Your business is growing, sales are booming and more leads are coming your way. The time is ripe to add more members to your sales team to help take your organization to the next level of success.
Getting to the point where you need to scale your sales teams within your company is an exciting milestone to reach. However, before you embark on a hiring spree, your leadership style needs to change in order to reflect this new phase. You no longer can make decisions and expect people to follow every aspect of the business.
The progress these changes bring means that the core values and culture in your business now make a stronger impact than the directives and mandates.
There are proven techniques and practices to help you scale your sales process and sales team without jeopardizing the quality of the working environment within the team and the company as a whole. Following these 5 steps can massively help scale your sales organization. These tips and techniques are your guidance into scaling your sales team and process effectively and smoothly.
1. FIND REAL TEAM PLAYERS
When you’re looking to successfully scale your sales process you need to have the right people on board first. Creating a mix of different characters in your sales team will help you carry your vision forward and experience real progress when it comes to your company’s growth. Having the right people from the start lays down the foundation of a high performing sales team.
For a sales team in any company to function well and bring in results, it first and foremost needs to consist of people who know how to work well in a team. Sure, you also want employees who are independent and thinking for themselves but the key to creating a successful team is in fact, finding people who work on bringing value to the team as a whole. So, in order to scale your sales team, you need people who will know their team success is measured as a part of a whole not individually.
2. Hire People Who Fit the Company
This one can actually serve for all of the HR managers who are looking to hire new employees. You see, sometimes there are people with the right skills, background, experience, and education for the job position, however, they don’t quite match the spirit and politics of the company.
On the other hand, you may find yourself interviewing a person whose resume does not shine as much as the one before, but this person shares the same values and the same spirit that your company is built on. Don’t hesitate to give this person a chance because if you want to scale your sales process, you need people who will share the same core values you have for selling, not just the knowledge for the job.
Once you find people who are the right fit, make sure that you assign them clear roles and responsibilities and communicate the same to them. Having clear roles and assigning solid goals prevents your sales reps from being overburdened and stretching themselves too thin.
3. GIVE YOUR EMPLOYEES THE RIGHT TRAINING
Regardless of the speed with which your team is scaling, it is your responsibility as a leader to give each person the right knowledge about the product or service they are selling. They should know the process of creation inside and out. The internal processes, the methodology, the reason why you’re doing what you’re doing and on top of it all, they should know how to implement your sales techniques into their own growth plan.
You may have laid down a strong organizational structure and may be following a solid sales process but your sales reps still need coaching and training for boosting productivity and staying motivated. Sales training is an undervalued activity which has the biggest impact on sales team performance. Get the new team members you hire to shadow the work of experienced sales reps and learn from them. Give them access to the templates and sales scripts that they need to succeed.
In order to know if you really have the right people by your side, you should recognize that high-quality salespeople are eager to constantly improve and have a tendency to be curious about all the nooks and crannies when it comes to the product/service they are working with. If you don’t have enough of these people around, it will be harder to successfully scale your sales team.
4. MEASURE THEIR PROGRESS
Even if you’re satisfied with your team as a whole, you need to measure each person’s performance regularly. This won’t only motivate your employees to work harder and prove their skills, but it’s a base on which you can set your team scaling later on. By measuring their results you see who’s performing well and who’s being outperformed. Who can be on top and who should follow.
As a measuring tool, take real numbers related to their performance at work such as their activity numbers, hit rate, their turnaround, and sales cycle. This is a simple equation that can help you put things into perspective: Multiply the sales opportunity your employee has had by their average deal value and also win rate percentage. The value you get should be divided by their length of the sales cycle.
Sales opportunity x average deal value x win rate% / length of sales cycle
The end result should be measured and compared over time in order to track the success of each one in the team.
5. KEEP TABS ON BUT DON’T MICROMANAGE YOUR TEAM
Last but certainly not least, after the measuring tip above, this next step will inevitably help you scale your sales process within the team. We know that change within a company is just part of business. Just like adapting to a company is a learning experience for your new hires, scaling sales teams is a learning experience for growing businesses.
No one stays the same and it is possible that an employee you’ve once considered to be of great potential is now failing to meet your expectations. The opposite is true as well, people who you were hesitant of, may find motivation and improve over time, which is why measuring the pulse of the team regularly can help you discover and track these changes easily.
CONCLUSION
Ultimately, you want to scale your sales process and scale your sales team between people who share the same core values as the ones your company is built upon, people who are fully dedicated to the cause and most importantly, people who are flexible enough to welcome the company’s growth and changes over time and follow those respectively.
Are you looking to scale your sales team and unlock business growth? Get in touch with expert sales consultants at Rose Garden Consulting today!
