As shown in this guide you need prioritized target customers and productized offerings. You need to organize for multiple, parallel long-term relationship journey’s, including dedicated resources. Relationship milestones are important. You need to identified prioritized pain points. Price strategies need to be backended to capture up sale potentials and your margins. You need enough early stage references and sales support marketing to ‘prove’ your relevance for decision makers you’re likely not to meet.

Successful entrepreneurs that grow tech companies know not trying to solve all challenges up front with targeted customers. All possible and real pain points are not prioritized. There are soft factors, internal political factors, timing and customers inhouse resources that often conflict with vendor logics.

That’s why well designed sales journey’s are such powerful tools.

You need more than resources when to grow tech companies

A common misconception, in my experience, is to add more resources when to aim for sales increase. Don’t misunderstand me, you need more resources but first you need to make a bit of strategizing and sales planning to know what kind of resources you need.

To aim for sales increase to grow tech companies require structure, investments and resilience.

Those entrepreneurs I know that have succeeded in ‘crossing the chasm’, from early adopters to the sceptic wider market, have been good adding a bit of structure. Without losing the entrepreneurship with the organization. No need to go overboard in structure and admin.

Before you add resources, you need to go through above discussed strategy phase, lead generation of target customers, designing relationship journey’s and plan key milestones. Only then will you know what type of resources to recruit.

In sales discussions we sometimes talk about hunters and harvesters. That’s only part of your resource mapping. Other nuances such as seniority level, technical competence, existing network relationships are also important to understand when recruiting sales executives. What do you need most?

Personal pros and cons also need to be factored once you start to recruit. That may include self-propelling, energy, team play, planning abilities, hands-on power point production etc.

Partnership alternatives when to aim for sales increase to grow tech companies

As already mentioned in above table, partnerships are certainly an option used successfully by many entrepreneurs that grow tech companies.

What is commonly less successful is pure sales partnerships with sales freelancers. You may hit one or two sales close with such individuals but seldom more than that. Usually it takes years for entrepreneurs not only to realize but also execute a change with his or her sales ‘organization’.

A common habit amongst successful entrepreneurs is to first try ourself, and then delegate. However, delegating is not the same as not leading, not directing, not following up and not inspiring. You make a big mistake if you assume your contracted sales freelancer have the same energy, thrust, insight and self-drive as you as the founder.

Successful partnerships for sales increase include, for example:

1. Management consultancy firms that can push for your solutions as a strategic direction. High end management consultancy firms may also give your offering a flavor of authority within your niche.
2. Implementation specialists where your products are part of bigger implementations.
3. Other firms that gain from your customers growth.

Pure sales representation partnerships are seldom a profitable way to grow. There are not large enough margins in your entry sales to share with others. Unless you have very large cash at hand for growth investments you will need your cash and cash flow to fund multiple parallel sales journey’s, for several years.

Your margin increases come with up sales, add on users or installation, training, consultancy support etc. These, you do not want to share either.

We shall all encourage relationship with others to boost growth, fast. Just be mindful with sales freelancer partnerships.

Communication strategies when targeting massive sales increase

Just a final word before wrapping up this guide on how to grow tech companies beyond early sales: Targeting massive sales increase can be confusing to your team members and coworkers. A minimum communication strategy is advised:

1. Internal communication is important. Strategy means different things to different people. You want your staff to understand what direction you take to make them engaged. You do not need to reveal all details for your employees, but they expect to know the broad direction. With thought through and regular staff communication you combat criticism, doubt and non-productive internal gossip.
2. External communication and pro-active marketing go hand in hand. Strategize, target set, lead and follow up but do outsource if you so prefer. Almost all customers like success. Show them than you’re moving up the ladder and it will help nurse your quality brand and your trustworthiness.

You need to nurse your brand. Moving from likeminded early adopter customers to the broader, more sceptic market makes your brand important.

Not your logo or color. You brand is the perception of your company, it’s authority, it’s delivery capability, it’s relevance, by other people. Not least with your employees and new enterprise customers decision makers (that you’re likely not to meet).

Conclusions

If you tick the box on most areas that we have discussed in this article, you’re ready to go.

Remember the two initial questions?

• Are you frustrated why your sales does not take off at greater scale?
• Do your early adopter sales plateau and you’re ready to grow to the next level?

I hope that this guide helped you give some insight on how you can resolve these two questions. This guide was for you