Your business is growing fast, the revenue is flowing in quickly, but you are struggling to meet burgeoning demand.
Your company has retorted by opening new divisions, beefing up the marketing squad and rolling out new product lines, which is tossing out more leads.
To meet the ever-increasing revenue targets, you need to scale up the sales function of your company. Of course, the stakes are high, the pressure is real and you can’t go over the same ground but you can do this.
You can lift that weigh-off your shoulders with the right combination of a scalable sales process and supportive CRM software to help you optimize, prioritize and strategize continually.
Here’s how you can actually build a system that’ll grow your sales force in a planned and consistent way.
1. Build an Effective, Repeatable Sales Process
If you plan on scaling up efficiently, your company needs to have an effective, repeatable sales process in place before you hire new sales reps. Wondering why you need to develop such a process??
Well, if you don’t have an effective sales process in place, you’ll struggle to track and measure your sales team’s progress, which means you’ll be making educated guesses on how to manage your sales time efficiently. To make informed decisions, you need accurate data.
More importantly, a lack of process can easily frustrate your sales force and consume their energy. You need to make sure the process should be easy enough that new hires can instantly determine what activities they need to complete to hit the revenue targets and add value once they jump into their new roles.
So how on earth you can build a scalable sales process?
Here’s an overview of the major parts that’ll allow you to build a repeatable sales process:
- Highlight important key performance indicators (KPIs).
- Clearly defined stages in your sales funnel.
- Define lead qualification criteria to match your pipeline stages.
- Activities sales reps need to perform at every stage of your pipeline
2. Beat Distractions with Activity-Based Selling
A defined repeatable sales process enable new sales reps to beat distractions by identifying important activities they need to complete during a sales cycle in order to deliver the best possible performance.
Since results are beyond your control, so you cannot push your sales teams on the basis of raw numbers alone. Rather, you need to focus on what you can actually control — their activities together with measuring results and assessing performance.
In brief, your job is to tweak the flow of activities your sales team needs to complete and optimize the sales process to maximize your sales. Here is why this tried and tested method works:
Concentrate
When sales reps (especially new hires) stress out about their quotas, they often panic and diverge from a set sales pattern to make a desperate attempt to hit their targets.
Activity-based selling keeps them on track and lets them focus on what they should be doing rather feeling overwhelmed.
Consistent
As your sales team grows, it’s hard to keep them aligned. In the absence of a defined process, every salesperson starts following their own unique process, which is tough to track and difficult to optimize.
By stressing everyone to focus on the same activities, you can easily monitor and measure your sales process as you scale without constantly keeping an eye on new reps.
Management
If your new sales reps are successfully completing their activities, it means the process is working. Because when your team members deliver what is in their control, results will eventually come. If not, identify the areas that need improvement.
Sure, if one new hire isn’t performing that doesn’t mean your process is at fault. You can help the individual with training, mentoring and some performance improvement plans. The clarity will boost reps confidence.
3. Find the Best CRM Software to Scale Up
Your cloud CRM should help you automate manual, time-consuming and repetitive tasks. Because the bigger you grow — the more time your sales team will spend on admin tasks.
However, before you compare CRM software get a scalable sales process in place. It will enable you to cede to a new team member easily. And your cloud CRM should support this. Else, you will end up ending extra chores and frustration to a busy sales rep’s workload.
Bear in mind, it can be really costly for growing businesses to pay for a consultant or spend weeks on training and on-boarding of new hires.
So when it comes to choosing CRM solutions, you need to ask yourself the following:
- Are your new sales reps going to be comfortable using the new sales CRM?
- Can you bear the cost and time required to onboard and train new hires on the tech?
- Are your existing sales team members accustom to the new technology?
- BONUS QUESTION: Is your current spreadsheet or CRM data compromised by missing or incorrect info?
Growing businesses need a CRM that is designed to help scaling teams sell smarter and faster. If your reps aren’t comfortable using your CRM, you are likely to end up with non-existent or inaccurate data. It will throw your tracking, reporting, and forecasting into chaos.
You need a sales tool that eliminates as much admin work as possible so your sales team can spend more time selling.
You also need the software that’ll complement your activity-based selling approach by prioritizing salesperson’s workload and notifies them of the right action at the right time.
An intuitive system like Funnel CRM can help you do just that. The affordable and easy-to-use system allows sales teams to get up and running in minutes as it doesn’t require you to invest in expensive consultants or training.
In addition, you’ll get a consistent process to track with accurate and clean data. This will help you draw better insights and make informed decisions.
4. Track, Forecast, Measure & Optimize Continually
When you have a small sales team, you can personally check in with each team member to ask them what they did today, how leads are progressing through the funnel, and where they are struggling.
It’s an excellent, simple way to manage a small sales team.
But it doesn’t scale.
You can’t check in with 30 or odd salespeople personally on a daily basis. Even with small teams, reps can conceal the truth and charm their way through a one-on-one meeting with the boss.
Fortunately, data doesn’t lie.
Tracking is undoubtedly the best friend of any executive or manager trying to scale up fast. When you have developed a repeatable sales process using activity-based selling, your sales team know exactly what they need to be doing.
When you add a cloud CRM to the mix it enables you to track your reps’ daily activities and you’ll know what each team member has been doing.
5. Trust Data to Make Tough Decisions
Decisions based on your instincts and experience carries the risk of leaving you susceptible. You need to draw conclusions from insightful data in order to support your judgment.
With a scalable sales process and an activity-based selling approach, you can trust data to make tough decisions as your team is consistently entering accurate information.
This ensures you have an accurate predictor that’ll support your experience and judgment. It will help you make informed decisions while you are on the way to scale up successfully.
Conclusion
Sure, scaling a sales team successfully is no easy feat. But with vigilant planning and well-chosen tools, you can certainly smash it out of the park. So leverage these five strategies and build a solid foundation for your business.
