In working with hundreds of companies, we’ve learned that the solution to sustaining a high growth rate is to diversify your approach to growth and embrace multiple growth strategies.

To scale a sales team intelligently, you need to do two things—you need to set up a hybrid sales model, and you need to invest in automation. What do I mean by a hybrid sales model? Well, lots of companies see a self-service sales model and selling through salespeople (commonly called “assisted sales”) as two completely different worlds.

“Make it easy for customers to leave if they want to. You can certainly ask them why they’re leaving, or try to win them back, but don’t get in their way—the digital equivalent of blocking the exit with a hulking security guard.”

The following figure demonstrates the two primary levers of growth in the Subscription Economy—average revenue per account (ARPA) and net account growth. If the total billings number of a company goes up, that means at least one of two things must have happened—either the number of accounts being billed went up or the amount each account was billed

LAUNCH INTO A NEW SEGMENT

POSITION Web & Social Media Public Relations Events ACQUIRE Sales Teams Reseller Channels Self-Service DEPLOY Implementation Customer Training Customer Adoption RUN Account Management Technical Support Customer Success EXPAND Increased Consumption (Upsells) Increased Capabilities (Cross-sells) Customer Evangelism PEOPLE Recruiting Onboarding &

Instead, as a couple of Wharton professors have suggested, what if business school consisted of ten months of campus coursework, followed by a lifetime of personalized, instantly accessible online courses featuring the latest available research? What if school never ended?

The thriving Westfield World Trade Center mall in downtown Manhattan, for example, is part museum, part entertainment complex, part showroom, part social watering hole. Its stores are doing fine, but management understands it needs to invest in access and amenities to keep feeding the Disney Parks “flywheel” growth model of foot traffic,

Simply put, the world is moving from products to services. Subscriptions are exploding because billions of digital consumers are increasingly favoring access over ownership, but most companies are still built to sell products.