How To Build And Scale A Sales Team
You definitely would have ticked all boxes of business requirements that include — building your business, product launching, market research, and much more. But what’s your solid plan for marketing and selling your product to your customers?
Well, the answer to that concern is — Right Sales Team. Your product could be the next hit in the competitive market if you have the right scaling sales team.
To grow your organization’s profitability and sustainably, you need to focus on increasing sales cost-effectively. Moreover, you must not only establish a high-performing sales force but also structure it so that you can scale up fast to support your growth if you are to meet your sales goal and growth target.
We have composed this guide to help you learn all aspects of how you can build and scale a sales team and set it up for success. We’ll cover:
- Effective Steps to build your Sales Team
- Strategic Methods to Scale Sales Faster and Effectively
- 5 Common Mistakes to Avoid when building and Scaling Sales Team
- How Deskera Can Guide You?
- Key Takeaways
Without any further ado, let’s begin:
Effective Steps to Build your Sales Team
Following is the list of steps that will guide you on how to successfully build your scaling sales team. Check these steps:
1. Understand what you want
It is highly crucial to determine and analyze what's your type for the scaling sales team. Moreover, when you hire a sales specialist for your sales team, then they will determine each and every aspect of your business. It includes your business strategy, growth, target market, target customers, nature of your services or products, and more.
Consider the following points that will help you determine your type in a better manner. Let’s check:
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Consider whether you require inside sales, field sales, or a combination of the two. Determine the type of experience and background required, as well as the number of sales reps you'll need to scale up.
You'll also need to figure out what processes and necessary tools you'll need to support the expansion. These things should be planned ahead of time to guarantee that you hire the right people for the correct position.
It's time to start hiring salespeople once you've determined what kind of salespeople you'll need.
2. Hire the right team
Account executives will most likely be your first employees, and it's critical that you pick the proper people. Exceptional AEs may close up to 45 percent of prospects in the pipeline, compared to fewer than 15 percent for low-performing AEs. It's critical to know what you're seeking in a great seller as you interview and hire your new AE.
High-performing salespeople have the ability to think beyond the box and respond thoughtfully in interactions. They're teachable, inquiring, humble, and eager to pick up new skills. Most of them are also competitive, which drives them to work hard and efficiently.
Putting together a sales team with a variety of backgrounds will help you seek more prospects. To bring in a larger perspective and open up new markets, hire for gender diversity, ethnic diversity, and experience diversity.
Consider the following characteristics:
- Energetic
- Competitive
- Motivated
- Non-traditional
- Resilient
- Quick-learner
- Self-starter
- People-oriented
It will be easier to hire if you try harder to understand the ideal fit.
3. Train and Encourage your Team
A repeatable and scalable onboarding process is essential for ensuring that everyone on your team has the same institutional knowledge, and can provide a consistent and predictable sales experience.
With point systems and a leaderboard, use gamification to drive your employees. Many sales reps' competitive instincts will be piqued by them. For instance, You can utilize sales contests to push team members to embrace new sales tools or to achieve certain goals.
To motivate sales staff, you'll also need a compensation scheme that relates success to commissions and bonuses. This will enable you to strike a balance between expense and risk while attracting the best salespeople.
4. Implementing necessary tools
You can expand up rapidly and efficiently with the help of digitalization and automation. Make the most of them by utilizing the massive quantity of client data you have at your disposal. Sales professionals will be able to make data-driven decisions and hence enhance ROI if they use the correct sales tools effectively.
Invest in software systems for sales intelligence, sales interaction, analytics, sales enablement, and sales management/coaching. By reducing operations, you will aid your sales force in increasing sales efficiency.
5. Use the best communication platform
The majority of today's sales are done over the phone. You'll need a trustworthy VoIP business phone service as well as cloud customer support software that can deliver the right features at the right time.
These technologies will allow you to have access to the best-in-class communication tools as your business grows, without having to make a large initial commitment.
A cloud-based call center technology, for example, enables you to deploy a remote sales force and access a bigger talent pool while cutting operating costs.
Moreover, it also provides a number of monitoring and reporting capabilities that allow you to get real-time information to help you enhance your sales performance.
Strategic Methods to Scale Sales Faster and Effectively
Here we have listed some of the most effective strategic methods that will help you scale sales faster and effectively. Let’s learn them:
1. Design an easy, structured, and repeatable sales process
To succeed in the sales area, it is required to allocate the easy, structured, and repeatable sales process. It further will help new reps to quickly pick up with their assigned role and achieve targets effectively.
However, you must focus on the repeatable processes that will help you scale effectively before you hire your sales reps. It is crucial to set your ways to measure and track the process. Moreover, you need to collect relevant and accurate information and data. Then, you should analyze your sales process accordingly.
In addition, make sure your sales reps are providing a consistent customer experience as you build up your sales organization. Further, they'll accomplish so by following a well-designed sales process that produces repeated results.
Also, your sales funnel will improve over time. However, it is important to plan and design this process from scratch. While a skilled salesperson may improvise a single presentation, a scalable and successful sales funnel necessitates a written and repeatable sales process that your entire team can follow.
2. Activity-based Selling
Implementing a scalable sales process offers a clear idea to new sales reps. It allows them easy access to understand and act over a series of activities to complete the scalable sales cycle. It will help them to focus on the primary aspect and enhance their performance as well.
Moreover, you can only do what you can control. Make sure to track, assess, and evaluate your sales team activities and performance. It will allow you to improve weaker aspects of your sales team. Measuring your team’s metrics will enhance productivity and sales.
Your role is to fine-tune your scalable sales process and the flow of tasks that your team must accomplish in order to consistently increase sales.
Here's why this tried-and-true strategy works so effectively for businesses trying to grow quickly. Check out:
Much Needed Focus | It is impossible to bring out effective results with a stressed mind. Sales reps usually go through stress to meet specific deadlines. It further leads to panicking and stress, which lowers the quality of work. Instead of putting pressure on reps to meet quarterly revenue objectives, activity-based selling keeps them focused on what they should be doing right now. |
Consistency is the Key | It becomes more difficult to keep team members on the same page as you grow. Moreover, you'll find it more difficult to track and optimize performance across the company if each rep starts using their own, unique method. Furthermore, by focusing everyone on the same duties, you can simply track and manage your sales process as your company grows. This eliminates the need to constantly check in on new salespeople. |
The Right Role | You should be able to insert a salesperson into an activity-based sales model right away and get results. There is no ambiguity about their role or how to carry it out. When you're growing quickly, this is critical. You will eventually see results when your sales reps can deliver what they can control through their skills. However, there is no fixed notion or strategy to achieve results that might cause mental strain on your reps. Also, it would be best to offer them transparency that will enhance their confidence. |
Management | You know the procedure is scalable if your newest team members are accomplishing their tasks satisfactorily. If not, you'll be able to pinpoint the sections of your process that aren't working. If one rep is having trouble, there's a strong likelihood it's not your procedure. Individual training, mentoring, or a specialized performance enhancement strategy can all aid that rep. |
3. Optimization
It is quite easier to personally analyze and handle your sales reps when you are working with a small sales team. Although, it may happen that the sales team hides away their concerns or issues. Though, it will be then visible on the final data. But in that case, you can still manage the issue with the sales rep on a one-to-one basis.
On the contrary, it becomes highly difficult when it comes to a larger sales team. You cannot personally converse with each member to address their issues or concerns. It may further affect the scales.
If you want to be successful to scale your sales, then tracking should be your first priority.
When you adopt an activity-based-selling strategy to build a scalable sales process, though. Then, your salespeople will know exactly what they need to perform.
You'll know what everyone on each team has been up to if you have a CRM that allows your salespeople to effortlessly log their daily activities.
4. The Right Technology for Scaling
Dealing with a larger sales team requires technology such as CRM. It will help you save time and energy and allows you to automate your tasks easily. Before you make any significant decisions, you need to obtain a scalable sales process. Also, make sure to choose the right apps and platforms to analyze for your organization to achieve success.
You should be able to simply hand off to a new sales rep if you have a simple, repeatable scaling sales workflow. This should be supported by your sales CRM.
Moreover, you can't afford to add more responsibilities and irritation to an already overburdened employee's schedule. You probably can't afford to hire a high-priced specialist to train your employees for weeks on how to use your new system.
Although, you still need to check upon the following points:
- Is your typical new hire going to be able to use your CRM?
- Can you afford the time and money it takes to onboard and train new salespeople on your technology?
- Are your current salespeople making proper use of technology?
- Is your CRM data at risk because of erroneous or missing information?
- Fast-growing businesses want a CRM that can assist large teams in closing more deals on the front lines.
Larger organizations require CRM to obtain a feasible approach to obtain successful deals.
You need a platform that reduces as much administrative labor as possible so that your personnel may spend more time on scaling sales activities.
You'll also require a system that makes your salesperson's job easier. To support your activity-based selling strategy, you need a CRM that prioritizes the rep's workload and tells the user of the relevant action to take at the appropriate time.
Your onboarding process will be sped up with the use of a user-friendly CRM.
You won't have to spend as much time training your new hires if you have a system in place. New hired sales reps will be able to start delivering within a few days with the help of your set and structured procedure and a simple, straightforward CRM.
It will also make your life simpler. You'll be able to track your progress in a consistent manner with clean, accurate statistics. You can gain more knowledge to help you make better decisions about your company's future.
5. Navigate Team with Key Performance Indicators
You can lead your team in the right direction only by making smart decisions. Therefore, to foresee and address any concerns on the horizon, you need to utilize the key performance indicators generated by your scaling sales process and CRM.
You can figure out where your team is falling short of the desired outcomes with the correct tools. Then you can concentrate on the weaker portions in order to avoid blunders and increase your growth. That's how you quickly traverse the always dangerous waters of scaling up quickly.
6. Managing and Trusting the Process
Managing rapid development on the basis of your intuition and experience can leave you exposed. Moreover, to support your decision, you must rely on data-driven insights.
Taking decisions without understanding and evaluating data will turn out to be disastrous.
Similarly, making judgments based on your intuition will put your company's future in jeopardy.
If you employ a scalable sales process and an activity-based selling approach, you can be confident that your team is entering consistent and correct data.
You know you've got a good future forecaster on your hands.
This is what you'll need to back up your judgment and experience. You'll be able to make well-informed and smart decisions on how to successfully scale your business.
5 Common Mistakes to Avoid when building and Scaling Sales Team
For startups or established businesses, it is highly crucial to know what to avoid to successfully build and scale a sales team. Here we have discussed the 5 potholes that you need to avoid. Let’s learn:
1. Failing to target the right customer
Your primary strategy should be focused on targeting the right customer, and not just approaching any customer. Although it may sound obvious to chase certain customers, however, it may not work successfully in each case.
To achieve high efficiency, you need to build a strong performing team that targets the right customers.
2. Ignoring Customer Retention
Sometimes startups or even established businesses tend to assume that loyalty and customer retention depends on customer satisfaction. It is a completely misleading assumption that might take your business downhill.
Further, one should understand that loyalty originates from the perceived value and high satisfaction is an irrelevant concept in this case.
Keep in mind that your clients are also the target customers of your competition. If you ignore building your customers’ value, you might easily lose them. Therefore, you have to invest consistent and extra efforts to boost your customer’s perception.
3. Lacking clear definition sales process (DSP)
What factor could transform a struggling sales team into a successful scaling sales cycle? Well, the answer to that question is— having a clear definition of the sales process (DSP).
Every sales team should have clear benchmarks and objectives that could navigate them step-by-step through each process. Not having a clear detailed pattern would negatively affect your sales.
Therefore, it is highly crucial to train and teach your reps on how to follow those benchmarks (best practices) to close a successful deal.
4. Failing to coach your sales reps with structured training
What sets apart your Top 10% sales reps from the other 90% reps?
One major aspect that sets successful sales reps apart from others is — that they know what exactly to say and do to close a successful sales deal.
Subsequently, if you want to achieve that for all your sales reps, then you must conduct a structured training program. Interestingly, having a strong foundation of DSP for your sales team would effectively show positive results.
In addition, make sure to teach your sales reps to obtain core skills that would lead your company to success on each level.
5. Not providing clear roles to your sales reps
Most business owners or managers do not provide clear positions to sales reps that further overburden them. As a result, you will witness negative effects on your sales.
Every sales rep should be allocated with clear goals, objectives, and responsibilities. Expecting them to do everything would only cause a castrating effect. Therefore, make sure to implement effective tools that will keep your employees engaged and productive in their work.
Furthermore, track their metrics and other factors that need to be trained for a better scaling sales drive.
How Deskera Can Guide You?
When you are running your own business, there are tons of duties and responsibilities that you have to fulfill. Your time is essential and has to be saved at all costs to develop your business further. This can be ensured by implementing Scaling Sales with the Deskera system.
Doing so will help you to save the time taken in transferring customer data between the different systems. It will also assist you with real-time updates about your business like cash flow status, customer satisfaction, inventory management, scaling sales, purchases, purchase orders, customer tickets, customer satisfaction, managing leads, revenues, profit, and loss statements, and balance sheets.
It would also help in integrating all aspects of your business across different platforms onto one system so that you have a consolidated list for email campaigns, leads management, and sales pipeline to mention a few.
It will also help you to sync between your orders, payments, taxes, refunds, product variants, sending out invoices and reminders, facilitating invoice management, and even undertaking follow-ups and advertisement campaigns.
Such a consolidated platform will help you to improve scaling sales through building scaling scales and also facilitates faster and well-informed decision-making. It will help you in strengthening your opportunities and being braced for the threats.
Deskera books and Deskera CRM will also be able to ensure the highest customer satisfaction and thereby an increase in net revenues and net profits.
Final Key Points
We have reached the final stage of this comprehensive guide. Let’s take a closer look at important pointers. It includes:
- To grow your organization’s profitability and sustainably, you need to focus on increasing sales cost-effectively.
- Invest in software systems for sales intelligence, sales interaction, analytics, sales enablement, and management/coaching.
- To succeed in the sales area, it is required to allocate the easy, structured, and repeatable sales process.
- Make sure your sales reps are providing a consistent customer experience as you build up your sales organization.
- Dealing with a larger sales team requires technology such as CRM. It will help you save time and energy and allows you to automate your tasks easily.
- Your primary strategy should be focused on targeting the right customer, and not just approaching any customer. Although it may sound obvious to chase certain customers, however, it may not work successfully in each case.
- Every sales rep should be allocated with clear goals, objectives, and responsibilities.