– For ecommerce businesses with less than $1 million in revenue, it is important to have a founding team consisting of individuals specializing in product/finance and marketing.
– When revenue reaches $1 million to $5 million, outsourcing time-consuming tasks like ads and content creation can be beneficial. However, building trust through personalized email communication is crucial at this stage.
– As revenue grows to $6 million to $12 million, focus should be on internal processes, testing, and conversion rate optimization. Hiring decisions should contribute to the bottom line.The key action item is to build a strong team consisting of individuals specializing in product/finance and marketing in order to help a brand grow past $1 million in revenue.E-commerce Growth Blueprint for 2022
Less than $1 million in revenue
Your founding team, solo rarely works to help a brand grow past $1 million in revenue. You need two key people: the product/finance side and the marketing side. If you don’t have these two key people, you’re going to struggle.
$1 million – $5 million in revenue
Outsource the most time-consuming parts of your job. This should be ads and content. I wouldn’t outsource email yet, though. Creating a narrative of the company and founder via email rather than selling is key to building trust within the community at this stage. People want to feel like they are supporting a small company still, so lean into this.
This is where you start hiring, but you won’t be able to afford top talent yet. This is the point where you are really niching down to your core product lines while also expanding intelligently. The ideal group to work with is a consultant who can handle data, research, and the beginnings of basic CRO. You’re still looking to build sustainable processes at this point. Remember, you’ve been doing it on your own for the most part up to this point. Begin to look omnichannel.
$6 million – $12 million in revenue
If you’ve made it this far, you’re going to start looking at your costs and weighing the options to bring things in-house. Your growth rate, product-market fit, and profit will determine the talent you’ll be able to attract. Focus on internal processes with documentation. It’s crucial but often non-existent still. Introduce a testing schedule and CRO into your business. Your decisions should be data-led at this point. You’ll experience your biggest gains from a solid process. Any hire should materially contribute to the bottom line.
$13 – $20 million in revenue
At this point, there’s likely been some turnover during your journey. There’s been a lot of growth, depending on how quickly you made it to this point. It’s time to take a really hard look at the unit economics of the business. With scale comes increased costs and a lot of things that should have been done haven’t been done. You have a fork in the road. You have a few hires internally, but the business decisions might be to find a growth agency that covers all the disciplines and works together closely instead of leveling up individuals in your org to get to the next milestone. This is the transition to hiring the best all internal staff you can that you were priced out of earlier.$20+ rev
You’re a real business. You should have enough staff internally to handle most of the day to day stuff. You should hire out agencies as needed but would be better off hiring strategists that have been there done that to optimize your processes internally. More advisory level at this stage.Top list of things to optimize:
– Supply Chain and GTM Strategy
– Customer Support
– Continual Market and Customer Research
– Content Creation
– Data Driven Product Growth
Inspired by a convo with Jeremy Epperson#marketing #strategy #ecommercehttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jivanco