What to Know Before Becoming a Large Seller

In your early days of business, one of your primary goals may have been to someday scale your business to a household name—or at least to be well known and thriving. But before you get there, it’s important to learn all about how to start selling things online. To make your growing business sustainable, becoming a large seller requires careful and thoughtful planning and precision.

Maybe your customer base has grown exponentially and consumers already love what you offer. But there are things to know about online business that require adjustments to your staff and operations with a strategy that matches the additional demands. Can you handle an ever-increasing demand? While you may want to become a large seller overnight, it’s important that every move you make is slow and deliberate.

6 Steps to Becoming a Larger Seller

Square is always thinking ahead so you can get ahead and stay there. Here’s our list of steps to get you to large-scale sales efficiently and sustainably.

1) Understand Your Product and Its Market

Before you do anything, let’s get back to basics—what you’re offering and why you’re in business. Consider the following:

• Is the market in need of your products or services?
• Do you have an advantage over competitors?
• Is your business scalable?
• Do you really want to scale up?

These questions help you uncover your present weaknesses and determine if scaling up to larger sales is right for your company.

2) Optimize Your Position

Part of scaling up is differentiating your company from others in your niche. Uncover what you can do to place your brand in the best position to meet the right people at the right place and at the right time.

To do this:

• Define (or redefine) your target audience. Drafting customer personas helps direct marketing and sales efforts toward the right demographics. This also helps you optimize messaging and budgets, as well as alerts you to the audiences that aren’t right for your product or service.
• Write your brand’s positioning statement. This one statement tells why you do what you do. It should influence every decision and action in your business. Identify why your customers trust you as a unique provider of a specific product or service and why your brand’s offerings are the best way to solve their problems.

3) Review Your Finances

Do you understand your finances? How much you need to scale and where you’ll get it? It’s important that you understand both short- and long-term financial requirements for executing your scaling strategy.

4) Do Your Housekeeping

Certain things can make scaling up to larger sales much easier. Consider getting these things in order:

• Your CRM. Growing businesses need a robust and reliable CRM solution. You should consider it the very heart of your company and the place to go when you need to view customer contacts.
• Your payroll solution. Can your current payroll system handle processing salaries timely and efficiently? Can it scale if you need to hire additional employees?
• Your accounting solution. Does your current accounting program maintain accurate accounts? Are they up to date? Do you have other tools or resources that can maintain accuracy?

Any issues you have with current programs and solutions will only get worse the larger you grow. Your app stack is your foundation.

5) Scale-Up, But Be Smart

After you solve any issues uncovered in the previous steps, it’s time to move on to the actual scaling. Don’t leave any loose ends—be sure your processes are tight. When it’s time to scale, you may have to increase the scope of such things as:

• SaaS. These are all the software-as-a-service programs you use to conduct your day-to-day. Do your current apps have scalability built-in? It may be time to upgrade certain programs and tools—or try new ones. If there are any gaps, find tools to fill them.
• Location and space. This mainly applies to brick-and-mortar businesses, but if you carry any sort of on-site inventory, it’s important you have the space to house extra. Plus, will your employees work from an office or from home? If you have on-site staff, it’s important to have enough space.
• Other resources. What else, if anything, hinders you from growing? Do you need an online store, for instance? Get it clear in your mind and come up with a plan for moving your strategy forward.

6) Scale Up Your Team

As you grow, managing your team can become more difficult. It’s highly likely you’ll need more hands-on deck. You may uncover gaps you need filled or key strategic areas you need specialists for. There’s no right answer to how many employees you need to scale—but it is something you must get right. Some businesses hire too many employees too fast and then have to let people go, which does nothing for your brand, your team’s performance, or your stability financially.

Work with Square Today

We’re building for the future. We have a flexible set of solutions that support scalable growth and new ways of running a business. You can choose just the solutions you need, and the best part is—it all works together seamlessly.

Square’s pre-built integrations offer you open access via a custom API. We can work with your existing business setup and enable you to extend into new capabilities outside our products. Interested in learning more? Contact us today to see what it’s like to work with Square. We’ll help you be successful now and into the future.