Scaling Sales: How to Unlock Exponential Business Growth

As businesses grow larger, it can become more challenging for management to keep up with scaling. This can happen due to the sheer number of deals and the impossibility of having a hand in all of them. Another common issue leading to scaling problems is that the founders of the organization did not prepare employees for growth in an appropriate way. Instead, they were focused on launching the business and ensuring that it survived the first two critical years when many companies fail.

Avoiding this problem requires a growth mindset from the beginning, but it’s not too late to change course and command an increasingly profitable business. Below are some tips for business leaders that may find themselves at this impasse when needing to scale sales efforts.

Make Sure Everyone is Contributing Their Fair Share

It’s a common issue among sales teams to have one-fourth to one-third of the team consistently reaching and surpassing their quotas while the others underperform and count on them to keep numbers steady for the whole team. Not only is this unfair, it’s a recipe for future problems. Some managers take a short-sighted approach by hiring more salespeople to help the team meet its goals only to be in constant training mode with new people. Smarter hiring and holding every sales agent accountable for production standards can help to resolve this dilemma.

Place a Greater Emphasis on Soft Skills When Hiring

A great sales team is not necessarily made up of people who have studied every technique in the book and know how and when to employ them. While specific job skills are certainly important, it’s equally essential that agents possess such skills as strong ambition, empathy towards those they serve, and working in an efficient manner.

Unfortunately, it’s not always possible to teach these so-called soft skills. The good news is that organizational leadership can decide to work with a recruiting agency specializing in building the most effective sales teams. These highly-skilled professionals know how to use specific interviewing techniques to uncover the soft skills that would be most beneficial in a sales role. Another benefit is that it frees up time for managers to focus on business growth.

Make Better Use of Industry Benchmarks to Measure and Forecast Growth

A company can’t scale in the future if it doesn’t know how it’s performing today. To this end, sales managers should make it a point to resolve specific challenges before tackling future business growth. Some of these include:

  • Analyze sales funnel activity to ensure that certain parts of the process haven’t become stuck.
  • Decide on a model for customer acquisition that capitalizes on both organizational and individual strengths.
  • Create sales teams that have the appropriate number of well-trained and highly motivated people to generate adequate leads.
  • Provide continuous feedback to sales agents to compliment hard work and discover potential training opportunities.

In short, a sales organization must have a firm understanding of its lead generation performance by team and the capacity for productivity from every member. It is a continuous refining process to ensure consistent performance from every sales professional on staff. Scalable growth is the natural outcome of devoting time and resources to improving performance across the board.