Before we delve into this any further, let’s address the key discussion that you and your team need to discuss about your conversion rate. Do you plan to scale through improving your conversion rate, by trying to increase your customer interactions thereby mathematically growing your total number of conversions through increasing the volume at one end of your sales funnel, or do you plan to try to do both?
My recommendation on this point is that if you were truly trying to scale as a company, you would choose to do both above. You would want to find ways to improve your conversion rate (adding or improving different channels of communication) while finding ways through marketing to grow the amount of exposure that your brand is getting. Both of these actions would result in a large jump in your total number of conversions, something that, at the end of the day, needs to be the goal of everyone in leadership.
At this point, two considerations need to be taken into account. If we truly want to expand the pool for customer interactions as well as improve the conversion rate, there are two things that need to be done in order for this to succeed.
Investment: Additional resources will be required to achieve both objectives. In improving the conversion rate, in addition to likely needing to allocate funding to improve existing channels of communication, it is quite likely that training employees to handle these improvements will also be a part of the equation. Finally, time will be required to not only study and determine the most effective means of achieving this, but also in developing the necessary plans.
Patience: Time is a necessity for many things to work properly. Take the career of Chuck Knoll for example. Everyone remembers him as the first coach to win four Super Bowl titles (in a six year span with the Pittsburgh Steelers). What most people do not remember is that in his first season, the Steelers went 1-13. Ten years after that awful start, he was the proud owner of Four Super Bowl Rings. Obviously, I am not saying it will take ten years to be successful (Noll had steady improvements the next two seasons before finally making it all the way to the AFC Championship game in his second season). What I am saying is that if you do the work properly and give it time, you will see results (potentially remarkable too.)
In a nutshell, once you have decided how you plan to use your conversion rate in scaling (improve it, grow the number of potential customer interactions, or both), it is important to realize that you need to invest in the plan, as well as give it time to grow.
In order to determine what you plan to do with your conversion rate when scaling, much of your focus needs to be on careful planning. You need to sit down and very carefully study every aspect of the process. Major considerations to keep in mind are what happens if you are successful with this? Will you need to hire new people? If so, how long will it take to not only hire the people that you need but also get them trained and ready to help with the demand? Will there be any additional improvements or additions to the existing infrastructure? Will the financial investments needed at the outset be one time or will there be some added costs on a recurring basis?
There is a very good chance that there will be additional questions that need to be asked, with other arenas of exploration required. While the questions above are not (nor were they ever intended) to be comprehensive, one thing is definitely certain: you need to leave no stone unturned in this process. The more thorough that you are when it comes to asking questions and investigating possibilities, the more likely that, at the end of the day, you will get a very thorough and accurate view of the situation, developing necessary contingency plans where required.