3 Ways to Develop Your Small Business Team for Collaboration and Innovation 

You’re getting to the point in your small business growth to where you can grow a more robust, specialized team – but where do you start? It might seem like you have a lot of areas that you might need help in, but you don’t want to hire too quickly. I’ve been there! At this level of growth, you’ll want to look for people who are open to collaboration and innovation. 

You will likely find that you’ll have anywhere from 11-20 roles open, many of them in Sales and Marketing. This doesn’t mean that you’ll have to hire 11-20 people, of course; those roles will likely be filled by anywhere from 5-9 team members.  

The first two levels of growth involved putting a strong foundation in place; at Level 3, you’re ready to expand, and you’ll need a strong team to help you do so! 

Delineating Roles as You Grow Your Team 

Level 3 is where you’ll start to see more specialization and delineation in roles, allowing you to grow a more robust team. Many of these new roles will very likely open up in Sales and Marketing, as these are the areas that will fuel the rest of your growth. 

This can be a little disconcerting at first, especially because your Marketing Team doesn’t immediately pay for itself. Marketing is an ongoing activity, and while some things can bring you a quick return on investment, much of what your Marketing Team does will pay for itself weeks or months down the road. 

Without this activity though, your Sales Team won’t have incoming calls – and the rest of your team won’t have clients to serve. 

In the same way, it can feel a bit uncomfortable to hand over your sales process to someone else – after all, up until now, it’s probably been mostly you. You know how to build rapport with your prospects, how to vet them, and who you want to work with…but unless you want to spend all your time on sales calls (which really isn’t a wise thing for an owner or CEO to do), you’ll need to build out a Sales Team that can handle the process for you. 

This is where systems and lines of communication become essential. 

Building a Specialized Team 

In Levels 1 and 2 of your business growth, there really wasn’t much of a need for specialization. You could handle a lot of what it took to run your business with the help of a few team members who handled the day to day tasks. 

Now, it’s time to start handing over the reins – and in order to do that, you’ll need to hire strategically and communicate clearly. 

Previously, you probably had one Marketing Assistant who could handle everything; now, you may find that you need to start bringing on specialists like a Copywriter, a Graphic Designer, and a Video Editor. In order to manage your growing team, you may also want to look into hiring a Marketing Coordinator. 

You also very likely handled all of the sales tasks yourself, perhaps with the assistance of an Intake Specialist to handle obtaining the initial information. As you grow, however, that’s going to become unsustainable…and you’ll find that tasks like responding to email inquiries, returning calls, keeping DM conversations going, and updating your CRM start to fall through the cracks. When that happens, it won’t matter how successful your Marketing Team is at bringing in prospects…they’ll dry up quickly when they don’t receive a response. 

By hiring a Client Engagement Specialist or two, you can keep all of your sales tasks up to date and start building strong relationships with your prospects. This superstar can jump in anywhere you need them, from developing rapport on social media and keeping your CRM up to date to responding to emails and DMs or handling extra sales calls. 

This prevents you from being the bottleneck and allows you to focus where you’re needed (rather than where you’re used to be needed)! 

Creating the Right Systems 

With the expected growth on your Marketing and Sales Teams, you’ll also want to make sure that you have the right systems in place. These are what will allow your team to communicate smoothly and work effectively without a lot of trial and error. 

There will be some trial and error of course – this is inherent in both marketing and sales – but having strong systems in place will allow your team time to refine their strategy and workflows, knowing that the foundation and structure are in place. 

Strong Marketing and Sales Systems will also allow your team time to collaborate, innovate, and execute in new ways. They’ll also equip both teams to work in ways that best fit their personalities. Your Marketing Team will likely be filled with creatives, and your Sales Team will probably include some fairly competitive extroverts. Both groups of people tend to be amazing at what they do, but their needs and working styles may add some new dimensions to your team culture. Having the right systems and communication structures in place will allow them to thrive in their zones of genius while still allowing things to run smoothly and profitably! 

The good news is, you don’t have to build these systems from scratch – we have done a lot of the work for you. If you’d like to know more about the solutions we offer, contact us and let us know!