The Best Way to Scale Your Sales

Person leveraging a sales graph upwards to illustrate how to scale your sales
March 31st, 2022 0 Comments

Scaling your business means scaling your sales – and it has the power to make or break you! The problem is, it can be difficult to know exactly when is the right time to scale your sales.

You don’t want to leave it too late and fail to keep up with customer demand. On the other hand, desperately trying to ratchet things up too early will waste money and resources – and possibly divert your reps and set your new sales resources up for failure.

Scaling your sales will therefore involve responding to that need in a well-thought-out and systematic way. This means: with a plan.

However, whether you have a small or a large business, are established or relatively new, the need to scale up will probably only appear on the horizon when you already have

  • a stable revenue base, and
  • a strong sales process that’s proven to work.

When to Scale Your Sales

If and when those two above things are in place, we believe the following extra points are key to discovering the best time to scale your sales:

  • When your data analysis says you should. Analyze the data you’ve collected about your business and your customers. Examine past data and your present pipeline. Can you predict what will happen if you do nothing? This data analysis should reveal the details you need to have in hand before scaling your sales. Bear in mind that all your reps must have entered the data into the CRM consistently and accurately!
  • When you’re getting steady profits. When your business is producing strong margins and profit, you’re in a better position to scale because you have fewer risks. This is the moment to put in place all the relevant people, technology, and services (chatbots, social media managers, conferencing software, etc.) that will work in your favor when scaling your sales up.
  • When you have enough leads. You can’t increase sales if you don’t have a good supply of leads, both inbound and outbound. When you have strong methodology to produce leads, it’s time to prepare your business to scale your sales by creating bandwidth to support the leads.

We’ll deal with that now.

Best Strategies to Scale Your Sales

1 Set a Clear Business Goal

Decide the type of company you’re aspiring to be when your business scales. Set measurable, achievable goals for that – ones that play into your strengths. This builds a secure foundation for future growth. It also provides a benchmark for your sales teams.

With no clear goal, it’s easy to suddenly underperform, either by missing new opportunities or failing to execute with your current team. In contrast, having a goal will define what success means for you and guide your plans.

2 Have a Proven Repeatable Sales Process

A sales process is a set of steps that a sales team takes to close a deal. Does your company have a sales playbook detailing what these steps are? Does your sales team implement them?

Before you make a decision to scale your sales, you must have a tried and proven sales process followed by every rep. On the other hand, you will refine this process over time as the new growth takes root.

Typically, your repeatable sales process will

  • give all your customers a similar buying journey in whichever channels they choose, and
  • include defined sales steps, criteria for each step, and clearly defined KPIs.

3 Optimize Your Sales and Marketing Department

If you don’t have collaboration between operating, sales, and marketing departments, it’s difficult to have a functioning, repeatable sales system.

Every marketing campaign to start the scaling up process must take into account feedback from the sales department, and also align with the goals set. That’s because circumstances can change fast. It’s therefore important for marketing analysts to work closely with sales reps to organize and strategize in a changeable marketplace.

Make this optimizing of your departments key before scaling up sales. This will also involve agreeing a set of sales messages.

4 Use the Right Automation Tools

Automation tools help you avoid time-consuming tasks that may or may not be directly related to sales growth. You need a highly configurable and extensible CRM that not only helps your sales team keep track of your customers in each sales stage but also can link to other tools. For example:

  • your back end systems
  • an end user-specific dashboard
  • Business Intelligence (BI)
  • a good customer help desk
  • social media output organizer, such as Hootsuite
  • newsletter and email automation, etc.

Technology has made things easier for companies to grow. So identify what would benefit you most in scaling up your sales, and implement it. Integrate as much as your technology will allow – operating in silos is a thing of the past!

5 Invest in a Customer Success Strategy

You will not scale up well without satisfying your current customers and intended extra customers. So dig deeper than automated emails and indifferent online support and set yourself apart from the competition. Your Unique Value Proposition (UVP)is crucial. You could also think wider and install a conversational chatbot rather than an AI one. Or offer manuals, webinars, or customer training sessions (according to what you sell).

Remember, growing and expanding your current customer revenues is just another way of scaling sales. Adding a new division, selling a new product line, and selling more may be opportunities. If you have excellent ways to focus on your current customers, you’ll find yourself seeing the extra renewals, referrals, and leads that indicate it’s maybe time to scale up.

To help achieve this level of new interest, you need a customer success strategy. You can leverage insights from current customers through social media feedback. Or perhaps reviews from those who’ve used your services and products and are willing to be quoted in your campaigns. “Listen, respond, and adapt” is good business practice at all times!

Caveat

When your business grows as you scale your sales, it may become harder to align everyone in your teams with the vision and goals of your company. Reps get excited, over-busy, and distracted.

This is therefore the key time to ensure everyone is focusing on the same goal even when team members may be doing different activities and tasks. How you do this will depend on your playbook, your sales team meetings, and your company culture – in equal measures!

We Can Help You Scale Your Sales

There are many factors involved in scaling up sales. If you’re  ready to grow your sales and would like some experienced help, do get in touch. Between us, we have years of expertise in company growth in many different situations. Schedule you free consultation today!

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Summary
Article Name
The Best Way to Scale Your Sales
Description
We show you the keys to knowing when is the best time to start scaling your sales, and 5 strategies to do so that are best practice and will help you find success.
Improving Sales, Sales Development
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