If you follow this blog regularly, you'll 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 our 2 previous articles "Start-ups: 5 sales-inspired tips to sell your project"and "4 key steps for selling yourself on social networks". Here is the third article in our series, by Fabien COMTET - founder and CEO of KESTIOto support start-ups in the - sometimes critical - phase of commercial expansion.
Is your startup's sales activity starting to reach a significant volume and is your sales performance growing rapidly? That's great news, and it's the moment when your greatest dreams finally come true! Paradoxically, it's also a critical moment, which in some cases can be fatal: when the sales stakes become higher, the internal organization through its sales management is directly impacted, and the need to structure your sales development is quickly felt. Where, until now, a fairly "instinctive" sales approach and the opportunistic activation of the founding members' individual networks may have sufficed, you now need to think up a more sustainable model that can be "duplicated" for the new arrivals the team is sure to welcome...
Don't panic, a takeoff is always good news, and this phase can be managed very well with a little anticipation and by following these few tips:
1 - Identify your sales success stories
Using the success stories that have helped your startup grow is a good starting point for structuring your sales action.
2 - Involve all employees in drawing up a profile of the perfect customer
In the transition from a human-scale start-up to alarger, more structured company, the first employees may no longer fully identify with the new way of working. Involving them actively is a must, if you don't want certain key members to leave.
3 - Define the right sales "method" and identify what's missing
The right sales method needs to emerge from in-house experience, and can then be compared with external best practices. In that order. Not the other way around.
4 - Equip yourself with the right tools for each stage
When a start-up becomes a large-scale enterprise, the reflex is often to turn to dedicated (and expensive) customer relationship management software. Wrong! There are plenty of free or nearly free tools available today, and there's no need to start immediately with highly complex solutions.
Discover the article " Help, my start-up is taking off! Les clés pour réussir son essor commercial" in its entirety on the Les ECHOS Start website.
You can find out how dynamic your sales are with our SCORE 7 tool. Take the free test by clicking on the link below:
KESTIO is a company specializing in services and solutions to improve Customer Performance. For over 10 years, we have been helping companies to secure and sustainably increase their revenues, by acting on all the levers that enable them to acquire and retain customers.
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