EP68: Which Comes First, Traction or Scale?

 

Our Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank, continue their discussion about churn and its various causes. Today’s topic is about how a company’s growth is managed. Are the guiding forces going after traction first? Or are they jumping right into how to scale before they have worked out their product’s kinks? Chris and Corey talk about the tragedy of designing for scale before you have traction. As Chris will tell you, it’s a fool’s errand. If you have no traction, no conversations with your buyers, then you’re not going to learn anything about what your customers need or about why they may not be coming back. Once again, market dominance is achieved when you investigate your churn! And that’s done with conversations.

Today’s podcast winds up with a question of “Who’s in charge here?” when it comes to how to steer a company toward success. Is it the investors you’ve taken money from, who may be pressuring you to scale quickly? Or is it your customers, who, if asked, will tell you what they do or don’t like about your product or service, guiding you toward what you should do to keep them renewing? Listen in to what Chris and Corey think about this important matter on today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Which Comes First? Traction or Scale?”

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The complete transcript of this episode is below:

Corey Frank (01:54):

How I think a lot of folks start in this profession of sales, right? We're talking about churn and SaaS, and there's certainly churn in your team. And what do you see when the landscape today, particularly all the implementations ConnectAndSell as part of? I would imagine it saves a lot of careers though too. When you have the right tech stack with the sales rep, who maybe again is in this existential crisis, that tech stack can revitalize or reclarify, re-energize that what they thought sales was doesn't necessarily have to be what sales will be. And they have a sense of promise of future potential, of hope again, I would imagine in quite a few instances, true?

Chris Beall (02:41):

ConnectAndSell in particular, I think has a place in that hope equation, in that if you didn't really recognize that your issues had to do with the fact that you just weren't talking to enough people to even have a shot. It's like if somebody put you to the task of driving a car up a hill, because you've got to deliver something, or trucks, say you're an Amazon Prime delivery person, which I believe is now one out of three Americans. So, your job is to get this truck up the hill. Well, if the truck has the horsepower and it has the gearing and it has tires on it and it has a steering wheel, it's connected through some coupling mechanism to the front wheel so that they'll still both point the same direction at the same time, this seems really straightforward.

Chris Beall (03:28):

It may be that the hill is steep or windy. It could be like the hill that led up to the geodesic dome I used to live in up in the Santa Cruz mountains where people would visit us once and never come back. That was pretty common. We had very few dinner parties after a certain point. It's like, "We're never visiting your house again."

Chris Beall (03:46):

"Why?" "Because you can't see where you're going on that hill and there's a cliff." "Okay, got it." I don't see the cliff anymore. But if that's your job, and your boss says, "Go do it." And then the problem is that there's something on the hill, say a little skiff of snow or a little wetness o