The Four Step Guide To Scaling Your High-Ticket B2B Business From $0 to $50k Monthly Revenue
By Lloyd Yip
November 8, 2019
This is an abbreviated version of the free training which goes into extensive detail how to scale your high-ticket B2B company (SaaS, agency, or coaching/consulting) from $0 to $50,000 per month in revenue. If you want to know the HOW and not just the WHAT, please check out the free training here.
Let's face it, there's about a million and one things you could do to scale your high-ticket B2B business, whether it's a service or a software solution.
Instead, you want to build a step by step, methodical approach which allows you to grow in a scalable and predictable way. Ideally, you're able to execute this process so that every week, you know exactly how many new sales meetings you're booking, and how many new clients you're winning.
Imagine not needing to come into work uncertain about where your next 5 clients are coming from. Or not needing to bounce between strategy to strategy, in hope of finally finding a method that captures clients every single time.
This is what we'll be covering in this article.
Quick Note Before We Begin: How To Build A Growth Strategy That Actually Works For Your Business
For example, let's say you're just starting out your business and you have next to no money or reputation.
Well, if that's the case, a tactic like hiring a sales rep would be a fruitless endeavor. For a sales rep to perform well, you need to pay them a high salary, and also give them a playbook that allows them to actually know how to sell your offer efficiently. Without this, you'll just lose money.
At this moment, you don't have capital, or a clear playbook of how to sell to your buyer, so this is the wrong strategy to choose.
Depending on the stage of your business, you'll always have scenarios like the one I just mentioned where your constraints mean that certain tactics won't make any sense.
On the flipside, based off your resources, there ARE going to be specific growth tactics that will work for your situation and lead you to consistent sales.
The beautiful thing is that all high-ticket B2B businesses will go through 4 phases which are fairly consistent.
In each of these phases, there is an ideal growth playbook that will maximize your ability to acquire clients. I'll be going through each of the phases here. If you follow this framework, you'll get to $50k monthly revenue and beyond in no time.
Once again, the free training goes into far more significant depth about HOW to actually execute these 4 phases. This article is a snapshot summary.
Phase #1: Proving Out Your Business ($0 to $5k Monthly Revenue)
Phase #2: Early Traction ($5k to $25k Monthly Revenue)
In this phase, you've earned some resources from validating your business model in the prior phase. This typically comes in the form of a few happy clients and testimonials, and a little bit of cash from your initial sales.
Your goal now is to build a scalable way to get your message to more people who fit your now-proven ideal client profile. By the end of this phase, you want to have a constantly full and self-replenishing calendar of interested buyers who want to evaluate your offer, as well as a predictable inflow of net new clients every single month.
Keep in mind, you're not rich yet, nor do you have a reputation. You'll still need to go about this in as low cost of a method as possible.
This phase may take from 2 months to a year to do properly.
Constraints:
• Fairly minimal team
• Fairly minimal time due to beta clients and customer interviews
• Fairly minimal capital
• Fairly minimal process still regarding sales, marketing, and product/service
• No reputation, brand, credibility in the industry
• No skill in terms of digital marketing
Resources:
• Some client testimonials
• Reasonable understanding of your client’s pain points and psychology
• Some capital is better than no capital
Solution:
The ideal method in this stage is to continue using organic outreach (as it is low-cost and simple), but to start building highly scalable systems around it.
This means a very scalable way to find prospects that fit your ideal client profile, an easy way to message a very large volume of them so that you're covering a lot of ground, but also a system that allows you to actually personalize your outreach (so that people don't get pissed at you for spamming them).
It's important to also build a tracking system so that you know how many people you're talking to, how many meetings you're booking, and how many deals you're winning. What you don't measure, you can't improve.
You also want to start leveraging some content to facilitate your conversations and establish more credibility. In fact, this stage is the perfect time to invest in creating collateral, sales scripts, case studies, and all the other tools that will make up your sales playbook.
Once you can iron this out, you'll start having a stuffed calendar of meetings, consistently high win rates, lower sales cycles, and a larger average deal size.
As always, I go through in high detail how you can execute these tasks in the free training that you can find here.
Phase #3: Rapid Scaling ($25k to $50k Monthly Revenue)
In this phase, you've built a system which is getting you clients on-demand. You have far more cash now (but you're still not rich), a growing reputation in the industry, and a strong understanding of your audience.
However, what you lack is scalability. The organic methods you've built to win clients is fairly time intensive, and also doesn't get you in front of enough eyeballs. Despite it being reliable, you need to now layer on additional strategies that get you in front of as many people in your ideal client profile as possible, allowing you to really explode your revenue and growth.
The system you want to create needs to be fairly automated and non-reliant on your personal effort and energy (since you don't have enough time for manual work). You want this system to be like a broken slot machine. Where you put $1 in, and $3 comes out.
You know you've successfully completed this phase when you've built a system that leaves your calendar totally filled with prospective clients at any given time. In fact, you'll have so much demand that you'll need to disqualify and turn away potential clients who aren't perfect fits, simply because you don't have the capacity to handle so many sales. This is a great problem to have.
At this stage, you'll have at the absolute minimum doubled your monthly sales from Phase 2.
This may take 3 months or longer.
• Small team
• Very minimal time due to sales and clients
• Fairly small brand and reputation
• Not much digital infrastructure set up
Resources:
• Decent amount of capital to reinvest
• Decent client base and testimonials
• Decent backend sales process and materials
• Reliable 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:
The ideal playbook in this phase is to leverage paid acquisition in combination with a really powerful and fully automated content funnel.
In effect, what you're doing is leveraging the hard earned cash that you've been earning through phase 2, and spending it on ads so that you're getting maximum eyeballs on your content.
Your content is then built in such a powerful way that when your ideal client sees it, they are so compelled by your messaging that they have to sign up for a demo/sales meeting.
When you pair this far more scalable method of lead generation with the sales playbooks and content that you had built during phase 2, your revenue will explode.
Some of the other positive impacts of this stage will be that your sales cycles will speed up dramatically. The reason why is because during phase 2, all your sales happened over the phone with you leading the charge. In phase 3, you can let your content and online funnel do some of the persuasion for you. By the time they show up to your sales call, they're already pre-sold. You just have to bring them across the finish line.
I've gone into depth about what it takes to create a kickass paid acquisition engine for phase 3 in my free training, which you can find here.
Phase #4: Delegate And Streamline ($50k Monthly Revenue & Beyond)
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.
• 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.
I dive into how you can ensure that phase 4 is executed upon properly in my free training here.
In Summary
Attract & Scale
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DISCLAIMER: Any sales figures stated above are not typical, I’m not implying you’ll duplicate them (or do anything for that matter). I have the benefit of practicing direct response marketing and sales since 2012. The average person who follows or buys any "how to" information gets little to no results, typically because no action is taken. Your results will vary (they could be better than mine, worse, or zero) and depend on many factors …including but not limited to your background and work ethic. All business entails risk as well as consistent effort and action. If you're not willing to accept that, please do not get or access our information. This website is not part of Facebook or Facebook Inc. Additionally, this site is NOT endorsed by Facebook in any way. FACEBOOK is a trademark of FACEBOOK Inc.