1. Review your organizational structure or design
In a well-designed sales team, the members are divided into specialized groups to increase team efficiency. This categorization could be based on region, products, services, or industries. If your company offers a variety of products and services, then it will be easier to structure your sales team based on those offerings. Similarly, if you need to target specific geographies, then create a territory-based structure.
The sales process should be well-documented, and the structure defined explicitly to ensure high performance. Companies that do not create the right structure according to their sales process and growth plans might fall back on their sales targets.
2. Build a team that understands your business.
The common challenge entrepreneurs face while scaling up a business is how to pass their ideas to their teams for day-to-day operations. Thus, you need to first ask a few basic questions about sales person’s expertise and experience to build an efficient team. Then align your team with your target audience, goals, challenges, and vision. Setting true-north for your team can be a good way to ensure that everyone contributes to the company goals.
To ramp up your team, focus on regular, calendarized learning and development exercises. It need not be long and grand sessions. These can be in the form of 45-60 minutes role plays between the team members, half – day product sessions including demos, sharing of personal & inspiring stories by the leadership team, or the hour-long town hall sessions to ensure everyone can understand your growth plans and celebrate milestones. The essence is the frequency of these activities. Let the team members know that the company is investing time, efforts, and money in upskilling them.
3. Streamline sales process
Having well-defined processes is the foundation for business growth. It makes employees more efficient and consistent. It even facilitates better communication with internal and external customers. Developing clarity around the process by which the organization transfers value to customers is essential. How the baton gets passed on from Leadership to Product/Engineering teams to Marketing to Sales and once the contract is signed the baton passes back to Customer Success teams should be clarified to every layer in the organization to get alignment.
Until recently, there was a clear distinction between marketing and sales roles. For instance, the marketing team had to find a market, create messaging and raise brand awareness to generate leads. Once they generated the leads, it was over to the sales team.
But now, the landscape has evolved, and sales has become more dynamic and challenging. Nicola Cook, the writer of two best-sellers, in her talk called ‘Building a Sales Engine for Growth,’, mentions a term called ‘S’ marketing. It combines marketing and sales skillsets that benefit the sales engine, facilitating growth for businesses.
To streamline sales processes and make them more efficient, you must digitize and automate responses and pipelines.
4. Set an objective for your sales-tech
Enabling the use of technology can help sales teams every step of the way. Customer Relationship Management or CRM can help connect with customers and new prospects better and thus improve profitability. Similarly, leveraging reporting and analytics tools can help measure efforts and provide insights into sales effectiveness. Tools like Calendly and Zoom are great for scheduling meetings and demos and boosting sales performance.
While most companies today implement a basic tech stack, only a few decide its objective before using it.
For instance, your team may not be using CRM to its full potential because of its clunky usability. In such cases, you need to make them understand the potential of a CRM and what their objective should be. Without CRM, it becomes difficult to streamline campaigns and eventually fails to make a pipeline of leads that can ensure growth in the long run.
5. Focus on review and analysis
Since the market is changing, you also need to know what works for your business and what doesn’t. For instance, if a sales strategy worked for your business five years ago, it will not necessarily deliver the same results today.
However, just reviewing them won’t suffice. You need to first measure the right metrics, analyze them and then make appropriate changes to bring out the best.
Here are a few KPIs that you should measure to understand your strategy’s efficiency.
- Number of conversations with new and existing customers/ day.
- Total leads generated.
- Number of qualified leads.
- Leads progression into Opportunities.
- Total conversion rate.
- Time taken by leads to turn into customers.
- Lead acquisition cost.
These statistics will give you a clear insight into whether your sales strategy is on the right track. Following the review and analysis, you can train your team for development to reach their full potential.
6. Work on QA
Quality Assurance helps facilitate conversion through a positive experience. The more delightful you will make your customer’s or lead’s experience, the easier it will become to move them through the funnel.
To create a better experience for your leads and customers, you should focus on a more personalized customer journey that makes prospects feel more valued. You can also focus on creating a customer-friendly brand image and improving ease of communication with your customers.
7. Deconstruct the concept of ‘heroic leader’
Back in the day, the CEO or co-founders of a company held a position no one could question. From there, we have come a long way and understood the importance of being people-centric. Now you should put your team first, engage them and make them efficient enough to be able to transfer the charge of taking critical business decisions.
It will also help you reconsider the need for onboarding marketers or advisors. It is true that they are erudite but not necessarily in your business. Thus, while the necessity of a ‘heroic figure’ is optional, having a team that can deliver results and has your back is non-negotiable.
8. Create optimal performance conditions
Sales success depends equally on two pillars – Talent and Performance conditions. Sales team constantly performs under performance conditions like culture, process, tools, product, customers, market, etc.. Business leaders need to ensure that they create and onboard the sales team to high-performance conditions to deliver their best.
Under poor performance conditions, like lack of sales process or right tools, teams are under constant stress and can easily result in high attrition and loss of talent. Whereas teams deliver their best under high-performance conditions like well documented and implemented sales process, and proper cultural alignment.
Great talent is like the right part for a great engine, but if you don’t fit the part correctly i.e. under optimal performance conditions, that great talent would go waste and sales engine bottom lines would suffer.
9. Sales enablement
Lastly, sales enablement is another vital component of any business. It ensures salespeople have the right equipment/tools/technology to engage target buyers better. On the other hand, the sales team must also have a clear idea of using these resources. A combination of both will surely boost your sales.
Sales enablement can empower the sales team in a variety of ways, such as automating sales workflow and data-driven decision-making, among others.
If you are looking for customized solutions to drive your business growth with the right sales engine, Cusp Services is here to help you out. We are all set to help you with your company’s profitability and revenues.
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