Suppose you have your first ten customers; congratulations! You’ve made it further than many startups. But now what?
The game changes when you move beyond your initial ten customers. You need to shift gears if you want to move from 10 to 100.
Here are three tactics to grow sustainably from 10 to 100 and beyond.
Are Your Customers Successful, or Just Happy?
Most businesses have a lot of happy customers but few successful ones.
Happy customers feel good about paying you monthly money and have no complaints. They might like your product, but the real reason why they bought it is because they believe in you, your team, your company, your vision, and what you stand for. Typically, one person within the organization is really championing your product and company. If that person leaves the organization, someone else might re-evaluate and decide to cancel your contract.
Successful customers know they receive more value from your product than you charge. Even if your internal champion within their company leaves, anyone else evaluating your contract could look at the math and conclude: "We’re getting more value out of this than we’re paying. Thus, it’s worth it to keep paying this company for their product." These are the customers that will help you grow sustainably.
Look at your customers and identify those who have grown the most due to your product. They shouldn’t be hard to find: Successful customers typically expand to more seats, they’re probably interacting more often with your team to optimize workflows and tap into advanced and complex features of your product, and they’re probably paying you more money with each passing month. They also can be your most vocal advocates. Ask yourself:
- What industry are they in?
- What is their annual revenue?
- How many customers do they have?
- How many employees?
- How do they use your product?
Look for the attributes that all your successful customers have in common and use it to update your ideal customer profile. Make sure that all your future leads meet the new criteria.
Short-Term Hacks vs. Long-Term Strategy
Most new businesses use short-term sales tactics to get their first ten customers. That’s great at the start but terrible for sustainable growth. Transition to more long-term plans as you grow.
A short-term plan is one that you won’t continue doing in the future. For example:
- Handling every support call
- Visiting every new customer in person
- Personally following up with every new user
- Tapping into your personal and professional network to get customers
A long-term plan scales with your business. For example:
- Cold calling and cold emailing
- Creating a drip email campaign
- Search engine optimization
- Building a scalable lead generation process
As your startup grows, keep these numbers in mind:
- 0–10 customers: 90 percent short-term tactics | 10 percent long-term tactics
- 10–100 customers: 80 percent short-term tactics | 20 percent long-term tactics
- 100+ customers: 20 percent short-term tactics | 80 percent long-term tactics
Anticipate Today or Fix Tomorrow
Transitioning from short-term plans to long-term strategies means shifting your focus from the present to the future. You need to know what your business will look like next month, in six months, and next year to prepare today.
Is your growth strategy proactive or reactive? Here are a couple of things you’ll want to consider after your first 100 customers:
- Creating teams: Many new companies start with a flat management structure—no teams or hierarchy. This won’t work as you begin to grow—even Zappos is struggling with holacracy. Divide into teams before you need to and set up hierarchies, or you’ll be scrambling when the moment hits.
- Reviewing your staff: You need to look honestly at your team and ensure each member is still a good fit for the company. Just because someone was great in the beginning doesn’t mean that they’ll be a good fit as the company grows.
- Updating your customer profile: Are most customers still successful or just happy? As your company grows, your specialization and focus may change. Make sure that you review your customers after any major milestone.
Invest your resources in people, processes, and prospects that will grow with your business, not slow it down. It’s much easier to anticipate today than to fix tomorrow.
In the early days, when you're just getting started cold emailing and cold calling people, you don't need a fancy system to keep things organized. You just need to get it done. Many times, founders want to buy our CRM tool, and when we learn about their business's current stage, we tell them to keep it simple: Use a spreadsheet, a whiteboard, or Trello to manage your sales pipeline.
Once you're interacting with so many prospects that it's chaotic, look for a way to make your email and phone outreach more manageable and systematize your sales process.
Focus on Long-Term Strategies and Build for Sustainable Success!
In the early stages of your startup, you might envy super-successful founders. From the outside, it looks like they’re just surfing on a wave of success: thousands of paying customers, a massive budget, and the most talented people knocking at their door to join their team.
Don’t forget that as your resources grow, so does the amount of work. If anything, growth makes it more challenging. But here’s the good news: For every milestone you pass, you’ll enter the next with more knowledge, experience, and insight. It doesn’t have to get easier because you’ll get better.
Want more actionable advice on getting B2B customers? We've partnered with Hiten Shah to create a guide covering it all. Click below to download your free copy now!
