In a recent article on entrepreneur.com, Sujan Patel provided 5 tips to earning a million dollars in your first year of business. Here’s how Salesforce.com fits into that plan. Practically speaking, you won’t be able to manage that influx without a system that can grow as fast as your revenue does.

Excel is not going to cut it.

1. Find a growing market

“find a growing trend and ride it to the top” (1)

So you have your business opportunity, where to next? Purchase licenses of Salesforce for your team, and start tracking everything. Every phone call, every email, every lead, and every opportunity. As you’ll find out, you’re going to need all that info later.

Additionally, you have a platform that will enable conversations about your customers, products, and strategy in context. Speeding up collaboration and keeping your employees productive.

2. Think monetization from the start

“either they sell a lot of inexpensive products to a lot of people or they sell a few big-ticket items to a more limited buyer list. Neither model is easier or inherently better than the other.” (1)

All that information we’re tracking in step 1, starts to be meaningful. Report on time spent versus revenue or product cost versus revenue. These reports take 5-10 minutes to build, and are perfect for real-time tracking. They’ll provide you the answer to the question of what are we doing that is increasing revenue.

3. Be the best

“Look to your current customers. If you aren't getting rave reviews online or positive comments sent to your inbox, chances are your clients aren't as ecstatic about your product as they need to be to hit your target sales.” (1)

There is a plethora of applications on the Salesforce App Exchange that will let you ask your customers a few questions to gauge those metrics.

Don’t wait for them to give you feedback, ask for it, and make it easy. A few critical questions is all you need. A few more reports which take 5-10 minutes and you have all the info you need to determine if you’re hitting your mark.

4. Hire all-stars

“hire all-stars, and the fastest way to do this is to ask around for referrals” (1)

Use Salesforce to track the applications, and the interviews. It can hold all your customer data, your HR data, and pretty much anything else you need or want to capture. Data is Data.

Once they are on board, track everything specific to them, and show them by creating a sales or operations dashboard comparing them to their peers. Another 5-10 minutes of reports and you have a daily or weekly place to determine each person’s effectiveness.

5. Consume data

Remember what we talked about in step 1?

“you need to be absolutely militant about gathering data and acting on it.”(1)

Gather the information, report on the results, refine your strategy, repeat.

“If you aren’t able to carry out these tests on your own, bring on a rock-star analyst who can help you make sense of your numbers. When every penny counts towards reaching your $1-million-a-year goal, you’ll find these employees to be worth their weight in gold.” (1)

This is where Stratus Hub can help you achieve success. We’re capable of giving you all of the above capability in less than a month. In some cases, complete implementations occur in a couple of weeks.

The sooner you begin to capture the data, the sooner you’ll achieve your revenue goals.

Have Questions? Leave a comment below. We will get back to you with an answer.

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1. Sujan Patel. 5 Steps to build a Million-Dollar Business in One Year. Entrepreneur.com.
      8 Dec. 2014. ‹http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/240388›.