4 steps to scale efficiently

Posted January 24, 2020

By Sydney Abrams

Senior Manager, Demand Generation at Outreach

Just about every company can agree on one thing — more revenue is always a good thing. The only problem is that scaling revenue is challenging and scaling it efficiently--with minimal cost--is even harder.

Luckily, Outreach can help make the process of scaling much easier. In fact, Outreach has already helped 43 privately held, billion-dollar companies scale efficiently and dominate their industries.

For businesses looking to dominate their own industries through growth, you’ll learn why scaling efficiently is important, what you need, and how other Outreach customers such as Zoom, MongoDB, and AdRoll used the platform to take their companies to the next level.

The Difference Between Growth and Efficient Scaling

Not all growth is created equal. Gaining more customers won’t benefit you much if you had to skyrocket your costs to do it. Scaling efficiently means increasing revenue with relatively little increase in cost.

The key to scaling efficiently is finding ways to optimize the resources you have to increase revenue with minimal cost. The internet has changed the way business is done. You can expand into new markets without ever opening a storefront or office there. You can have an entire business that doesn’t sell a single physical product or have a single physical location. You can communicate directly with your consumers and get near-immediate feedback.

However, with all this change comes difficulties. The internet has raised customer expectations. The increased communication and transparency that the internet allows means that customers expect hyper-personalization regardless of the size of the business. This may be possible for a small business with just a few clients, but personalization gets harder the bigger you get.

Outreach takes on the problem of personalization at scale — and many more that come with a quickly evolving business landscape — to make your life easier, and to make it possible for you to scale efficiently. Outreach helps you get the most out of your team while still delivering on customer expectations.

The 4 Steps to Scale

Scaling your business efficiently is like directing a symphony with a hundred different musicians. Every part of your company needs to be working harmoniously, communicating, and driving your company towards the same goal. To scale efficiently, you can’t have any wasted action like your teams collecting the same data, repeating the same tasks, or working towards opposite goals because of miscommunication and confused processes.

Efficient scaling comes down to having 4 things:

  • The right information
  • The right technology
  • The right workflow
  • The right team

Information

Efficient scaling requires strategic direction, which is built on the right data and information. It requires detailed customer data, competitor data, and metrics on every part of your revenue team to know what is working and what could be improved.

Because of the siloed structure of most revenue teams, it’s very common to end up with incomplete, conflicting, or duplicated data in each silo. This leads to increased costs, wasted time, and makes it difficult to quickly make the correct strategic decision. You need all of your data organized and in one place, and this is where having the right technology can help.

Technology

Technology is key to scaling efficiently. Having the right tools to automate daily tasks, collect and organize data, and help your teams communicate and make decisions is often the difference between a company that simply grows and one that scales.

Beware though, the wrong tools, or too many tools that don’t communicate with each other can end up costing you more time and money than they save. So, don’t just go out on a spending spree.

Focus on the essentials, and find tools that integrate to create a unified tech galaxy for your company.

Workflow

With new information, new technology, and a new plan, you will need a new process. The workflow that a team of 10 might use won’t work for a team of 100. Scaling requires streamlined organizations and efficient communication.

You will need to come up with a clear, organized workflow that clearly defines everyone’s role, and makes use of every tool at your disposal.

Take time to build these processes early. The longer you wait, the harder it is to shift the culture of your company.

Team

The last aspect of efficient scaling is having an excellent team. Improving your tools and processes will help, but if you don’t have a team that is trained and capable of taking advantage of those new changes, then you’ll be leaving profits on the table.

Everyone wants a team of all-stars, but more importantly, you need a team that works together and communicates excellently and efficiently.

Take time to invest in hiring the right people and training them to excel in their roles.

How Outreach Can Help

So now the big question is: How can Outreach help?

Outreach helps with all 4 aspects of efficient scaling, but don’t just take our word for it. Many of today’s leading technology and B2B solutions have used Outreach to scale their businesses efficiently.

Zoom

Zoom has come to dominate the enterprise video communications space, facilitating face-to-face meetings over any distance. Zoom uses Outreach to overcome misalignment and automate manual processes.

Zoom came to us with a complicated sales stack of different tools. Data was being pulled from different places, and few of the tools communicated to each other, if any. On top of this, their different revenue teams, Sales, Marketing, and Success, were terribly misaligned on strategy, and were forced to manually relay information which led to wasted time, mistakes, and ultimately money left on the table.

In this environment, sharing insights between teams and developing long-term strategies was impossible.

Outreach fixed this by centralizing all of Zoom’s data into one platform. By integrating all of their sales tools and solutions through Outreach, Zoom’s sales teams were able to work from the same data to improve alignment, facilitate communication across revenue-facing teams, and smooth hand-offs between teams.

Zoom also leveraged Amplify, Outreach’s machine learning technology, to conduct guided A/B testing to target their messaging to different verticals and personas. This allowed them to identify which messages and campaigns were most successful and focus their attention on those. Being able to work in a single platform to execute all of their sales workflows made their sales teams more efficient, data-driven, and aligned across their teams.

In addition, Outreach has helped them scale their team efficiently as well. New reps can clearly see the overall process, and they get notified when a project requires action from them. Managers can control what data the new-hires have access to so they don’t get overwhelmed. All of this allows reps to thrive from day one, meaning they get more productivity out of every rep.

Lindsey Liranzo, Director of Online Sales and Sales Development at Zoom says that “With Outreach, we were finally able to get everybody on one page and actually using the same Sequences that we were seeing success with.”

If you want to read more about Zoom’s story, click here.

MongoDB

MongoDB is a modern database company that has emerged as a leader in its industry. Outreach has been key in helping them reach that point by helping them improve sales productivity and optimizing their sales execution.

One key to MongoDB’s success has been its focus on pipeline generation. Outreach has transformed the way they build their pipeline. By enhancing engagement and automating administrative tasks, they free up their sales team to focus on selling, developing their messaging, and identifying the prospects that they need to reach. This has allowed them to scale their business because they can get more done with the same amount of reps.

Using Outreach has overhauled their processes as they move towards IPO, helping them double their sales productivity and improve their renewal rates by double digits.

If you want to hear more about MongoDB’s story, click here.

AdRoll

AdRoll is a powerful digital advertising platform that helps customers advertise and market across web, social, and email channels. With 35,000 customers, AdRoll was already a big company when they came to Outreach. However, their problem was a byproduct of their success: they had too many leads.

Tracking and managing thousands of leads, while personalizing their selling strategies to get an opportunity and move it through the funnel, was extremely difficult.

AdRoll needed a powerful sales engagement platform to help market themselves, pursue and manage leads, and close deals efficiently with minimal cost.

After implementing Outreach, AdRoll was able to personalize at scale, and build an in-house MQL follow-up system that helped SDRs pursue high-intent leads faster and more efficiently through automated personalization.

The team was then able to put prospects into best Sequence based on the content that they interacted with, allowing reps greater visibility when a prospect is interested and can then reach out at the right time with the right message.

To read more about AdRoll’s story, click here.

Outreach Is Your Key To Successful Scaling

These are just a few of the many stories of how Outreach has helped companies dominate their industries. Outreach works with your current system and tools to create a unique sales tech stack that is tailored to your business and ideal customer profile. With Outreach’s growing list of partners and features, the possibilities will only continue to grow.

There’s never been a better time to start scaling, and there’s no better tool to help you scale than Outreach.

So, what are you waiting for? Get Outreach, and start scaling today.


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