History is filled with stories of people who have had a great idea for a product or service, but have been unable to create or find a large enough market to make their idea a smashing success, or have been unable to handle the demand once their idea finally became popularized. One of the products currently in the process of finding a market is the all-electric Tesla model vehicles. Though there is undoubtedly plenty of public interest in the cars, currently their price, coupled with the concept’s relative newness, has prevented the company from scaling production and sales upward. For most businesses which are destined to undergo meteoric growth, scalability is an essential factor.
Your Market Must Include Sufficient Prospects
Look at your product or service and your marketing techniques and try to determine just how scalable your overall plan really is. Ask yourself if your niche market contains enough prospects for you to really make it big. For example, if you are marketing tee shirts to Star Trek fans who graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1963, you may find that your overall market is simply too small to allow you to grow your business significantly. In order to make your company or your marketing efforts scalable, you would likely need to expand your market to include more prospects.
Your Advertising Medium Must Reach Sufficient Prospects
Another factor involved in scalability is your advertising medium. For example, if you have been making a living advertising in a local newspaper with a circulation of about 5000, it is possible that a similar ad would work in a much larger newspaper – allowing you to scale up significantly. However, it may be that such an ad would be simply lost in a larger paper and may not yield proportional results. The same goes for online and practically all forms of marketing. In order to scale up your sales, not only do you need to ensure that there are sufficient prospects to purchase increased quantities of your product or service, but you also need to ensure that simply duplicating your current marketing efforts, on a larger scale, will produce proportionate results. If you must significantly or completely change your marketing efforts, the scalability of your plan is low, and the risks of loss increase significantly.
You Must Have Sufficient Product and Delivery Capabilities
In order to successfully scale up your business you must be able to meet the demand generated by your increased at marketing efforts. For example, if your company sells baked goods, in order to scale up and sell far more pastries you will need to ensure that you have sufficient supplies of flour, sugar, eggs and milk, and a place to bake it all. Meeting to obtain sufficient product is a problem many performance marketers would never run into, as digital downloads and products of that sort essentially never run out. However, performance marketers do need to ensure that their servers and technological solutions are able to handle the demand.
You Must Have Sufficient Customer Service
When building a company which will last you must ensure that you continue to serve your customers after the initial sale. This means answering questions, handling returns in refunds, and generally keeping in touch with previous customers. In order to successfully scale up performance marketers must ensure that their customer service operations are able to meet the challenges of an influx of new customer service requests.
