Steve Loughlin, is the co-founder and CEO of SalesforceIQ (formerly, RelateIQ), which built the world's first Relationship Intelligence™ platform. We sat down with Steve to get his perspective on how he scaled RelateIQ as a small startup to what is SalesforceIQ today, the driving force of delivering predictive intelligence to the Salesforce Customer Success Platform.

How did you plan/prepare for rapid growth?

We operated by the phrase, “Planning to win.” When you're planning to win, you ought to be planning for that growth. You should know what the drivers of that growth are and be able to make adjustments based on what you’re measuring for what success looks like.

If you have a framework for thinking about your business, you know when it’s time to start investing and time to start scaling, based on the value you’re creating. Each stage or phase of growth you will need to have a vision and plan on how to get there, but in planning for growth, you should should never lose sight of who your customer is and who you are building for.

Depending on the stage of your company, you should be setting value-creation milestones at each phase, which will help inform how and when you need to scale up.

We had a five year plan for where we wanted our business to be, baking in certain assumptions about the business. Then we had quarterly plans that outlined what was important (those value-creation milestones) to accomplish in that quarter, and the overall annual plan to which we revisit every quarter and made adjustments for what we needed to do next quarter. So to prepare for rapid, exciting growth, is to actually plan for it, and spend a decent amount of time at it.

As the company was growing, what kept you up at night?

At each phase of a company growth, there is always something that keeps you up at night; for us, it was about hitting and accomplishing our value-creation milestones as our company grew:

1. Is there demand for this product, is the pain point real?
2. Do customers love our solution, how are they using the product?
3. They love our product; how do we price it? How much value were we creating?
4. Are we scaling appropriately to meet demand? Do we have a team to sell this?

Companies get in trouble when they move on too quickly, do not accomplish what they need to, and start scaling parts of the business that don't need to be. It’s important to be intellectually honest on when you’ve hit those milestones, so that you’re not scaling for the sake of scaling.

Who did you go to for advice on difficult business decisions?

We’ve always had a great leadership team and board of directors to help guide direction. In addition, we also had a set of advisors with domain-specific expertise—marketing, engineering, sales—who had been at a scale that was larger than our company, that we could go to for advice and get an outside opinion. These people are extremely important to have around your company. They help you think through the problem because they may have seen it before.

Tips for Finding Expert Advisors

1. Find the right folks who match your business
2. Compensate and incentivize them to pick up the phone
3. Engage them with the company, make them feel a part of the team so that they’re invested in your company’s success

How do you maintain a fast pace of growth as you bringing on new team members? How do you avoid losing momentum, or culture?

You need to make sure you’re building a strong foundation for people and culture. One of our values as a company is the “People” – because there is no company, no product, without the folks on the team. We spend time on hiring right; bring on folks who can scale with the business, change paths along the way, adapt to new strategies and build traditions to help drive the growth of the company and culture.

Be transparent about the plan and set the right milestones for the team. That way, the team knows exactly what value they’re creating for the company when you hit those milestones. When everyone has visibility into the plan and how the company is doing, they’ll know what they need to achieve to keep moving the business forward.

And when things are going well, reinforce it, celebrate it—it’s what we call and value, “Moments,” here at SalesforceIQ. At the same time, when you run into problems or issues, make sure you’ve created a culture where people can raise their hands to say, “Hey, I see a problem here” and they’re empowered to go and fix it. This is especially important if you’re growing fast – stuff is going to break, so give your team the license to go solve those problems and not let debt occur across the organization.

What advice would you give to other growing companies and startups when scaling their business?

It’s great to execute, work hard and hustle, but make sure you’re doing everything in the context of a great plan. Ask yourself, “Does our plan take us to a place where the company is really valuable?” Continue to iterate on your plan, and dedicate time on planning. Once you’ve nailed your first product, it gives you the right to do more.

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