If you follow this blog regularly, you will know that our managers and consultants publish business-oriented advice and best practice articles for young start-up managers on the excellent online medium Les Echos START : (re)-discover in particular our 2 previous articles "Start-ups: 5 tips inspired by (good) salespeople to sell your project"and "4 key steps to sell yourself on social networks“. Here is the third article in our series, proposed by Fabien COMTET - founder and director of KESTIOThis is the third article in our series, proposed by Fabien COMTET - founder and director of the company "Les Echos START" - which supports start-ups during the - sometimes critical - phase of their commercial development.
Is your startup's commercial activity starting to reach a significant volume of business and is your commercial performance growing very fast? This is great news, and the moment when your greatest dreams finally come true! Paradoxically, it is also a critical moment, which can in some cases be fatal: when the commercial stakes become higher, the internal organisation through its commercial management is directly impacted, and the need to structure your commercial development is quickly felt. Where until now a fairly "instinctive" commercial approach and the opportunistic activation of the individual networks of the founding members may have sufficed, it is now necessary to think of a more perennial model that can be "duplicated" for the new arrivals that the team will certainly welcome...
Don't panic, a take-off is always good news, and this phase can be managed very well with a little anticipation and by following these tips:
1 - Identify your business success stories
Using the success stories, which have helped the startup to grow, is a good starting point for structuring its commercial action.
2 - Involve all employees in creating a picture of the perfect customer
When moving from a human-scale start-up to alarger, structured company, the first employees may not fully identify with the new way of working. Actively involving them is necessary, so that some key members do not leave.
3 - Define the right sales 'method' and identify what is missing
The right sales method must emerge from internal experiences and can then be compared with external best practices. In that order. Not the other way around.
4 - Equip yourself with the right tools at each stage
When a start-up becomes a larger company, the reflex is often to turn to dedicated (and expensive) customer relationship management software. Wrong! There are many free or almost free tools available today, and it is not necessary to immediately start with very complex solutions.
Discover the article " Help, my start-up is taking off! The keys to successful business development " in its entirety on the Les ECHOS Start website.
You can find out your level of commercial dynamism thanks to our tool, the SCORE 7. Take the free test by clicking on the link below:
KESTIO is a company specialising in Customer Performance Improvement services and solutions. For more than 10 years, we have been helping companies to secure and increase their revenues in the long term, by intervening on all the levers that enable them to acquire and retain their customers.
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