In the online service-based world, we tend to avoid using words like “startup a lot”. But I can say now, after 5 years of helping businesses scale effectively, that almost all of them were startups.
It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, startup is more of a solid explanation of where you are in your business journey, more than in which industry you’re in (people think startups are always tech!).
That being said, and having worked with so many different businesses over the years, I can share with you that most, if not all, companies we have worked with didn’t have a mature product/service. An easy to analyze this is to look at their Client Success Department.
Normally underplanned, underdeveloped, and underappreciated.
Not intentionally, but we know startups need to dial in acquisition (Marketing and Sales). But the next stage of maturity will come from developing these departments to feed the more developed ones.
I have seen myself, and through our team, the scaling process to thousands of clients, and I want you to grab a pen and paper to get some of these shortcuts that can help you accomplish the same.
It doesn’t matter how fast you want to scale or how big you want the business to be. If you envision a sustainable business over time, you’ll end up serving thousands of clients.
The key things we have observed change the trajectory of a business to actually scale and not get bloated and unsustainable, are:
- Quality of Service
- The experience, expectations, and clear Avatar who benefits from the service
- Loyalty
- Little to no deliquent payments, clear intention to expand revenue & increase money spent doing business with you, and willingness to refer people
- Authority & Positioning
- Online Reviews, Testimonials (or lack thereof), Reddit Threads, Word of Mouth from Clients & Industry Leaders
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Quality of Service
That’s it, quite simple.
According to Walker Research in 2024, customer experience is now considered equally important as price and product when it comes to differentiating a brand, meaning that a positive customer experience is just as crucial as the price or quality of the product itself in influencing consumer choices.
We have observed that some companies are losing up to 50% of their revenue due to bad client experience & support.
And knowing that people are much more willing to spread bad word of mouth than good one, in a world of online forums, social media, and alike, this feels like walking on eggshells.
Statistically, it is said that it takes up to 12 positive reviews to make up for a very bad one. So, all reviews matter.
So what you do is important, but equally important is who you do it for.
Another big mistake we’ve seen over and over again is Marketing & Sales trying to push numbers to new heights at all costs.
This will end up forcing you to start selling to people who either are not ideal for what you have to offer, or you have created a journey for someone who is not the person who you’re selling to.
On one hand, those extra sales can make everyone feel better about product market fit, but it’s like a piece of cake you ate at night to “celebrate” to just regret the impact it made on your diet the day after.
The aftermath of selling to the incorrect clients showed us over and over again that the impacts it has on delinquency, churn, and retention make it a very low ROI decision.
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Loyalty
This aligns pretty much with the previous point. It’s a nice overlap between selling to the right people with the right expectations, a reliable team, and a process that can help us be consistent while streamlining our service delivery, allowing us to have a loyal client base.
A simple question we ask our consulting clients is how many reviews, testimonials, and referrals they’re getting a month.
It’s very rare when we get a concrete answer (and the actual answer was given; they’re not doing it enough).
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Authority & Positioning
Even if you cross the chasm, and you’re the first one doing what you’re doing well with what you have to offer, it won’t stay like that forever.
There will be someone trying to offer “more” than you, “faster” than you, and “cheaper” than you.
There is one thing they can’t do better if you start at the right time: building your Authority & Positioning, how your clients feel when working with your company.
Companies tend to reach out to us and make this decision after they understand the problems are too big for them to solve them, but if your client success department is not on fire and you have been growing consistently, now is the time to start working on it.
I can give you an example. We focus on serving growing businesses that deliver online services (B2B and B2C), and we decided to provide a full white glove, high-touch VIP type of service because we know no one in our space will prioritize it.
This is why we didn’t create a course and wait for people to watch and do. This has been a big differentiation in why, over the past 5 years, there has been little to no competition with what we do (because of how we do it).
As a byproduct of that, it has built me, my co-founder, and my team to unprecedented levels of knowledge. The white-glove service not only makes the client happy it gives us more time and exposure to our client’s problems and challenges, which has led to us being super aware of what is happening in the marketplace and helped us build a toolbox that helps all clients we work with.
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Takeaways
Don’t neglect client success when pushing to scale your business, you’ll need it to have the right quality of service, word of mouth, referrals, and authority in the marketplace.
It’s easy to focus on Marketing and Sales at the cost of working on Client Success too late, and as mentioned before, bad reviews spread like wildfire.
How do you stop wildfires?
You don’t throw water at them. Ideally, you prevent them from starting.
Talk soon,
Jay
