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5 Online Sales and Marketing Lessons Learned Scaling a Startup

Here are five sales and marketing lessons I learned while scaling my team from one to fifteen plus employees.


In today’s online world, having a good marketing strategy and processes are imperative to an organization’s overall success. The five tips mentioned below are based on my personal experience while scaling my company from a single employee to a team of 15+ employees.

 

  1. Store sales leads in a single database.

    There are various media thru which your marketing and sales teams might receive sales leads. Lead generation can occur through social media, email marketing, etc. While you may gather and store leads in MS Excel or a CRM tool it is very important to store all of them in a single database to preclude duplicate leads, lead performance problems, etc.

  2. Filter and segment sales leads based on various criteria.

    Scoring leads can help you focus on the right customers. Small business owners have a general tendency to consider all prospects equal. I personally, partially, agree. But this mindset causes unnecessary time and effort spent on someone who is merely “window shopping”. Instead, categorize leads and give priority to “hot” ones, further down the purchase cycle.

  3. Encourage salespeople to utilize CRM software.

    Salespeople should enter sales lead details and follow-up information. These days, CRM software offers many features that can be useful to small businesses. However, don’t make lead capture and the lead management process too complicated. If using a new CRM tool is too complicated your sales team will find short term workarounds (i.e. capturing sales leads in MS Excel, etc.).

  4. Automate marketing and sales processes as your budget permits.

    With today’s global market, and the right marketing, small business owners can easily gather tens of thousands of leads. However, in order to convert leads into sales, depending on business type, you need to filter, categorize and nurture them. With the availability of today’s online marketing tools, you can easily setup automated processes for just about any stage of the sales funnel.

  5. Create a marketing team as soon as possible.

    Don’t wait till you grow big. Not having dedicated marketing efforts and accountability is the most frequent mistake most startups make. Even when you are small, you should ideally have a sales and marketing department (even with just one employee) and marketing processes in place. In today’s business world, you can scale very fast, and at that speed you need an efficient marketing and sales department to cater to growing organizational needs.

 

Priyadarshan Joshi is the Founder and CEO of TaxSmart Technologies, a leading mobile apps development company located in India. Under his leadership the company has grown from a single developer to a team of 17 in under 3 Years. He has 11+ years’ experience in the software industry. He has also worked for New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York as an ERP Consultant. Connect with TaxSmart Technologies on Twitter.

 

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