Growing the sales department in a scaling up business

In today's episode, Mattias explains why a functioning sales team is so important and why many companies don't grow beyond ten people.

The early phase of sales

Firstly Mattias gives a brief overview of how iGoMoon and its sales team developed over time.
He founded the company from scratch without any funding from outside, so he and his business partner Erik made all the acquisitions on their own. They were knocking on doors and made countless cold calls on the phone, hoping to find anyone who would buy their website services.

After that initial phase, one or two additional salespeople at iGoMoon got the ball rolling and paved the way for future referrals from early customers.

About 3-4 years into the business, those referrals generated sufficient incoming business at that time, and Mattias focused predominantly on growing the delivery team. This decision quickly led to Mattias once again being the only salesperson after some time. Since he also needed to focus on being the CEO and scaling up the company, he mainly worked with incoming sales and was not concentrating on outgoing sales activity.

Scaling up the business

As the company grew bigger and bigger, he needed to make the decision to scale up the business. The delivery team needed to become bigger, and so did the sales organization. Mattias explains that many founders become the bottleneck and subsequently never manage to grow their company to over ten people because they don't actively scale up their business.

Another crucial part of successfully scaling up a company is implementing teachable processes and defined packages for all your products and services.

Challenging each other

That being said, Mattias started to actively expand his sales team again about two years ago when Henrik joined iGoMoon. About half a year later, Dennis came on board as well.

A positive side effect of having multiple salespeople is their (usually) competitive nature. It's even better if they have some background in sports since that usually adds to it. They like to outdo and challenge each other, which is excellent for the business and their own motivation.

💡EPISODE TAKE AWAY
In order to successfully grow a business and avoid becoming the bottleneck, you need to actively scale it. Invest in good people and teachable processes.

Let us know if you want to hear more about Mattias' scaling up his business and different departments.