In this competitive world, we’re always looking for ways to grow our businesses. However, you can’t expand your company and customer base without growing a sales team to match. Adapting your approach to deal with international clients without sacrificing your core values isn’t easy, but with a bit of forward thinking and savvy planning, it’s certainly within your grasp.
1. Hire the right people for the role
The most obvious area to focus on when building a sales team is getting the right people. It’s best to take a calculated approach to hiring and there are plenty of HR tools out there that can help you.
First off, create a detailed profile of the role and the person you want to fill it. Cover questions such as the skills needed and cultural fit, as well as whether the position will be remote or in-house. There is a great advantage to teams that work from home in that you can choose from anybody in the world, rather than being restricted to one city. Similarly, if your sales team structure includes international markets, you’re more likely to find knowledgeable talent within the market itself.
2. Prioritize your onboarding strategy
When thinking about how to grow your sales team, you need to go way beyond getting your recruits through the door. A top priority is integrating them as efficiently as possible with a structured onboarding process that covers every aspect of their role.
Create a standard onboarding pack in your company drive that details all the main aspects of the job, from territory management and product USPs to task prioritization and sales workflows. After all the reading is out of the way, it’s a great idea to pair up your new team member with a more experienced worker to put what they’ve learned into practice.
As a manager, you’ll also need to set up a range of meetings to make sure your new recruits are on track and to give a psychological boost. These meetings don’t need to be overly formal, and if you’re a remote team, you can use video calls for that personal touch.
3. Align your sales and marketing teams
SaaS sales teams and marketing departments aren’t often known for getting along with each other, but it sure is worth the effort. When you have a lack of communication between your departments, you can find yourself pulling in opposite directions and getting nowhere. Both teams can learn from each other and collaborate on opening up new markets or focusing on your top territories.
By getting together every now and then to work on your strategy, and by displaying everyone’s tasks on a transparent project management visualization such as a Kanban board, you can avoid duplicating work and the uncertainty of which tasks are currently underway.
4. Consistency: A key to growth
With small teams, you can improvise quite easily, but that’s not a great strategy when you’re growing. You need to guarantee consistency of service across the board to instill trust in your customers and maintain a brand identity. Trust is everything in all kinds of businesses and especially Saas, so a solid playbook that keeps your whole team on the same page is a great addition.
Your playbook should be made up from what you have discovered to be your best practices and it will serve as amazing material for the onboarding process.
As a final note on consistency — as we’ll discuss in a later point — it doesn’t have to be set in stone. This may sound like a contradiction, but consistent service can coexist with continual improvements.
5. Set realistic goals inside your CRM
If you’re a manager, you’ll know that when you’re thinking about how to grow your sales team, clear KPIs and detailed analysis are going to rank high on your priority list. This can be a bit of a headache if you’re not too technically minded, so arm yourself with the right goal-setting tools to help you along.
By setting KPIs, your team knows their individual goals, which is great for motivation (especially if there’s a reward involved). Don’t just set year-long targets as they can seem too far away to be tangible, and it’s best to check in quite often to help your team improve.
At the end of each period of time, be it a month, two months, or half a year, you can set up a meeting with each team member to analyze their performance. Keep hold of these analytics — you’ll be able to see progress over time and set realistic goals for new recruits.
6. Provide fair incentives for high performance
When thinking about how to grow your sales team, it’s easy to overlook the staff you’ve already got. In your desire to expand, it’s important not to lose sight of the valuable team members that have got you to where you are in the first place. By removing people’s cherished markets, or making them feel undervalued, you can disrupt your team as you start to grow. A great way to get around this is by offering tangible rewards.
Merely promoting your high performers isn’t the best way of maintaining your sales team motivation. Firstly, not everybody is suited to transitioning from sales to management, and there are only so many promotions you can make.
A better way is to implement a bonus structure for high performance, so your best workers can feel rewarded for their efforts. Not only will you keep your turnover low, but you’ll also have a consistent, trusted connection in place to liaise with your best clients.
7. Kaizen philosophy: Continuous improvement
When thinking about how to grow your sales team, you can look to areas other than simply new personnel and markets. A key area to grow is in how you approach your sales technique. Best practices change quickly and you need to be agile to stay on top of your game.
By adopting a Kaizen mindset, you can structure the way you move forward. Set calendar reminders to check your sales analysis and identify where you can make improvements. Focus on questions such as “how many leads is our email marketing returning?” or “are we putting off customers by calling too often?”.
In short, following Kaizen philosophy helps you be more agile when it comes to growing a sales team as opposed to clinging steadfast to inefficient practices.
Bitrix24: Building a sales team made easy
Now you know how to grow your sales team, it’s time to start implementing your improvements. Each manager knows their own team best, so you’ll be able to judge whether to change things little by little, or through a complete overhaul.
However, at Bitrix24, we offer a full suite of specialized tools that make the entire process easier. As you grow, you’ve always got room to expand your capabilities at the same time, although the free version already gives you an impressive array of features.
Over 10,000,000 companies have already put their trust in Bitrix24, so sign up today!
