What is Anti-Scaling? How Doing Less Leads to More

What is Anti-Scaling? How Doing Less Leads to More

Seven simple ideas on how to embed anti-scaling in your GTM:  

1. Positioning and value proposition

Most SaaS between $2m - $10m ARR companies get far too ahead of themselves with positioning. They believe the vision (and using the significant change in the world story will motivate buyers). Anti-scaling focuses on making your positioning simple enough to engage a small audience that understands the sales story; then, you expand the vision later.

Everything starts with the sales story (you need revenue).

You don't want a confusing ideological message externally or internally.

2. Content Marketing

Post or pre-investment is all about "scaling" content production and distribution. The content plan will never get done because the program often contains too much, i.e. six blogs per month, one thought leadership piece, 6 SEO blogs, and two new case studies.

Slim the content plan. Don't think about scaling it. Just focus on one or two content streams. Do them well, and then go broader.

You don't want lots of poor-quality content that does not engage a minimum viable audience.

3. Outbound Marketing

To hit your number, it's all about "automating" and "scaling" outbound. Most do this without ever knowing what's working. Most spend six months evaluating tech because they feel it will make your process scalable. You buy it and spend one day writing the content before a mass send. Congratulations, you managed to scale your email sends, but your conversion rate is 0%.

Anti-scaling says to focus on a smaller set of accounts, focus efforts on writing, getting the right message and getting results. Once you determine whether outbound works, you build a more scalable plan.

Not the other way around.

You don't want loads of activities and zero results.

4. Field Marketing

Get started. Scaling field marketing is about getting started, consistency and a mixture of event types. For example, owned (small breakfasts, dinners and small co-marketing events), webinars, conferences, round-tables and more.

You can wait to know the complete plan. Start with running small breakfasts or dinners once per month. Start with one conference. Get a good process before investing heavily in "scaling" your events program.

You don't want 50+ events with no pipeline delivered.

5. OKRs

You don't need to have 55 OKRs across the business.

a) You'll probably only finish writing them halfway through the quarter, and before you know it, it's quarter-end already—a waste of time.

b) It won't help you scale.

But keeping a lean set of OKRs that are simple will.

You don't want ineffective OKRs every quarter.

6. Hiring

You get investment to "scale" the team, sure thing that's part of the plan. But the anti-scaling mindset is about "getting the right capabilities" and "resources", not the number of resources.

Understand how to use resources efficiently. Most groups or teams must be more productive and fail because the plan is too broad.

Create a slim, high-performance environment. Then scale the team.

You don't want a large group of unproductive people.

7. Hiring the CMO or CRO

Most CEOs want to hire someone who has "scaled" revenue previously at their ARR range. In theory, great. Often, it fails to work out because it's hard to go back into the trenches if they have become too BAU.

Anti-scaling says to look at the capabilities and potential of an individual to adapt to the needs within the ARR phase. These people may not over-complicate things and get support through a mentor to validate their plan.

It makes a world of difference.

You don't want someone to come in and solely focus on building systems and infrastructure.

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Those are seven simple ideas that have an anti-scaling mindset at the core.

What would you add to the list?