Congratulations – your business is thriving with exciting developments like increased sales, bigger staff, wider product lines, greater capital or just plain more resources. That’s growth, and we love to see it. But oftentimes, pouring the revenue generated from growth into new resources offsets those bigger numbers. When you learn how to scale a business, you empower your Ecommerce platform to keep growing its metrics at pace with its resources, which crucially helps keep revenue and overhead in healthy balance — and keeps your company trucking for years to come.
Before diving in, it’s important to establish that scaling is more than just a buzzword – though if you’ve spent more than five minutes with Ecommerce entrepreneurs, you’ll know that it is definitely a big buzzword, too.
But First, What Is Scaling in Ecommerce?
Put simply, scaling is growing your business, but it also means growing your business with intention. This involves making deliberate considerations for both capacity and capability. Growth is great, but scaling with intention helps ensure that your business – Ecommerce or otherwise – has the systems and infrastructure in place to accommodate that growth. Here are a few tips on how to scale a business in B2B Ecommerce:
1. Refine Your Sales Funnel
If you are at the point of investigating how to scale a business, chances are your sales funnel is already solid. But for the low-resource, high-impact sort of sustainable growth a well-scaled business needs, it’s time to start refining the end point of that funnel.
Content Powered recommends building an incentive-based referral network for your most passionate buyers, focusing on networking with your most high-value customers, introducing customer loyalty programs and strengthening the three “Rs”: retargeting, remarketing and retention. The result? You maintain a steady foundational income flow that feeds resource growth elsewhere.
2. Focus on Inbound Marketing
Outbound marketing is the type of interruptive marketing that presents audiences with products or services that may not necessarily be interested in as they go about their day-to-day (think TV commercials, pop-up ads or spots on ad-supported streams). On the other hand, inbound strategies cater more to scaling as they target customers who are already interested in your products and solutions via a cycle of attracting, engaging and delighting buyers.
Social media content, blogs and inbound sales calls with a focus on solution selling are effective marketing tools for scalable businesses. So are long-term strategies, like utilizing surveys or chatbots to ensure that customers are happy with what they’ve purchased.
3. Invest in Automation
Machine learning isn’t just for massive IT, financial and software sectors. Today, SMB Ecommerce companies are fortunate to have access to AI-assisted tools that use automation to do everything from high-quality customer service (i.e. chatbots and human-like phone services) to handling drip marketing campaigns to pinging customers who’ve left their online shopping carts without checking out. Even better, automation can help you perform rote tasks on the administrative level, drastically reducing the amount of spreadsheets you’ve got saved on Google Drive.
As Omniconvert notes, investing in ground-level automation generates a key factor for scaling your business: time. And that time can in turn be invested in more critical tasks, like product development or creating more bespoke marketing content.
4. Involve Your Customers
You’ll notice that much of the endeavor of scaling an Ecommerce business focuses on marketing, repeat sales and retention, largely because these tactics require minimal investment (especially when some are automated) while generating the types of steady returns that make growth sustainable. Involving and engaging your customers – making them an active part of the sales process – happens throughout the funnel and sometimes beyond. Strategies such as these enlist customers to engage with your business for the long haul without you lifting a finger:
- Offer an account system on your site, which lends buyers access to useful features like quick checkout and access to past purchases while driving traffic to your site.
- Encourage customers to write reviews, and share the most glowing testimonials in spaces like product pages and newsletters.
- Consider widening your salesperson-led strategy and allowing customers to make their own self-service purchases. If some of your consumer base is comfortable placing their own orders, more of your sales team can focus on nurturing existing customers and finding new leads.
- Strongly solicit customer feedback and feature requests; not only does this keep customers engaged with your brand, it makes them feel cared for (which increases retention) and can significantly contribute to your R&D efforts at a low cost.
5. Explore Outsourcing
Growth offers your business an opportunity to outsource people power, and while the prospect may be intimidating at first, the potential scale-related benefits are too good to pass up. Consider outsourcing accounting, marketing, IT, administration or customer service (which itself is often vital to successful scaling). Assivo’s Nadia Swofford notes that outsourcing work can not only save your company money and help you focus on more income-generating operations, it can reduce the amount of employee-related issues on your plate, widen your talent pool and even lend your business a significantly wider geographic footprint as a vendor.
Let Zoey Help
Scaling emphasizes the type of balance that takes your mental, financial and energy resources off of certain, often rote, tasks so that you can invest those resources in tasks that need your hands-on attention. Tracking your metrics and helping your refine your search engine optimization (SEO) is just the start of how Zoey can help with that – by importing your sales, product and customer data and accommodating multi-location selling and multi-user admin access, Zoey automates time-consuming data tasks while broadening your sales net, all while helping your business more easily implement the type of sales, discounts and coupons that retain customers. Our tools let both customers and salespeople directly make and manage orders, all in one place, helping avoid time and cost-consuming data entry and the mistakes that often come with it.
As a tool for scale, Zoey leaves you free to focus on what matters: not just growth for growth’s sake, but setting the stage to enable a steady and sustainable future for your business. Experience the growth for yourself with a free demo:
Dan is a small business owner and freelance writer based in Dallas, TX. In over a decade of experience, he’s been fortunate to write and collaborate with business-facing brands including The Motley Fool, Chron, Office Depot, Fortune and more.
