Scaling your sales strategy isn’t a straightforward process. It is, in fact, a challenge that many businesses face. Their customers are ready to buy, but the internal sales operation cannot scale quickly enough to reach them.
Even worse, they could fall into the trap of hastily scaling their sales strategy at the expense of quality, customer experience or renowned service.
In order to scale properly, businesses need to be strategic.
With the correct tools, knowledge, and processes, you can scale your sales strategy and keep the quality of your product or service high.
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Hire the right team
If you’re thinking about scaling your sales strategy, you’re probably also thinking about whether to scale your team. After all, if you want to grow your business, you probably don’t need us to tell you that you need a solid team of people behind you.
So how do you make sure you’ve hired the right people?
Ultimately, that’s down to you and what your priorities are. According to research conducted by Robert Half, “62% of companies prioritize experience and technical skills, although 87% of business leaders made successful hires when evaluating cultural fit.”
With the work environments changing from in-person to remote, you’ll need to reexamine how you’ll motivate new hires and retain employees during this time. Common in-office perks may not be necessary. Instead, flexibility, mental health counseling, and home office equipment like standing desks or a VPN may be useful to get the team up and running in a new environment.
Identify your milestones
Identifying milestones is a great way to keep your strategy on track and measure quality along the way; they’ll help guide your strategy to its end goal.
For example, your goal might be to achieve a 15 percent increase in sales over the next quarter. In order to achieve that goal, you might have monthly milestones you meet along the way. This could be broken down into individual objectives that focus on a 5 percent increase per month.
When it comes to actually setting the milestones, we always advise that be done before you start scaling your sales strategy. That way, your team has a benchmark to work toward that is aligned with your new strategy and goals, leading the group in the right direction to achieve the required standards.
The milestones you set will depend on a number of factors:
- Industry;
- Company size and total employees;
- Company and product roadmap;
- Growth trajectory; and
- Other checkpoints or phases in the project lifecycle
Milestones will ensure your sales strategy scales without dropping quality because of their impact on alignment, accountability and motivation.
First, milestones bring the team together and center them around one unifying goal. Everyone knows what they are working toward and the steps they need to get there. Second, milestones bestow a sense of accountability on each team member. Since the path to their goal is right out in the open, everyone should know what their teammates are working on. Thus, each one will feel a bit more accountable for delivering work completely and on time.
Finally, milestones can be used as a motivator. Everyone knows what they have to do to be successful. Employees will feel more motivated and engaged to do their jobs. Engaged teams can impact a business’s profitability by 21 percent.
Improve your communication
Most of the problems associated with scaling can be attributed to a lack of infrastructure, knowledge or communication.
Communicating is something we do naturally, but businesses need to strategically think about the messaging they will use to articulate changes in the sales organization. Additionally, they should adopt proper protocols for how new employees in the sales organization should send files, meet with their teammates, and voice their opinions or concerns.
The work doesn’t stop there though. It’s not enough to simply improve your communication across your sales team. You have to ensure you are communicating effectively to other departments as well.
Adopting a company-wide chat communication software like Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Google Chat can be the easiest way to integrate new employees into the existing company structure. Plus, research shows that these types of programs can help bring products to market 23 percent faster, eliminate email usage by 32 percent, and cut down on unnecessary meetings by 23 percent.
Streamline your processes
Finally, you need to examine the processes that you have in place.
It isn’t enough just to scale the team; you have to ensure that the processes don’t break as the organization gets larger, too. This is an often overlooked area when scaling a sales strategy.
Examine how things get done: What are people often waiting for? What is slipping through the cracks? Ask your team what is taking up most of their time that they wish could be eliminated. These questions will provide clues into where your existing processes need to be bolstered or new processes need to be introduced.
Working with the right software
To properly introduce new processes, consider software options to connect the team. The software you’ve been using might be up to date, but if you’re scaling your goals, is it still the platform that best serves your needs?
Each member of your sales team should be using the same tech stock and operating on the same workflow. Live dashboards can be set up to give senior leadership valuable insight into how the team is performing, and what revenue will be like for the upcoming quarter and year.
Think about the functionalities and features you need in order to get the most out of your software and keep your sales process as streamlined as possible.
Project managing software can help keep businesses on track. In fact, we know that organizations using project management waste 13 times less money because their strategic goals are met more successfully.
The four main processes you should use software for include:
- Prospecting–Use a software like Crunchbase Pro to save your team time from manually searching the web for potential contacts.
- Account Creation–Connect all areas of your business with a centralized CRM like Salesforce, Hubspot, or monday.com.
- Transacting–Automate contracts with DocuSign or PandaDoc and accept payments with Stripe or Payoneer.
- Reporting–Source data from Google Analytics and Falcon.io to review on a frequent basis.
A team is only as great as the people who make it. But a team is only as successful as the processes that are currently in place, enabling it to do its job efficiently.
Listen to your customers
Finally, it’s important to always listen to your customers. Customer feedback can guide some of your most critical sales strategy decisions. Designing your sales strategy in a vacuum without enriching your decision-making process with customer data is detrimental to your company.
Your entire sales strategy needs to revolve around customers and their experience with the company. Even if you have processes in place, your team will need the flexibility to adjust those processes to match customers’ preferred timeline and journey.
Sales representative vs. customer disconnect
Processes are in place to standardize the experience the company offers to each customer. However, what if part of the process needs to be updated? Customer feedback can help resolve that issue. Research shows that there is often a disconnect in what the buyer wants to talk about and what the salesperson prefers.
HubSport research found that 58 percent of buyers are most interested in discussing pricing on the initial sales call, while 65 percent of sales representatives want to discuss what the company is trying to achieve with the purchase.
Buyers are twice as likely to dive into how the product works compared to the sales representative, who might be more focused on the purchase or sharing the company’s goals.
This isn’t uncommon. Sales representatives want to nurture the buyer along a prescription customer journey to ensure everything is covered in their calls. However, each buyer is different and has time constraints and varying needs of their own.
Thus, processes will need to be adapted and pitch templates may need to be rewritten.
With buyer feedback, issues like these can be quickly resolved to ensure that the sales process is conducted with the buyers’ best interests in mind.
Conclusion
Businesses ready to accelerate their growth need to focus on how they will effectively scale their sales team. Unfortunately, so many businesses miss this critical step and the quality of their product and service ultimately suffers.
To ensure that your product and service’s quality stays resolute, you can grow your sales team and scale your strategy with a variety of tactics.
Hire the right team, set your milestones, and improve your communication. Find the right software to put in place to streamline your processes. Finally, listen to your customers and let their feedback and insight be your guiding light.
By following these steps, you’ll strategically scale your sales operation in a way that’s beneficial and positively impacts your bottom line.
Author Bio: Joanne Camarce is a digital marketing expert specializing in SEO, e-commerce, and social media. She loves meeting new people and embraces unique challenges. When she’s not wearing her marketing hat, you’ll find Joanne fine-tuning her art and music skills.