.jpg)
Scaling sales is a crucial part of growing your business. When you increase the size of your team, and implement tools and systems to optimise performance, you pave the way for revenue growth. Unfortunately, many companies still don’t approach scaling the right way.
Often, companies hire too quickly, spend money on the wrong resources, and fail to implement repeatable processes that generate ongoing, sustainable results.
To scale your sales strategy effectively, you need more than just more employees and higher quota targets. You need a comprehensive strategy that helps your employees focus on strengthening relationships, customer lifetime value, and boosting productivity.
To make scales scalable, companies need to implement clear, repeatable processes that drive positive results. If you don’t have the right process outlined, you’ll struggle to onboard new employees, track results, and make intelligent decisions for future growth.
There are various factors involved in creating a scalable sales process, from selecting the right metrics (KPIs) to defining the key stages in your pipeline, and ensuring your employees know how to target and qualify the right leads.
Here are some of the key steps you can take to make sales more scalable.
An effective, repeatable sales process always starts with setting goals. The only way to ensure you’re achieving results is to know exactly what you want to accomplish, and which metrics you should be measuring to monitor success.
On the surface, the main aim of scaling sales is to increase revenue and growth. However, you need to decide exactly how you’re going to do this. For instance, are you focusing on accelerating the sales cycle to close deals faster? Do you want to improve customer lifetime value by increasing retention rates and enhancing relationships with your target accounts?
Defining these goals in advance will show you which metrics you need to track as you scale, such as average order value, time to close deals or retention rates.
It also ensures you know which metrics to monitor when deciding how to compensate your sales teams with bonuses and rewards. Once you have your goals in mind, implement an activity-based model for sales that focuses less on measuring and rewarding your team’s actions.
An activity-based model will deliver benefits like:
• Increased focus: Salespeople worrying about achieving their targets panic and diverge from processes to try and hit their numbers. An activity-based strategy ensures sellers remain focused on what they should be doing in the present.
• Consistency: When everyone is focused on the same activities, you can more easily measure and monitor your sales process as your organisation expands. Your leaders will also have an easier time managing and guiding your team.
• Morale: Rejection is inevitable in any sales strategy. A looming revenue target can be daunting when sales teams face objections. Activity-based selling allows agents to focus on what they can control – achievable tasks.
A key part of making scales scalable is figuring out how to motivate and drive your team. Many sales compensation strategies designed to encourage scale in B2B operations involve a traditional bonus/salary structure where compensation is based on metrics like lead consumption and meetings set. While this approach is relatively standardised and easy to execute, it leads to numerous problems.
The traditional compensation strategy often yields a one-size-fits-all approach to sales that leads to mishandled leads, lost prospects, and diminishing brand loyalty.
To motivate your team correctly, you need a creative approach to incentives and compensation that focuses on driving specific results. For instance, if you want to:
• Focus on pipeline acceleration: Offer employees an additional bonus on the commission payout for any sale completed faster than the average deal cycle. This motivates your team to stay engaged throughout the buyer journey and follow up with leads.
• Improve customer relationships: Motivate employees to spend time on research as part of their compensation package. Reward employees whenever they complete a discovery worksheet or specifically pinpoint key decision-makers in a business.
• Boost engagement with the buying committee: Offer bonuses to employees who make sales where the entire buying committee is involved. This will increase your chances of renewal, expansion, and growth, even if your “champion” leaves the business you’re targeting.
• Enhance lead quality: Remove commission targets from meetings set with anyone in a business under the director level. Encourage team members to seek out key decision-makers and provide target account lists to your teams.
After you’ve established a compensation model that aligns with your company’s goals, the next stage is ensuring your employees can rapidly, and efficiently move through the sales process. This means implementing the right sales enablement strategies.
Organisations with sales enablement strategies in place achieve a 6.4% higher win rate and significant increases in productivity and efficiency. Begin by ensuring you have the right customer profiles in place to help sales teams target the right prospects.
Outline the exact type of leads you want your employees to target, and align this with your compensation plan. For instance, you might only make bonuses available to team members who first qualify leads according to a specific standard operating procedure.
Next, invest in technology that will accelerate and improve the sales cycle. CRM tools can help provide insights into leads for qualification purposes, and keep employees on track throughout the sales cycle. Automation tools can remind team members when to follow up with prospects, and AI can assist with generating content for outreach.
You can even use time tracking and project management tools to help staff members optimise their schedules and cut down on productivity roadblocks.
Successful, sustainable scaling is powered by data. You need to collect as much information as possible about which processes are working for your team, so you know how to adapt and evolve over time. The easiest way to do this is to leverage the right technology.
While you might be able to check in with each rep personally in a small team, you’ll need to automatically collect information as your business grows. Implementing tools that can allow you to monitor critical metrics in real time, and help salespeople automatically log daily activity will ensure you can take a data-driven approach to future growth.
You may find it helpful to implement real-time dashboards into your tech stack for your sales teams, so they can measure their own B2B sales metrics and progress towards bonuses or extra commissions. This can be a great way to keep teams motivated. Plus, it’s a fantastic way to boost engagement if you implement gamification methods such as leaderboards.
Make sure everyone in your team agrees on the metrics you should be monitoring, based on the goals you set for your scaling strategy.
Finally, to effectively scale sales, it’s important to look beyond simply capturing more prospects and converting more leads. Now more than ever, customer retention is crucial to continued growth. Existing customers will likely spend up to 30% more on products than first-time customers. They can also contribute to your growth, acting as advocates for your brand.
If your sales team isn’t aligned with your marketing and customer success teams, you lose an important opportunity to upgrade retention. Plus, you’ll miss out on chances to collect feedback on the quality of the leads your team is accessing.
Ensure your sales, marketing, and sales teams are properly aligned, and build your scaling strategy around a focus on customer experience and brand loyalty. This will ensure you’re not just capturing more leads; you’re also connecting with more valuable customers for your business.
Scaling sales effectively isn’t just about hiring more sales reps, or increasing your quotas. Effective scalability relies on your ability to establish a repeatable sales process that focuses on activities that achieve specific goals.
The steps above will give you the framework you need to sustainably scale your organisation, so you’re not just growing – you’re paving the way for future development.
.png)
.png)
.png)
