🎯 Outperform your competition

There are 4 areas every startup needs to focus on to get ahead.

🏎️💨 1. SPEED 

Speed is the most important thing in a startup.

In every way you can break up the silos and enable and foster collaboration and transparency.

Why?

Revenue growth is a team sport.

And the more you collaborate the more you will increase your chance of winning.

Scale knowledge and best practices fast in the team.

There's no better way to build team spirit than to learn and win together.

Example: when you go to market, you try a lot of things.You experiment to find product market fit. When you try something that works well, it’s your responsibility as the leader to make sure that knowledge is spread inside and out, across the whole team. Make sure everyone learns from best practices. This is how you win ground faster together.

Review the sales process - can you make it easier/remove unnecessary steps or time?

It should be ridiculously easy to buy from you.

Unfortunately, it’s not easy to buy from a lot of startups today.

Example: When a lead is coming in from the website, how long does it take your team to reply? Check and improve. Speed is everything.

👩‍🚒 2. TOP TALENT

Do you have the right person on the right seat?

If you're unsure, ask someone that knows.

Example: If you’ve started to give excuses for the VP of Sales or some other important role on the team, don’t postpone it.

It will not get better unless you deal with it, don’t wait.

Treat your top performers like they deserve.

So many lose sight of this when things get stressful.

A-players know their worth, don’t risk loosing them due to neglect.

Why?

“I can just hire someone new.”

No, top talent doesn’t grow on trees. Mediocre does though.     

Keep your team LEAN. Bring in freelancers for specific tasks/projects. Often you don’t need to hire a full time employee.

If you're an early stage startup, skip the Salesforce/Google hire. Hire for the right phase of your startup.

You will save yourself and the candidate time and headache.

Examples: You need someone with experience of the early-stage. People who have worked at large companies are often used to a lot of support and will often not be as hands-on as you need them to be.

Please don't oversell the role.

Be honest and attract the right people instead.

There's a big difference in selling the vision and exaggerating the status of the company.

I see so many companies wasting time in this area.

📈 RECOMMENDATIONS & SOME INSPIRATION

🚀: This is my best interviewing experience, thank you Machinelab Ventures read it here.

👀: The attention economy is literally EXPLODING - START building TODAY

🌎: Psst..have you checked out this remote sales leader role here? I'm helping my client Future Talent Council recruit a Sales Director.

🎧: 20 minutes of inspiration (no joke) with Codie Sanchez in Founders Journal by Alex Lieberman, listen here.

📣: Sahil Bloom inspires me daily - read about how he talks about founders owning their own distribution channel. I highly recommend his FREE newsletter.

🧃Have you heard of Cyberjuice? I’ve just teamed up with them as Growth Advisor.

🔥 3. SALES

Are you measuring the output you want to see?

Many startups don’t. Unsure what you should measure? Ask for help.

Go to your network and ask for warm introductions.

So simple, yet so often forgotten. Leverage the low hanging fruit in front of you.

Make sure to end each customer call with an ask for a referral.

Don't forget to do the same for them. This is a massively untapped opportunity.

When a new sales rep starts are you setting them up for success?

No, really, are you?

So many startups would benefit from having a light onboarding in place.

You will get ROI faster if you do.

Giving someone a laptop and wishing them good luck is very contra productive, yet this is so common.

📱 4. MARKETING

If you haven’t already you need to make creative a part of your company DNA

You need to become a content power house.

Start building community around your brand.

Put a human VOICE behind your brand.

Leave the one way communication behind.

Experiment with content

Loads of it.

Check what’s out there and reverse engineer it to fit your business.

Every startup should see themselves as a media company.

Your job as a business owner today is to find ways to grab attention, build audience, engage and speak with that audience.

This is where people spend time today. This is where you influence people.

Dare to have fun on social media.

Get all your C-levels to actively start sharing content on social media.

Find a kick-ass copywriter that can nail storytelling for you.

Not what you think is kick-ass, what the AUDIENCE think is kick-ass.

Innovate, try new things, experiment.

PS. Don't forget to thank your team. The team you build is the company you build.

👋 Work with Hanna

Whenever you're ready there's 5 ways I can help you:

1. I help startups build revenue growth, audience and high performing teams. If you want to work with me, reach out here or send me an email: [email protected]

2. Work with me 1:1 and build your audience on LinkedIn. You will learn the exact strategy I used to build 69,500+ followers and 48 million+ impressions and how you can do the same and monetize your traffic. Learn more here.

3. Join 35,100 and subscribe to “The Future of Work Newsletter” on LinkedIn here (next edition is about how to build a portfolio career)

4. Promote your business to 36,000 people by sponsoring my newsletters. Reach me here: [email protected]

5. Go-To-Market with Huntrs. Reach us here. 🔥