Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin are here to provide a formula for hyper growth, one that you can emulate to take your business from something that feels impossible, to inevitable.
Nail a Niche
A niche means that you are focused on a specific target customer with a specific pain. Regardless of how many types of customers you could help, or how many of their problems you could solve. Hyper growth comes from focussing on where you have the best chances of winning customers. There are 5 aspects of a niche that will determine whether or not it is right for you.
- Is there a popular pain point? You want to specialize in a specific pain point, but you don’t want it to be so narrow that nobody has it.
2. You want to be able to show tangible results in solving that pain.
3. Do you have a believable solution? Anybody can say they produce results, but will your prospects actually believe you?
4. You have to have identifiable targets. If you can’t figure out how to market directly to the people who have the pain you are serving, you won’t be successful.
5. Finally, you need to have a unique solution in order to avoid commoditization.
Create Predictable Pipeline
The single most important thing you’ll do to grow your business is to create a predictable pipeline. Without this, you are going to struggle. There are three different types of lead types you can go after.
- Seeds. Seeds are many-to-many leads, created from word-of-mouth, networks and relationships. This is usually accomplished through creating happy customers who refer others, and who remain as customers for years.
2. Nets. One-to-many marketing campaigns, including what is now referred to as inbound marketing—creating content to attract leads to your business.
3. Spears. Targeted outbound prospecting or business development campaigns. Usually you will be working through a targeted list, calling, emailing or using any other techniques that help them make contact and get appointments.
Make Sales Scalable
Once you’ve hit your niche and can profitably generate customers, it’s time to scale your sales team in order to take things to the next level. One of the most important things you can do is to have your sales team specialize. When you are ready to scale, you should have different people responsible for qualifying inbound leads, generating cold outbound leads, for closing sales, and finally for account management.
You need to make sure that everything in your sales process is a system. You simply can’t grow if your sales people don’t follow a repeatable process that you know works.
Do The Time
No matter where you are right now, it’s going to take you years longer than you want to get to where you want to go. The authors suggest that you are most likely going to fail if you don’t commit to spending 24 months to achieve initial traction. They say that the hardest part about entrepreneurship is not managing the business, but managing yourself. Make sure this is really what you want to do. The benefits of hyper growth really are there, you just need to be able to put in the time