Scaling a sales team is the process of enabling and supporting the growth of your company and growing without being hindered, which requires planning, funding of the proper systems, staff, and partners. But why is it so important? Let’s say your product is super high in demand, and your business is taking off. Suppose you continue running it with the same amount of people as you were when it was starting up.
We won’t let that happen, as long as you follow this comprehensive guide that will help lead you through the process of scaling, tips, and tricks, what you should not do, and how firms can help. Let’s get started.
Make an Efficient Sales Process
The first step and the most important is making sure you have a clear and efficient sales process that reps can easily follow. Map this process out, make sure reps are trained and informed how each step works, and follow it every time. Of course, make sure the sales plan also yields significant results.The typical steps in a sales process look like this:
- Find prospects
- Qualify them
- Make contact
- Present your business/product
- Close the deal
- Keep as a customer
Activity-Based Selling Strategy
Once you have your sales process down, it’s time to move onto the next step, choosing a strategy that best fits your sales team. The most effective strategy that is utilized across many businesses is activity-based selling.
It’s the idea of keeping your focus on the actions that make a sale happen and not the results of the sale or the sale itself. There is, of course, a reason this works so well and why we are recommending you utilize this strategy!
- Understand your goals-what specific actions will result in meeting your goal.
- Know your why- beyond just money, what another personal meaning is behind this business/goal
- Map your success- take notes when you were successful, take notes when you are not. See if a pattern evolves.
- Tap action resources- use the internet and determine what sales techniques have worked and have not for other businesses. Insight can go a long way.
- Calculate action metrics- know your KPIs (key performance indicators), keep track of them, analyse, and compare data.
- Set weekly and daily action metrics- set a realistic target goal each day and week and track hitting them.
- Take stock- look back at the metrics when the week is over, celebrate what you’ve accomplished, and look at areas you can improve in.
- Evolve-recognize when and where things are moving better and keep moving forward from that standpoint
Streamline Your Sales Process
Having a streamlined sales process in place helps everyone, and has a particular impact on new SDRs. A clunky process will obviously slow down onboarding and ramping, but there are bigger consequences, too. The factors that create sales friction—a bloated tech stack, manual processes, and siloed workflows—add up to information overload for new hires.
When determining how to best streamline your sales process, you may want to consider the bigger picture of how your sales stages are (or aren’t) functioning in relation to what your sales team is doing on the ground. It’s also worth looking into some practical ways to make Salesforce more user-friendly, automating actions where possible.
Conduct A Interview (Post – Training)
When a new rep reaches the end of their training, schedule a post-training interview. This is a time for both parties to provide with their honest feedbacks and opinions about the process. As a leader, your feedback can include tracked metrics, success highlights, and constructive insights for further development.
Consider looking at some of the following metrics:
- Number of net new contacts added into the system
- Number of those contacts that entered a sequence/cadence
- Which steps in the sequences/cadences they’re spending the most time on
These metrics reflect the effectiveness of your training and the effort your new reps are putting in.Make sure that the post-training interview is a two-way street. Your newly ramped reps should feel comfortable providing feedback on their experience as well.
