This is a re-post of a Quora question I answered.

Have you achieved product-market fit yet? By this I mean has your business reached the point where you are able to use a repeatable process to sell a product or service to customers in a way that is or has the potential to be a viable business with a sustainable revenue model.

If the answer is yes, I would spend a lot of time researching and understanding the sales and marketing process by which you get customers, what types of customers and what products they are buying. This should give you insights into what types of customers and products you should spend most of your time marketing and selling.

I would resist the temptation to get spread thin on too many products or customer types and stay relatively narrowly focused on the group and product that best meets your long term objectives (whether they are revenue goals, profit goals, acquiring market share in an industry, etc). I’d consider using a sales CRM tool like Salesforce, PipeDrive or Zoho so that you are more able to effectively analyze your sales and revenue data.

I’d also make sure to track user analytics to understand what people find most valuable about your product or service (for a product, this can be accomplished using a tool like Google Analytics or MixPanel; for a service, this can be done with user interviews, surveys and sales data).

You should talk to as many people as you can who have done this before. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. You will likely get a lot of interesting and varied answers with very valuable and actionable steps you can take. You may also want to consider hiring one of these people (ie a head of sales or marketing) depending on your financial situation and if the math generally seems to make sense based on financial projections (will this hire be ROI positive?).

Look at how competitors or analogous companies in other industries have scaled their business. Try to map out their sales and marketing funnel. Its easiest to do this in reverse. So look at their end product or service for sale, who they are selling it to, for how much, do they have upsells, etc and then go backwards to see what that looks like in terms of sales focus and marketing techniques. This will give you some helpful implementation ideas.

If your business has not achieved product-market fit? Don’t try to scale yet. First try to figure that out.

I realize I neglected the engineering and product management elements of this question (if its a technology company). Those are important too and largely overlap with sales and marketing, but they can’t be properly addressed in a vacuum with out a sales/marketing strategy.

I’d also suggest an iterative and “fail fast” mindset to trying these strategies so you don’t waste a lot of time going in the wrong direction.