For Start-ups Processes are critical for growth

You have got your first set of paying customers and have validated all your assumptions and now feel you would like to initiate actions for serious go-to-market. Every young enterprise looks forward to this day when they would be able to scale and grow their revenues. The entire focus is on revenues. But do you know what the pre-requisite is to ensure a predictable growth?

PROCESS.

This is something that is completely forgotten or one is not even aware of. It is only process that can bring in predictability and repeatability. Repeatability helps you to manage growth without much pain. What kinds of processes are required to manage growth? To understand this you need to know what growth entails.

Growth is not just about revenues. Revenue is the outcome of growth. To enable revenue growth you need to grow your team, which means hiring more people, who will need to be inducted into the organization and trained. Broadly, the team will comprise of sales, support, administration and management. You need to have a system, a process, to ensure successful induction of these people into the organization in the shortest period of time. A timeline for hiring, for induction and training has to be in place so that the new hires can get productive at the earliest. All this can only be achieved if you have processes in place.

You have a team, now how do you ensure predictable business? To generate business you need to have a target list, information on that target list and get in front of that target list to articulate on your product or service. This means you need to have processes for lead generation, lead management, a sales process which will include data capture, reporting and customer handling, pre-sales for technical support (if your product or service requires it) and last but not the least, post-sales support. The last one is mostly an after-thought, after the sale is made. This could prove to be disastrous for a start-up as every happy customer goes a long way in building your credibility. So planning for a happy customer is imperative. Customers smile only when they have been delivered what was promised …. on time. The answer to this is Process.

In the early days when you were the salesman, CEO, HR, Finance Mgr etc. you could manage it. Somehow. But when you start having more people, start servicing more locations and start to deal with multiple customer touch-points, the problems start to emerge. Managing this volume of work and resultant data becomes a huge issue and could prove to be disastrous in the long run. Most start-ups end-up losing a lot of ground only because of their inability to handle this growth. This is where processes come into play. Each component of the sales process right from lead generation to post-sale support needs to have a clearly defined and documented set of processes.

Internal processes need to be built to ensure optimal output with the smallest team possible. Don’t forget, the motto is still to conserve cash for use where it is most required. So smaller the team the better it is. But this same team would be able to handle scaling only with clear cut processes. Such processes are also required to bring in operational and fiscal discipline.

But the most important are the sales and support processes. Being customer-facing, these need to be tightly aligned with the customer’s requirements to ensure predictable business and a satisfied customer. Having already acquired a small set of early adopters, you would have understood what it takes to progress the customer from first meeting to closure. Breaking this into small stages, understanding the customer requirement at each stage and putting in pace proactive actions would help to bring in some predictability into the sales cycle and ensure steady progress of the sales process. This also includes having a well-defined process for pre-sales activities like product demos, presentations, proposal preparation, custom demos etc. All this will ensure low cost and time for customer acquisition.

As I mentioned, it is important to have processes for post-sale support. This starts with the customer on-boarding process, once the sale has been made. Starting from familiarization with customer environment to product delivery and smooth and successful implementation in the shortest time, a clear cut process for each of these activities will ensure a good beginning to a long term customer relationship. A happy customer not only helps to build credibility but can also be a source of future revenues thereby extending the LTV (Life Time Value) of the customer.

It is important that these processes are well thought through, documented and put into practice right from the beginning so that when you are ready to scale it would be a no-brainer and would not seem daunting.

The author, Srikanth Vasuraj, is a Business Consultant focused on Mentoring and Advising start-ups. He can be reached at +91-98454 78585 or srikanth@nodiva.co.in . For more information please visit www.nodiva.co.in .