Scale Your Business Better: The HUSTLE Stage

A better name for this stage would be “AHHH THERE’S ANOTHER FIRE”. You don’t know what you don’t know about your product, service, or market, yet.

This stage is all about identifying the actual problem that your product or service is intended to solve as well as the actual audience that is willing to pay for it. This is a reactive stage mainly focused on lead generation. All questions that need to be answered will fall into one of two categories:

• Are you creating a solution that fits the market right now?
• Is the market you are targeting big enough for sustainable growth?

Marketing During This Stage

In this stage, your marketing will be aimed at your total addressable market, generating a whole lot of leads through lists, events, digital ads, inbound and outbound strategies, calls, and demos.

Naming promotions, products, and the company brand are incredibly important because it will dictate a consumer’s perspective on your brand. Choosing the right name is often the most underrated part of running a business and scaling it to be as profitable as possible. For example, just by changing the name of a promotion to something your prospective client can easily remember, you can increase the conversion by three to four times even though you haven’t changed the product. That’s the power of a good name. A good name should be memorable and sticky, and there are different ways to go about that.

Picking the right niche is an art. It'll help you to optimize your messaging, bring more value to your customer, and allow you to charge a premium price. If your business ends up in the wrong niche, it won’t find a product-market fit and will likely be overlooked by your customer. 

Sales During This Stage

Sales will be focused on selling the dream. As you acquire clients, you’ll begin to learn how you can best serve them, the needs they actually have, and gather the data to support this. This information will allow you to gain clarity and identify who is “ideal” so you can then be intentional about moving toward your total relevant market, increase your conversion rates and create processes to streamline acquiring new clients.

Pricing power is all about hitting the sweet spot of charging what a product is actually worth, incorporating a premium, and over-delivering to satisfy your client. Creating a business that can scale requires that you and your customer agree to the same value for your offering. You might think that your product is worth $500, but if the person that is purchasing the product values it at $100, you will never make any sales.

Operations During This Stage

Operations during this stage are focused on setting up a CRM to organize and track your client data and conversion tracking, and a CMS to manage your communications and website content. These will enable you to track metrics like calls, demos, and close rates for sales, traffic, leads, funnel conversion rate, and cost per lead for marketing.

Once you figure out problem-market fit, you either transform and grow or stay and get stuck. No brand can afford to stay too long at this stage. In time, the volume of leads approach will become increasingly inefficient, and you’ll struggle to retain some of your clients.

Why Don’t Companies Get Beyond this Stage:

• You haven’t found the ideal client for your product or service.
• Heavy discounting and clients aren’t renewing: your key use case is getting commoditized.
• Your brand and positioning are weak, leading to poor demand and win rates.
• There is no primary reason for churn, so there’s no clear resolution.
• You have no common enemy, and therefore, you have no direction.
• Clients are unsure of the ROI you provide when renewal time approaches.
• What you sell is not what you deliver.

At this stage, marketing and sales aren’t fully aligned because they are still learning. Once you’re confident that you have the right product in the right market for the right client, then it’s time to start making the change. Staying here too long is going to cause you to stall. Transitioning to the next stage doesn’t mean you abandon everything you just did, instead, we need to build upon it.

Omicle delivers brand clarity, marketing strategy, and operational efficiency to prepare leaders to scale their business. If you are ready to scale your business, contact us today to get started.