As your business grows, one area that must scale at an equal (or faster) rate is your sales organization. Otherwise, you risk missing out on new and lucrative opportunities. Of course, understanding this fact and actually achieving scalability are two entirely different things. If you are working on a growth strategy, particularly an aggressive one, here are a few tips that can help ensure your sales org is able to adapt accordingly.
Get the right people in place.
Without question, you are good at what you do. Dare we say great? What you may not excel at, however, is what it takes to run a successful and scalable sales organization. To position your business for rapid growth, you must ensure that the right people are at the helm and to do this, you must have a particular knack for identifying the right soft skills. In many cases, these are characteristics and attributes that can’t necessarily be taught. For instance, you can’t train for hustle or drive. Candidates either have it or they don’t.
This is where enlisting the help of a recruiting agency can be extremely beneficial – particularly one that specializes in building sales organizations. This enables you to focus your time and efforts on growing the part of the business that you’re best at while someone else handles the critical task of assembling a team that is built with growth and scalability in mind.
Establish the right processes.
What goals and objectives are your sales reps working toward? If you don’t have the right KPIs in place, their efforts could be inadvertently hindering your company’s growth. Maximizing productivity and ensuring that your sales team is focusing their efforts in the right direction to support the organization’s overarching goals is absolutely critical for rapid growth.
To accomplish this, utilize the data and analytics that are available to you to gain insight into what the best sales activities and interactions are. Take the time to identify what processes produce the best results with prospects and then implement those things as repeatable processes across the entire sales organization. And, of course, you should always take advantage of the technology that’s available to help your team work more efficiently.
Get new reps up to speed quickly.
Chances are, as your sales organization ramps up, the need for additional personnel will also increase. Being able to bring on new team members and get them up to speed with internal policies, procedures and expectations is the key to successful and sustainable growth. That’s why it’s so important to implement a strong, comprehensive onboarding strategy.
Depending on the size of your organization, getting new employees up and running quickly may require an investment in formal training and possibly even certification. For smaller companies, pairing up new reps with seasoned, high-performing ones might do the trick. In either case, the goal should be to make the introduction process go as smoothly and seamlessly as possible.
If growth is something your organization is seeking, which is typically the case for most successful companies, focusing your efforts on scaling your sales team is of the utmost importance. By keeping the above three things in mind, knowing when to enlist the help of an expert and implementing the right policies, your sales team can continue moving forward while keeping pace with the growth of your business.