3 Steps to Prepare Your Startup for Expansion

Scaling a Startup: Here are things to keep in mind so that your company growth doesn't end in chaos.

Picture this, you’ve just launched a marketing campaign - the email’s been sent out. Excel spreadsheets explode for the sales team, customer service is struggling to keep up with the influx of inquiries and the marketing team are left twiddling their thumbs, unsure what to do next. Sounds bad? It is.As startups grow, company processes often become more complex and keeping on top of everything in the operational environment becomes challenging. It’s easy for founders to lose track of things and this can be made costly if customers are lost, this could spell the beginning of the end. That’s why we’ve come up with three tips to help protect your business from failing.

1) Process automation - Guarantee your customers an exceptional service.

After developing a successful business model, taking on some investment and experiencing steady increase in conversions, it’s vital that some level of automation is set up. Soon you could be faced with an influx of leads and you need to ensure that these are all handled the right way. This is the core competence of the Salesforce platform: by mapping, automating, and optimising all processes in sales, marketing, and customer care, it enables startups to have a solid workflow during their company growth, giving you more time to focus on your business. As well as eliminating frustrating manual tasks, the platform guarantees an above-average customer experience. How? By ensuring that no customer is forgotten. First-class customer experience paired with an efficient operations setup is an absolute must if you want to soar above competition.

2) Cross-functional reporting - real-time data as a decision-making aid.

Salesforce has been the market leader in customer relationship management (CRM) for a while. However, the platform offers more than just a CRM. It enables founders to control all areas of the business via one platform and put their business intelligence to operational use.With all data and information provided via a central system, all customer-related data can be evaluated granularly and in real-time. Startups cannot afford to make any mistakes, especially in scaling phases. As the saying goes "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it" data-driven decisions are more important today than ever before.

3) Process discipline - technology is not everything.

Even the best technology can be ineffective if it’s not used properly. On one hand, the tool may need to be adapted and tailored to a start-ups unique business requirements. On the other hand, you need user adoption. Employees must work consistently and disciplined with the solution, only then are the relevant data generated via the system, automations triggered and the scalability of the company ensured. It is the task of the management to promote this infrastructure and to ensure transparency in all areas of the company.

EMPAUA - Salesforce Consulting for Startups

Although Salesforce is extremely agile and intuitive to use, founders often don't know how to take full advantage of the power of the Salesforce platform. To avoid errors in the implementation or development of Salesforce, young companies should rely on the expertise of Salesforce experts right from the start. EMPAUA is a certified Salesforce consultancy for startups from Berlin - and Europe's only Salesforce for Startups partner. The team of founders, developers and consultants specialise in designing, implementing and maintaining best-practice solutions for startups.

"Our focus is always to empower startups with our support to achieve size and make a real difference in their respective industries," says Malte Warczinski, one of EMPAUA’s founders.

EMPAUA leverages the agility and speed of Salesforce cloud technology for young, disruptive businesses."If the processes within a startup change, previously suitable system architecture may no longer makes sense. Interdependent automations may have to be restructured to ensure that all processes continue to run seamlessly and logically without manual intermediate steps, this is where EMPAUA comes in" explains Warczinski.If a startup does this on its own, it can not only be extremely tedious, but also extremely frustrating: "Employees should always be deployed to generate value. This is the case when they deal with the core competence of the respective company. In a system implementation, the widespread do-it-yourself mentality in the startup area doesn't work out. Experience shows that system errors can occur often" says Warczinski.

EMPAUA: Consulting, Implementation and Maintenance

So how exactly does EMPAUA’s methodology work?

1. The interdisciplinary team of business analysts, developers and solution architects first take a look at the business model of a startup.
2. An initial solution design is developed in Salesforce that maps the model.
3. This is followed by a process analysis that ensures that all processes have been accurately recorded and taken into account.
4. If this is the case, implementation takes place.
5. The startups are trained in how to use the solution.

The team continues to take care of the IT infrastructure through individual customisations and maintenance - and thus ensures that the respective solutions are always up to date.