In this phase, you have a potent lead generation engine that's bringing in high quality sales meetings daily. Every month, you're closing a fair amount of deals, and the business is very profitable. Congratulations!
However, it isn't all roses. There is one significant flaw in your business that hasn't been addressed.
YOU are the company's biggest constraint.
Up until this point, you've been largely relied upon for client delivery. If you're selling a software, this won't be as significant, but onboarding and ongoing support is still likely leaning on you.
But for service providers, coaches, and consultants, you're probably completely tapped out time wise.
Not to mention, whether you're selling a product or a service, sales still depends on you for the final close. We've done a good job in automating away a big portion of the sales process in phase 3, but the closing aspect still takes up your day.
As long as you are relied upon for the final sale or client experience, you cannot grow past phase 3. You literally have no more time to close or service additional customers.
This is where streamlining and delegation comes into play.
The goal in this phase is to offload your client support, onboarding, and sales tasks in order to increase your total capacity. Once you accomplish this, you'll be able to bring on even more clients, without ever sacrificing the overall customer experience.
This phase never ends. As you scale, you will always need to add process so that you can handle more sales and client delivery.
Constraints:
• Small team
• Essentially no time due to sales and clients
Resources:
• Decent brand and reputation
• Good amount of capital to reinvest
• Good client base and testimonials
• Good backend sales process and materials
• Good website, funnel, ads, and automations set up
• Good content that converts at top, middle, and bottom of funnel
• Predictable sales funnel and process
• Deep knowledge of your audience and the problem you’re solving for them
Solution:
There are a few ways to relieve the "You" constraint.
First method is to streamline your actual client experience by leveraging technology.
For example, instead of needing a human to onboard your software, can you build an in-app tutorial?
If you're running a service, could you productize parts of your service so you don't need to fulfill it yourself as a human being?
You can also outsource your work to other humans. Examples of this could be hiring a client support assistant, or even outsourcing certain parts of your process to virtual assistants from other countries at a low cost.
When it comes to sales, you can hire a sales rep and provide them a sales playbook that allows them to close deals at the same win rate as you were initially. Now you have double the capacity for clients you can close.
That being said, there's a lot of risks and considerations a founder has to make at this stage. How do you offload client delivery without it hurting the actual experience? If customers start disliking your offering, it defeats the purpose of streamlining.
As well, how do we hire the right sales person, train them, and make sure they perform for you? That is a complex topic as well.