Success is a double edge sword. The more customers you have, the more you have to support. In addition, how do you make sure each department is supported and hired properly as you grow? These concerns can all be addressed by answering this question, how will you scale your organization based on your sales playbook?
Organization Playbook Framework
Once you have an effective and repeatable sales playbook, it’s time to look at how to grow your company to support the playbook. If you don’t have an effective and repeatable Sales Playbook yet, check out the FounderWay Sales Playbook framework for help on how to craft one. The reason for basing your organization scaling on your sales playbook is due to your sales plan being the main source of revenue, which pays your bills and employee paychecks. Also, there may be teams that are more crucial to onboarding new clients/customers, and supporting them so that they don’t leave out of frustration.
To figure out which teams need to be prioritized, list out each team and their responsibilities within your sales playbook in the Team Responsibilities section. Based on these responsibilities, you should be able to prioritize the importance of each team to the overall success of the playbook. Use your team priority to guide your hiring plan, which can be recorded in the Hiring Plan section. Some things to think about for your hiring plan are:
How many clients/customers can be supported by a single employee?
How many clients/customers can a single salesperson get per month and year?
How many employees can be supported by each HR employee?
Do you need onboarding or training for your clients/customers and how many can be trained per employee per session?
Do you need engineers for your product/service, and how many do you need to hit your product/service development and support goals?
Are there more cost-effective ways to outsource any of your team responsibilities?
Think ahead and see if there are tools/software that can help increase the effectiveness of each team
With your teams prioritized based on their responsibilities and your hiring plan drafted up, let’s take a look at how your internal processes. In most cases, there are processes that have stuck with your organization as you have grown that have not changed for multiple reasons. As you focus on growth and scaling up, it is a good idea to do an internal review to see if you can make any processes more efficient. This review can reduce the number of people you need and reduce the time and money you spent. An easy way to do this is to see if there are any tools/resources/software that you can implement to automate these processes. Check out the resource area on FounderWay to check out our curated list of resources. If you find any keep track of them in the Tools Needed section. In the Tools Needed section, you can also prioritize the tools based on how much impact they will have on your sales playbook and hiring plan.
At this point, you should have a pretty good idea on the path forward, but it is always good to do a sanity check on your plan by making sure you can afford the hiring and tools that your sales playbook needs. You can list out your expenses in the Operating Expenses section, and put the total in the Burn Rate section. If you can’t afford the total sales playbook plan at this moment, see if you can break your plan into phases so that you can grow and implement, as your sales revenue increases. Another approach is to try and fundraise. Even though Founderway is a strong believer in revenue being the best form of fundraising, we know that rapid growth means a lot of expenses, which means fundraising may be the only way.
"The secret of change is to focus all your energy not on fighting the old but on building the new." - Socrates, Philosopher
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