The stage of growing sales revenue from $10M to $100M is really exciting. I’ve had experience in this sales revenue range at 3 companies:
- AppAssure – we went from $10M to $25 Million in sales around the acquisition by DELL
- Acronis – we went from $19 Million to $100+ Million in sales
- Veeam – grew about $18M to $100+ Million in sales
By the time you attain $10M in revenue, you have the following as the foundation to scale to $100M:
- The market is big enough
- The problem you’re solving is real
- The product is sufficiently good and can win in the market
- The processes are repeatable if you got to $10M
- You have clarity on the kind of team and talent that works for your company/culture
It’s a really exciting time and this rapid expansion stage growth is when a lot of really fun things happen – this includes hiring great people on the team as the company expands, the culture grows and a lot more team building activities happen, the product gets better, the market share expands rapidly, and you get to help a lot of new customers. But creating this revenue growth is harder than it sounds.
So here are some things that we did and which I wanted to share with other companies to ensure they have on their checklist to fuel their growth from $10M to $100M (usually goes from ~ $10M to ~$20M then to ~$40M/$50M then to ~$80M/$100M):
- Talent – your People are the key to success and recruiting is a critical piece of the puzzle. Every day is a draft day and in this phase you need to get A-level talent in the right seats
- Consistent Processes – this growth phase is all about having effective, repeatable and consistent processes. This is not just for sales but for everything at the company such as the Recruiting Process, etc.
- Growth Drivers – by the point you hit $10M you must clearly understand the key drivers that will fuel your company’s growth and then you will know what to do to drive the revenue growth
- Executives – Bring in more experienced senior executives focus on recruiting more great managers to lead teams; You may end up upgrading your executives around $20M and at $100M but not if your existing ones are doing great (i.e. if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it)
- Managers – this is where getting good middle managers is really critical and one of the biggest difference makers for a company expanding in this $10M to $100M range is recruiting really good middle managers and then developing some internal people to be good managers
- Employee growth – in this range, you’re growing from about 100 employees to anywhere between 500 and a 1,000 – as you continue to scale recruiting, you need to have a recruiting team building the right processes to focus and be continue to attract world-class A-level talent at a larger scale (this is harder than when you’re just 50-100 employees)
- Global Presence – begin to expand to EMEA, APAC, ANZ and LATAM but start in the UK & Germany (prioritize by top tech spenders)
- Sales – now you need a dedicated team and a repeatable process for winning larger Enterprise deals (remember how Salesforce.com started with SMB/MM and then began selling more and more $1M and then $10M and then even larger deals
- Marketing – the #1 lever is Lead Generation to drive your pipeline and sales growth and you have to have a dedicated B2B Demand Generation team
- Segmentation – it’s critical to have different and well thought-out segments clearly set in your strategy and have teams in Sales and in Marketing as well as CS really focus by customer segments. Things like Value Proposition will change from segment to segment, so will all the Sales Motions and different selling plays in your playbook
- Product – your engineering team is larger and more specializes, your product must be more sophisticated in order to support larger Enterprise customers that drive bigger $ACV deals and you need to have an interlock with sales, marketing and customer success to get the necessary customer feedback to make the product world-class for more consistent sales to larger organizations
- Customer Success – so Customer Success is the key to the company’s success and ensuring customers are using the solution effectively and give a good NPS score will yield good renewal rates which keeps your revenue growing; investing in CS is really a big part of your effective growth to $100M
- Executive alignment & cadence – this is not discussed as frequently but what I’ve seen consistently is that there is a real rhythm to executive team’s alignment, from weekly Executive Team Meetings, to Monthly Business Updates, to Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs), to Strategic Planning Offsites, etc. This alignment is critical to grow to $100M and beyond
- Execution – to get $10M to $100M in global revenue, you have to have Dashboards to monitor KPIs across the entire company and not just sales or marketing; you must track execution and have regular business reviews to ensure execution is on track.
- Effective FP&A – not a lot of people talk about this but effective Financial Planning & Analysis is critical to model out top-down and bottoms-up business operating models to get a clear understanding on the business but also to do things such as capacity planning for your sales and hiring sales reps way in advance of the time when you need them to be at-ramp and hitting their quota