Nine ways to scale your sales team

Your sales team can make or break your business, so it’s important you do it right. These tips will help you on your way to scaling your sales team successfully.

1. Know your business

You know your product better than anyone, so you should be able to successfully sell it before hiring anyone else. Knowing for sure that your product can make money before scaling will help reduce risks.

You need to test your sales process before hiring, too. Before you bring on your first new salesperson, make sure your system is foolproof. You can’t scale something if you don’t have an established process to scale. Doing this will help ensure you can scale your sales team quickly and effectively.

2. Know when to hire

It can be difficult to know when to hire new salespeople. You don’t want to oversaturate to the point of losing money, but you don’t want to miss out on sales due to a lack of staff either.

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To determine the best time to hire, consult a combination of data and your gut feeling. Knowing what’s going well and what might need work will help. Also, know your employees, what motivates them and what they’re good at.

Knowing when to hire involves a delicate balance. It takes a bit of time to get right, but it’s an integral part of scaling your sales team.

3. Specialise

Everyone you hire should know exactly what their job is. Every employee should have a specialty. That way your sales team works like a well-oiled machine in a consistent way that’s been tested, so you know it can be successful.

This will help you to easily scale, because you’ll know exactly what each position’s duties are.

4. Hire quality people

Another way to ensure you scale your sales team successfully is the hiring process. You want to hire quality employees who are knowledgeable, good at what they do and driven to succeed.

Not only do you need quality hires, your new employees also need to fit in well with your company culture and sales strategy. The sales team is a unit, and you want all the pieces to work well with each other.

5. Train consistently

Along with hiring the right people, you need to train those new hires consistently. Everyone should get the same training, so once they begin working, they’re all on the same page.

When training ends, your new employees should know the sales process and your company’s philosophy inside and out. They should know the expectations of their position, so they’re ready to jump right in and start selling.

6. Streamline your data

Sales reps spend 19 percent of their time searching for information, time that could be spent actively selling. In fact, only 39 percent of their time is spent actually selling.

Sales information is sometimes spread out among multiple databases, which are sometimes difficult to navigate. This leads to wasted time. Reorganising your data can help your sales team be more efficient.

7. Know your customers

This one is a classic, but it’s a classic for a reason. Knowing your customers is extremely important for your sales.

Knowing when, what and how much your customers will buy helps you streamline your sales process and leads to increased conversions.

8. Take advantage of technology

We’re living in an increasingly technological world, and there’s no reason to ignore technology when it comes to your sales process.

Technology can help organise your information, enhance communication between your employees and customers, and analyse various aspects of your business. You can customise it to fit in with your business model so it can be easily integrated and enhance your process.

9. Use metrics

Take advantage of metrics to evaluate your sales process and determine what’s working well and what’s not. Metrics can also help you figure out when to hire new salespeople, organise customer data and analyse your sales. Using metrics well helps you consistently improve your business.

Scaling your sales team is an important step in the development of any business. Completing this step successfully can lead to incredible growth. Mistakes made along the way may hamper your progress but, if you learn from them, can be beneficial in the long run as well.

The process is a little bit different for every business. Each company is unique, but there are some guidelines that are generally useful. Scaling your sales team may be a challenge, but these tips will help make it as painless a process as possible, so you can grow both your sales team and your business.

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