Scaling up as a startup isn’t without its challenges. In fact, there will be a stream of new challenges to face and problems to solve as you start growing at a faster pace. The faster you grow, the more complex your problems will be.
Growing the sales team
is one of the big challenges to overcome. In startups, the sales team usually
have higher turnover. On top of that, finding suitable people to fill strategic
positions in the sales team isn’t always easy.
So, how you can boost
the performance of your sales team to stimulate growth for the rest of the
organization? There are actually a few tactics you can use, and we are going to
review them in this article.
Start Automating
This is perhaps a tip that you have heard before. Automating is a startup’s most powerful weapon indeed. However, the importance of automating sales-related tasks cannot be stressed enough, especially the repetitive ones. There is a good reason for that elevated importance too.
The sales team can be
more effective when they are focused entirely on the customers. Everyday tasks
such as creating project cards on the Kanban board and synchronizing contacts
across CRM solutions are more of a distraction. By automating these mundane tasks,
you gain a substantial boost in performance without expanding the team. Add the
fact that sales task automation is easy, and we have a winner.
Tools like PieSync
certainly make automating key sales tasks easy. In the case of PieSync, the
tool is specifically designed for intelligent synchronization of information
across multiple platforms. HubSpot Intercom integration becomes seamless; integration of other
platforms is just as easy.
Stay Targeted
I know how tempting it
is to seize every opportunity that comes your way, but that’s not how you grow
in a sustainable way as a startup. Seizing every opportunity will only lead to
backlogs, inefficiency, and quality downgrades, especially when the sudden
spike in customer requests isn’t managed properly.
What you want to do
instead is approach one specific target at a time. For example, you can focus
on an industry or a particular market segment whose requirements can be met by
your products and services perfectly.
This type of focus is good for long-term growth. Since you are focusing on a particular industry
while delivering superb products and services, there will be more clients that
promote you as a reliable supplier or vendor.
Optimize Your Team
Just because you can
boost the performance of your sales team using other means, doesn’t mean you
don’t need to grow the team itself. Hiring is still a necessity, albeit not the
only way you can scale up. Another thing to add to your list of priorities is
employee development, specifically the development of your sales team.
Combined, these
tactics will help you scale up the sales team in terms of performance rather than just sheer
size. Every new team member will bring so much more to the table when the
existing sales team is already highly optimized for maximum performance.
Scaling up in a sustainable way is the outcome of these optimizations.
