Drive Business Growth With These Sales and Finance Tips
4 Sales Tips to Grow Your Startup
4 Business Finance Tips for Entrepreneurs
Growing Your Startup and Becoming Financially Sound
When launching a successful startup, you must always look toward the future. Growing a startup requires setting up building blocks toward your success, which starts with having your finances in check and a solid sales strategy.
These tips can help drive business growth and keep your startup on track for a brighter future.
When you’re operating as a startup, you’re usually dealing with limited funds that you’re working to grow. You don’t have the budget to mess around with marketing that isn’t going to get you results, so it’s essential that you have a solid marketing plan based on your goals.
For instance, if your goal is to build longer-term brand awareness, you want to develop more of a demand-generation strategy, which may rely on social media marketing, email marketing, and other brand awareness-building tactics.
On the other hand, if your goal is to collect and nurture leads to create revenue quicker, you would want to focus on lead-generation strategies, like content marketing, platform demo sign-ups, or webinars.
In many cases, you may need to find the right balance between both demand and lead generation marketing strategies. Take some time to choose what’s best for your firm.
In a survey of more than 150 startup founders on why their startups failed, 17% said there was no market need for their product, while another 16% said they were out-competed. These results suggest the importance of knowing your market and your competition.
To be able to compete in your market, you should know what you provide, why it’s important that the solution you provide exists, and how your solution is better than your competition. Your salespeople should be able to speak toward all three points. Consider creating sales battle cards that contain essential information on your product or service, why it exists, and your competitor’s offerings.
Your ICP is a description of a type of customer who would most benefit from your product or service based on firmographic, environmental, and behavioral data. For instance, a SaaS company that sells a new social media scheduling app might then target social media managers at small or mid-sized businesses.
When you create an ICP, you can better understand your target audience, including their pain points and what they want to hear most to get them to convert. ICPs can be significantly helpful for both lead generation and demand generation. An ICP can allow you to better score your leads, enabling your sellers to focus more on leads that are likely to convert and less on those who aren’t as interested or high-value. In terms of demand generation, your ICP can inform you of where your audience is and make it easier to meet them in the places they already are.
As a startup, you might feel like automation shouldn’t be at the top of your list of concerns. If your sales team is only converting a handful of leads every month, invoicing, data entry, and other manual tasks likely aren’t all that time-consuming. Yet.
A big part of startup life is using the initial growth phases as a time to establish a structure that you can build upon. You might only have a few customers now, but do you have the framework in place to reach and exceed the next stage of growth?
By automating manual tasks, like social media scheduling or invoice approval, you’re freeing up your marketing, finance, sales, and other teams’ future time when they have more relationships to manage.
More than 25% of startup owners don’t pay themselves a salary. That’s a bit like not putting your own oxygen mask on in a plane — and instead trying to help someone put theirs on as you struggle. In other words, you can’t help your business and your employees if you don’t help yourself first.
Especially when times are tight, you may need to rely on your personal finances to secure loans and keep your startup afloat. If you’re not managing your finances properly, you may not be able to help your startup when it needs it most. Don’t let your personal life fall by the wayside.
A sales forecast can help you predict the monetary future of your company. When you forecast your sales and your expected revenue, you can build a better budget and ensure you have enough funds to stay afloat through every quarter.
While there are many ways to do a sales forecast, you’ll often need to rely on your company’s financial data, as well as market trends. However, as a startup, you may not have a lot of previous financial data to utilize.
Considering 68% of companies miss their forecast by more than 10%, it’s essential, especially as a startup with limited data tracked, to continue to monitor your projections and adjust when necessary to ensure you’re staying on track.
According to a survey of why startups fail, the number one reason for failure is that the company runs out of money!
As much as sales forecasting can help you stay on top of your budget, there may be times when you face a cost that you can’t predict.
Always keep an emergency fund on hand in case of unexpected expenses. These expenses may include physical damage to your offices, medical emergencies to you or key employees, hacking incidents, or lawsuits. It’s a good rule of thumb to keep 10% of your annual revenue or three months of business expenses in your emergency fund.
It’s good to celebrate your victories. But sometimes, startups get ahead of themselves by thinking that a big windfall means that they will keep that trajectory up. In response, they start spending more, even on unnecessary expenses.
Instead, when you experience times of high revenue, save some in your emergency fund and then look for ways to reinvest in your company. Use the additional revenue to plan for your next stage of growth, like purchasing a new platform that can help you automate manual tasks or hire more people to grow your marketing or customer success department.
Your startup may be young now, but you need to plan not only for what it looks like today but also for what you want it to become tomorrow. When you take the time to understand your market, customers, and competition, you can create a better marketing strategy and position your product better.
Budgeting is also an essential part of creating a startup, as you can better plan for expected and unexpected expenses. When you do experience times of high revenue, it’s time to reinvest in yourself and your company. With these tips, in time, your startup will thrive.
Bio: Jacqueline Gualtieri is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in The Huffington Post, Insider, and The Slowdown. In addition to writing, she works as a digital media consultant and content marketer, driving online traffic for her clients. She’s always looking to advance her skillset and believes strongly in the early adoption of new technology.
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