As your business grows, so does your need to scale sales efficiently. Scale can be your best friend, or the elephant in the room threatening to knock your growth off course. Your sales team needs special attention to scale efficiently. They’re a huge part of why your company is successful, don’t lose the magic that makes you special. Here are the areas to pay attention to when it’s time to scale your sales team.
Training a small team is easy. You know exactly what works and how to communicate it. Communicating the skills and strategies your team needs as a big organization becomes much more difficult. You won’t always get 1-on-1 time with each rep who talks to your customers.
It’s important to develop internal...
The following answers are provided by members of Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched BusinessCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.
I like to match each new hire with one of my veteran team members. We care a lot about our culture, and for me, it’s a part of the onboarding process. Mentoring has worked very well to keep the habits that built us up stick around.
— Adam ...
Faking it as a startup is pretty much what being a startup is all about.
As first-time Founders, we just don't realize that it's the norm. Instead, we worry ourselves about not being a big enough company, not having a full staff, or not having a proven product.
Well, guess what? If we're just starting out, we fake everything!
"But wait, won't people find out that all we have right now is a cheap landing page that my cousin created and just a couple of products available?"
Yes, and they generally won't care. When is the last time you deliberated on the corporate structure of a company before making a purchase? Probably never. Most customers assume there is some level of functionality and deliverability in our product becaus...
Owning a startup, to many, is the epitome of the American dream. Who doesn’t pine the work day away thinking about being their own boss, escaping the hamster wheel of being a salaried employee or clock puncher, and making your own destiny?
However, one area where may new entrepreneurs and small business owners fall short is dealing with the law and regulations. Typically, new business owners starting out have not had to worry about legal issues in their past jobs; now however, at the helm of your own company, that lack of knowledge can be detrimental.
Ignorance of the law can inhibit your company’s growth, expose you, your employees, and your customers to significant liability risk, and even put you into legal jeopardy if you run too far a...
Nancy Duarte is a pro when it comes to presentations. Not just giving presentations, but starting them, finishing them, and every step in between. Author and co-founder of Duarte Designs, Nancy Duarte is a seasoned veteran when it comes to incorporating storytelling into speaking and creating connections with an audience.
The below video is the ninth part in a series of 10 in which Nancy shares the key components to making a successful pitch using creativity and critical thinking. Find out what she has to say:
In 1987, after working and saving money for a whole summer, Nancy Duarte”s husband bought a Mac. He had a vision: he was going to get behind the technological movement and use his newly acquired equipme...
The answers below are provided by members of FounderSociety, an invitation-only organization comprised of ambitious startup founders and business owners.
Don’t lose focus of the overall goal of communicating your value proposition. If the prospect fails to see it, you’ll never get them sold no matter how hard you tried or how much effort went into your sales deck.
— Steven Newlon
SYN3RGY Creative Group
The best pitches look like they’re off-the-cuff, but they’re not. Smooth delivery and confidence comes from a lot of practice. I’ve heard so many people say, “I speak best when it’s not rehearsed” or “I...
Matt Mullenweg is one of the most influential people in the tech world—if not in the world at large. In 2005 he founded Automattic, the company that laid the foundation for websites including Akismet, Gravatar, VaultPress, IntenseDebate, Polldaddy and, of course, WordPress, which he also founded. Today WordPress powers nearly a quarter of the Internet. (Yeah, take a moment to let that sink in.)
Matt took the time to sit down with us and discuss how Automattic and WordPress became so successful. Check out the video below to hear him explain firsthand what inspires him as a founder; or, if you’re short on time, keep reading—we’ve summarized the main points for your reference.
Automattic has garnered much acclaim, including the reputation for...
Great business mentors are one of the most valuable assets a startup Founder can have. They can shave years off of your startup journey simply by avoiding costly newbie mistakes. They can make life changing introductions to investors, customers and key executives. They can accelerate your ability to grow your startup by orders of magnitude.
But they can’t do any of that unless you know exactly how to use them.
On it’s surface, it sounds easy enough – find someone who seems to be an expert and ask them lots of questions. Yet if you’ve ever sat in the business mentor seat as I and thousands of others have done, you know that the value you get is directly tied to exactly how you manage the mentor relationship.
If you have a business mentor, o...
Today’s society glorifies startup life. Most see startup culture as acquiring VC funding, getting a fancy office, and rapidly scaling. The problem is that no one wants to talk about the grueling path every startup must endure before acquiring funding— this is the side hustle stage. This means you are still working your full-time job and starting a business on the side which will eventually become large enough to be your new full-time priority.
Marc Andreessen stated that the life of a startup could be divided into two phases: before product/market fit, and after. The latter is the fun part – when VCs and scaling the business come into the equation. This article is about the former, less glamorous part of building a business. The part that ...
The beauty of the startup game is that you only have to be right once.
The frustrating part is you never know when that one time might be! While we all love to hear Founders regale us with origin stories of their massive successes, what we miss most often is the part where they had many misses along the way.
We write those misses off as incidental — they aren't. Every one of those misses started with that very same Founder thinking that was going to be the time they got it right.
What we tend to misunderstand, most often early in our careers, is that there's rarely one single moment where it's all “make or break.” It's kinda like when we were in High School and we thought what happened at that moment was going ...