Sell More Faster

Chapter 5Scaling Your Team for Speed

Figure 5.1 Scaling Your Team for Speed

Knowing When It's Time to Hit the Gas on Hiring

I look for PPC, the three things that signal a tech startup is at the first tipping point in its life cycle and likely able to successfully scale-up sales. First P is Product, broadly the product–market fit is established and product execution is a solid B, without which sales beyond innovators and early adopters won't happen soon.

Second P is People, specifically the team's readiness to learn and grow into the coming tipping points of revenue growth, which really means abandoning what worked well for sales in the previous tipping point (i.e. MVP).

C is for a critical mass of customers evidenced by 10+ lighthouse customers—these are customers who sing praises about your solution addressing their pain points, unequivocal evidence that Product and People have matured sufficiently to scale up sales.

—David Loia, CRO at ScaleFactor

Up to this point, we've spent our time focused on building our foundation so we are poised to sell more faster. We've used the W3 framework from Chapter 1 to identify who our customer is, what they are buying, and why they need your product. In Chapter 2 we learned the difference between customer development and sales and how to use the customer development process to identify our ideal customer profile (ICP). In Chapter 3