By Scott Hoffpauir, Managing Partner

At True North Advisory, we sometimes work with technology startups and smaller companies. They all want to grow their business and take it to the next level. But what they really mean is that they want to scale.

So, what’s the difference between growing and scaling? Growing is increasing revenue at the same rate as your costs while scaling increases revenue faster than your expenses. In layman’s terms, scaling is just doing more with less.

So how do you scale? You have to look across the business and figure out how to make operations more repeatable and cost-effective. An excellent place to start is by looking at the customer lifecycle, from selling to onboarding and adoption. The selling phase is a topic unto itself, so we’ll focus on onboarding and adoption in this post.

The goal of onboarding is to get a prospect using your product so you can get value as quickly as possible. To scale, you need to perform this process efficiently and predictably. The first step is to determine what problems your customer is trying to solve and what success looks like. The best way to do this is by building use cases.

The second thing you need to do is build a customer success team. Simply put, this team is responsible for achieving your customer’s goals. They prove the value of your products and brand by guiding and supporting your customer. The organization accomplishes this task by performing a variety of sales, marketing, professional services, training, and support functions.

The best way to start a customer success organization is to find someone passionate about your products, who is an excellent communicator, and who has proven leadership skills. Have them start with the basics, and then build a team as you grow and mature. Remember, while your sales team focuses on customer acquisition, your customer success team focuses on satisfaction and retention.

The third thing you need is to map your customer journey. This is the process by which your customers interact with your brand and products. You’ll need to understand the key stakeholders, their goals, and their motivations. You’ll also want to identify every customer touchpoint. With the customer journey mapped out, you’ll want to layer on the required people, processes, and technologies to improve each step of the experience. Having a well-defined customer journey ensures you have a blueprint for success that reduces inefficiencies and increases customer satisfaction.

The last thing you need to do is to make sure you have the right tools to help with automation and measuring success. If you’re just getting started, it’s fine to start with a manual customer success program. But to scale, you’ll want to find tools that help you automate your efforts. You also want to make sure you’re able to measure customer success, both from your company’s and your customer’s perspective. The most important metrics to track are churn and customer satisfaction. These critical measurements guide you in making adjustments and helping you to optimize in the future.

Focusing on the onboarding and adoption phases of the customer lifecycle is a good first step to scaling. Salesforce was an early innovator in customer success. Companies like RingCentral, Slack, and Zoom use their customer success teams as differentiators, providing a strategic advantage. Signing up new customers is hard and worth your focus, but you need to make sure your existing customers see value in your products and don’t churn away.

Customer success is a crucial piece of the scaling puzzle — however, there are other areas to consider, such as your product, technology, support, and organization. In subsequent blogs, we’ll discuss each one in-depth. Today, though, remember that focusing on your customer’s success through onboarding and adoption can help you scale your business.