The Smarter Way to Scale a Sales Team Without Losing Quality

Scaling, or the stage that follows an organization’s growth phase, is especially challenging for a sales team.

At this point of growth, significant executive attention and pressure is placed on new revenue growth. Additionally, when selling a new product in an emerging market, freshly hired sellers & managers are tasked with testing messaging to find out what works.

Doing this with the wrong technology stack in place creates several challenges for the scaling sales team:

• The entire team is learning on the job every day
  Even your most seasoned sales hires will be iterating and learning how to best position your innovative product in the new market.
• New hire onboarding is twice as hard
  New hires in a scaling company must learn both standard new role challenges and learn along with the rest of the team how to position their new product.
• Management structure lags behind growth
  Often the sales leadership doesn’t have the layers of management needed to fully devote time needed for team skill development & sales coaching.

A smart, timely investment in sales enablement technology can mitigate these challenges early, setting a foundation for future success.

We’ve laid out the 4 places sales technology helps a growing company scale smarter:

Automation of processes and day-to-day tasks

At any stage of a business, the automation of routine, boring, low-productivity but necessary tasks is important.

At scale, it becomes even more important for the company, because high-effort-to-low-value work is replicated across entire teams. This costs the business thousands of hours of wasted productivity, sapping crucial effort needed to move the business through this inflection point.

This is especially important for a scaling sales team. The worn statistic reported by Forbes a decade ago is that sales reps only spend 36% of their time actually selling. Various studies by Salesforce have found that salespeople spend 9% of their day leaving Voicemails, 21% of their day researching leads, 20% of their day doing CRM admin work, and 31% of their day creating or searching for content. Each of these points gives us a clearer picture of where sales teams waste time in ways that can be automated or streamlined for scaling businesses.

Eliminating CRM work with better sales tools like an intelligent dialer, reducing the time spent writing emails with a sales cadence tool, or eliminating voicemail time with a voicemail drop solution are all easy, quick wins that pay for themselves quickly in the resulting time savings.

Powering sales coaching and skill growth at impossible scale

In an interview with the VC firm Notion, Jacco Vanderkooj lays out a process for startup sales teams that places the “scale-up phase” after the “grow up phase”, and points out that the smartest sales teams put a process in place for skill development in the grow-up phase because it is so foundational to long-term success.

It’s important to also remember to increase your knowledge and capabilities too. As Verne Harnish says, “If you want a 10X a company, you really have got a 10X the knowledge not just of yourself, but everybody else in the firm.”

If your business missed this approach in the grow-up phase, it is absolutely urgent to develop it in the scale-up phase because your focus at this point needs to shift to hiring the right, coachable people that fit your process.

A sales technology such as conversationAI* allows you to coach your sales team as if you have heard every sales call. Surface key coachable moments in your call recordings, such as mentions of competitors, pricing, or interruptions, and have them ready for review in your coaching sessions, rather than spending hours listening to ride-alongs or call recordings for the perfect moment.

This allows you to coach at a scale that was once thought impossible – in years past, sales managers had to listen to live calls or research by digging through hours of call recordings to find coachable moments, which often meant that sales coaching fell by the wayside.

Now, you can coach your team as if you have heard every sales call, because your technology is doing the heavy lifting. This gives you a scalable process – all managers need to do is schedule 1:1 time and listen to the calls surfaced by the tool, allowing for more coaching and less researching.

Faster onboarding against the odds

Once you have reached the growth stage, you have your key players in place who have learned by trial and error, working alongside your pivotal hires who bring your years of experience. Now, you are at the point where the need for production is nearly immediate when someone new comes aboard to help you meet your ambitious goals.

The technology foundation you laid months or even years before has a dramatic impact on onboarding speed.

Not only will your salespeople be enabled or inhibited by how user-friendly the sales tool stack is for them to use and begin selling, but a solid suite of sales coaching tools put in place at the right stage of growth can be pivotal.

The right sales coaching software can reduce your rep onboarding time by:

1. Allowing you to build an educational library of best practice sales calls that will enable your new sellers to learn from your superstars
2. Giving them the ability to read call annotations and feedback provided to poor call performances, reducing rookie mistakes
3. Providing an avenue for immediate feedback with recordings and annotations on their own calls, allowing for faster skill development from day one
4. A mechanism for smarter call prep, where reps can listen to 1 or 2 best practice call recordings before 10-minute mini call blocks

This, combined with the power of a smart sales cadence solution can drastically reduce the time it takes to onboard someone.

More quality touches with prospects that match your playbook

As you continue to invest your time and energy into the iterative process of building your best practice call library, you’ll start finding language and strategies that are effective. With a sales cadence tool like Revenue.io’s Sequence, you can tie all of these together in a scalable package that eliminates the need for your salespeople to reinvent the wheel every time they send an email, and ultimately continue to refine and bake best practices into your outreach for continued improvement.

Additionally, you can use Sequence to jump-start your process development, easily enforcing Marketing-Sales service-level agreements (SLAs) and ensuring sales reps are hitting a set amount of outbound touches per day or per week. This is another key element in effectively onboarding new hire salespeople.

With the use of the right sales technology, sales teams can alleviate much of the pressure placed on reps during a scaling period. This technology not only allows them to meet the increased activity demands, but also increases the effectiveness of their selling in order to meet goals.

Scaling Through Sales Automation Software

Salespeople only spend 30% of their time selling, with the other time dominated by repetitive and administrative tasks. But with the help of sales automation software, teams of all sizes can streamline their sales processes and stay ahead of the competition. Automation tools can handle the boring work like data entry and lead tracking while sellers focus on what they do best – selling!

One of the most significant benefits of sales automation is that it helps small teams stay organized and on top of their sales activities. No more scrambling to find that one email from a prospect or forgetting to follow up with a hot lead. With automation tools, salespeople can easily track their leads and deals in a centralized system, set reminders and alerts for follow-ups, and generate reports to track their progress. It’s like having a personal assistant who never forgets.

Sales automation software is more than just making your team more organized and efficient. Imagine being able to send personalized emails to your prospects and customers at scale with just a few clicks. Instead of generic “Dear sir/madam” messages, small teams can send fun and engaging emails that capture the attention of prospective buyers. And with sales analytics and reporting, they can track their performance and celebrate their wins, whether that’s a new deal or a record-breaking month.

Here are 5 ways to leverage sales automation software to sell more with a smaller team.

1. Prioritize the right leads

Figuring out which leads to reach out to and when to reach out remains a massive challenge for sellers. Sales software has become far more effective at automating large percentages of the work it takes to cultivate and develop leads into opportunities, but there are still some gaps.

Data hygiene can be a big factor in this challenge. Often reps are confronted with a CRM filled with old or duplicated data and have little clarity on where to start their day or what leads are a poor use of time. Sales automation software should always integrate with your CRM so data stays up-to-date and actionable.

Reps commonly spend their time prioritizing whatever leads seem the most opportunistic, but in many cases this is at odds with the strategic direction set by leadership.  Data-driven sales automation software takes leadership strategy into account along with historic data and pipeline forecasting to present reps with a list of exactly who to reach out to at what time.

2. Quickly prepare for each interaction

No one would argue with the fact that reps need to be prepared for every interaction they have with a potential buyer. After all, personalization is key to cutting through the noise. But often, reps spend too much time searching for the information they need before connecting with a prospect. Even worse is when reps face too much friction when trying to uncover the right info and simply decide against making the call as a result.

Here are some ways your team can use sales automation software, specifically conversation intelligence, to work smarter not harder:

• Read the notes added to the buyer’s record in your CRM
• Check conversations that have already happened with this buyer and listen to key parts that are automatically surfaced by conversation intelligence
• Search conversation transcripts, recordings and emails to discover buyer challenges, existing solutions in place and more
• Weave these findings into your conversation to get meaningful insights into buyer challenges and needs faster

3. Know exactly what to say and do in every conversation

Once reps have figured out which leads to prioritize and how to connect, they need to know what to say. All the preparation in the world won’t stop a rep from facing something unexpected in a conversation. How can you prepare your team to handle objections, competitor mentions and technical questions during their conversations?

You can’t rely on sales training alone. 90% of information is forgotten within a month, and sales training is no exception. Sales automation software with real-time guidance triggers notifications based on what is said and not said during live conversations. For example, if a competitor is mentioned during a discovery meeting then a notification will automatically pop up containing a suggested response to that competitor along with a link to your team’s battlecard.

This type of sales automation software is next-level. Revenue.io’s patented technology Moments is the only platform that guides reps in the moments that matter.

4. Rely on accurate opportunity analytics

Many types of sales tracking software include opportunity analytics. The value goes without saying: it’s immensely helpful for setting quotas, predicting revenue, strategizing and more.

Make sure your platform is set up to track important metrics such as leads, opportunities, and deal value. This will give you a clear understanding of your sales pipeline and highlight any critical bottlenecks.

Remember to monitor your opportunity analytics regularly to ensure that they remain accurate. This will enable you to make any necessary changes to your pipeline management process and adjust your sales strategy as needed. Regularly reviewing your deal health can help you stay ahead of the competition and maximize revenue growth.

5. Automate all task creation and data collection

With 41% of reps wasting too much time creating follow-up tasks, something as simple as automating task creation can work wonders for your team’s productivity. It goes without saying that sales automation software should be able to generate follow-up tasks directly within reps’ workflow.

Reps shouldn’t have to spend lots of time on manual data entry, either. A proper sales automation platform should automatically capture every sales engagement activity, including text, email follow-up, voice, video meetings and more, right in your CRM. The Revenue.io platform does all this and more, capturing both quantitative and qualitative data directly in Salesforce.

Revenue.io sales automation software

Reps need dynamic sales sequencing that prioritizes cadences based on engagement data, intent data and more. This is the only way to make sure they’re focused on targeting the right accounts and driving more pipeline.

Revenue.io sales automation software creates a prioritized sequence of leads to contact based on how well they fit your target buyer profile, how often they have been contacted and any other relevant criteria in your sales playbook. Your reps will know who to engage with, what channels to use and what to say every single time. Learn more here.

How Revenue Helps You Scale Your Sales Team Faster

Anyone in sales can likely attest that expanding and scaling a sales team is a challenge. To properly grow your team, you first must find the right candidates, interview, and hire them. Then, you must get your new reps onboard, familiar with your sales stack, trained, and ready to sell. This process can take a single rep six months or more before they fully ramp and hit quota.

Two of the most significant challenges in a new hire are getting your reps acquainted with your sales process and instituting a coaching program. Revenue.io helps streamline your onboarding process, provides access to knowledge, and allows for self-coaching through simple onboarding, call recording, and sales analytics so you can scale your sales team faster and more effectively than ever. Here’s how:

Easy Sales Onboarding

First, Revenue.io doesn’t add any extra burden to your new reps. When it’s time for them to get on Revenue.io, they download the Chrome Extension and log in with their Salesforce credentials. Since ease of use is one of the critical factors in sales application adoption, Revenue.io is designed to be as straightforward and effortless to use as possible. The Intelligent Dialer has an intuitive interface, so reps can use it immediately.

When reps spend less time learning your sales applications, they spend more time learning how to sell.

Encourage Teamwork

A sales team is truly all about the team. We don’t believe that the sink-or-swim culture is effective; instead, we feel that sales team performance is maximized when reps work together. Verne Hanish, author of Scaling Up, says, “You cross this kind of crazy point about 70 employees, where you don’t know everybody’s name anymore, and that’s where your culture can start to leak.”  That’s why Revenue.io includes features to help your reps learn and work collaboratively.

In the platform, all reps are assigned to teams. Teammates either listen in on each other’s live calls, or hear recorded versions after the phone is hung up. This provides several benefits. New salespeople can listen in on senior reps’ calls to hear how they solve problems, address concerns, handle competition, and overcome objections. Another option is to have your new reps listen to each other’s calls and coach themselves. This creates a positive learning experience for everyone involved, builds team cohesion, and creates a culture of coaching.

Coach Reps to Scale Sales Success

When your new reps begin to make their own sales calls, the reality is their sales pitch will be unrefined. As a sales manager, you can use live monitoring and call recordings to perfect their pitches, just like your reps use them to learn from their peers.

Conversation Intelligence is especially effective for a scaling team. You probably don’t have time to sit and listen to every single one of your rep’s live calls, but with call recording, you can listen on your own time. In Revenue.io, providing feedback is easy. You simply annotate each call with tips and suggestions as you listen. Afterward, reps can review your notes on these calls to get feedback. This allows you to coach a large number of calls very quickly. You can even run reports on your notes to track progress and ensure that reps are reading and improving.

Leverage Powerful Sales Analytics

The power of analytics for scaling your sales team is twofold. First, it gives you instantaneous insight into your team’s performance. Second, it allows reps to hold themselves accountable.

If you bring on many new reps quickly, the sheer number can cause complete chaos. There can be organizational problems, management issues, and decreased sales performance. However, with dashboards specifically made to catch and diagnose these problems, out-of-the-box reports can actively monitor critical sales metrics on both a team and individual rep level. With these reports, you understand how your team is functioning and if a rep is falling behind.

When you provide reps access to their own dashboards, amazing things happen. They can monitor their performance and become more data-centric overall. When reps see how they stack up against other team members, they can quickly identify areas for improvement to hit their performance goals.

In many cases, access to these reports helps train reps over time. Reps may be able to self-diagnose when they call at the wrong time of day, fail to pitch well, leave ineffective voicemails, etc. This self-coaching relieves sales managers’ pressure so they can focus on coaching more complex issues and grow the team while maintaining its effectiveness.

Scale Sales Internationally with Local Presence

Expanding a company into a different state or country is no simple task, but Revenue.io can make it easier. It helps create more connections and generate business in your new location. By now, local presence is a common feature, but most local dialing solutions still don’t work internationally. With Revenue.io, however, you can call with every local area code in the US, UK, and over 50 other countries in EMEA and APAC.

Whether you plan to add a new office location or expand your selling territory, Revenue.io ensures that you still see the benefits of local presence dialing in your new location.

Scaling a sales team is easier when you have a partner. Revenue.io gives you a more efficient and effective coaching program to expand your team, ensure every rep is onboarded properly, and still hit your sales goals.