How to build the revenue engine that scales your startup

Behind every great business is a great idea? I’ll let you decide if that’s true or just sounds nice, but it's definitely true that every great business is powered by a rock solid commercial engine.?

Whether you’re a startup or moving on to Series A+, you’re going to be in the process of trying to build or refine your revenue engine. There’s three areas you should focus your attention in the first instance.?

Go-to-market strategy?

If you’re a scaleup, you’ll be tempted to skip this section, but I would bet that you shouldn’t! Sales strategies have a lifecycle, so even if you had an initial approach that worked well, as you scale you might start to see a disconnect between your product, solutions, and how you’re communicating it to the market.?

It can be useful to pause and take a moment to reconnect with who exactly you’re trying to target, what their issues are and the benefits to them of your solution. It’s unlikely you’ll need to start from scratch, but inevitably as you scale, in particular if you’re doing it quickly, you’ll need to catch up with yourself.

Team and talent?

Like the army marching on its stomach, businesses run on talent. This doesn’t just mean that you need to hire good people, although of course you do. But you also need to be clear and strategic about what level you’re hiring at and therefore what skills you need them to have.?

In a sales team, hiring senior people too early means you’ll recruit people that might not have made a cold call for a decade. And the reality might be that you need operational doers not senior strategists.

Depending on what stage your business is at, you’ll need different things. We recommend earlier stage startups hire operational people first before they bring in VPs. For scaleups, the challenge is different, and it might be more a question of upskilling some individuals and recruiting specialists in other places.?

The power of the process

Systems might not be the glamorous part, but they are the bit that will deliver you to your goal. We use a 90 Day Methodology, which you can read about and download here. But the aim is to build around your team the processes, systems and tools that enable them to consistently deliver.?

Again, at a scaleup stage, often this is a case of reviewing some of the legacy tools and systems that might no longer serve you in this phase of growth. You can often delight your CFO and save money by checking you’re not duplicating in certain areas, and reviewing what exactly your revenue team needs.?