As companies experience success and grow their business, sales teams must be able to scale quickly or risk losing out on new opportunities. To scale quickly in a hyper-growth organization, sales reps have to get up to speed fast, processes must be streamlined and sales leaders have to continuously monitor sales team performance. If adjustments are required, they need to be made quickly to keep sales on track with the company’s growth trajectory.
To scale faster, some of today’s top-performing sales organizations are adopting sales acceleration tools. Including engagement analytics and email automation, these technologies are helping companies:
- Improve rep onboarding
- Leverage repeatable processes for more successful prospect engagement
- Gain real-time insights into sales rep performance
- Getting reps up to speed fast
To onboard reps quickly, you need to implement agile sales processes. Automated capabilities, such as email templates and group email sending, let reps interact with prospects faster and more effectively. Email templates deliver consistent messaging and also save time, so reps can focus their attention on customers rather than attempting to write different messages themselves every day. Reps can also use email templates identified for specific buyer personas, increasing efficiencies while simultaneously maintaining control to customize templates for different stages of the sales cycle.
If you’re adding new sales staff, sales training is also essential to educate them about processes and products to onboard quickly. Depending on the size of your organization, this can include formal product training, message training, and demo certification. You might also consider ‘pairing up’ new reps with a high-performing rep for a few days, so they can participate in demos and calls together.
Building a successful sales model
Sales reps spend nearly two-thirds of their time on activities that don’t generate new deals[1]. As sales leaders grow their team, maximizing rep productivity is a key priority to avoid lost opportunities.
To scale quickly, organizations need insight to determine the best sales activity levels, messaging and types of interactions, so they can repeat the same approaches across the organization. New research shows that companies that use analytics and automation can strengthen sales rep productivity with the ability to build repeatable sales processes into their selling cadence[2].
These companies can see what processes have the most success with prospects. They can see what sequence of emails gets the highest engagement and the best response rate, and repeat the same approach across the sales organization.
No organization wants to grow their sales team at the expense of slowing down their sales cycle. By using repeatable processes, recent Aberdeen Group research findings show that best-in-class companies are shortening the sales cycle up to 18%. Taking it a step further, putting a sequence of emails scheduled on different days to nurture prospects is even more powerful. By leveraging email sequencing, organizations not only save time but also gain valuable insight for improving their sales processes.
Gain real-time insights to improve rep performance
Integrating automation and analytics, sales acceleration tools give sales leaders real-time insights into how reps are interacting with prospects with their sales content and emails. Managers can see which reps are having the most success engaging with prospects, so that they can emulate their processes with other team members. With real-time insights about rep performance, sales leaders can quickly see where adjustments need to be made within the team.
Sales leaders can also see where deals are progressing – and where they aren’t. This helps them determine which prospects should be ranked higher and quickly separate poor leads from good ones. As sales organizations add new reps, this ability can help all reps get to close faster. In fact, Aberdeen finds that with analytics and automation, companies have higher team quota achievement and lead acceptance rates compared with other companies.
Having these insights is key, especially during rapid growth. No organization wants to lose opportunities. Even as sales organizations grow their team, they must keep a close pulse on all potential opportunities and maintain their ability to respond quickly.
With processes in place that help reps onboard quickly, leverage repeatable processes, and monitor team activities in real-time, your sales organization can keep full-speed ahead even while scaling to keep pace with business growth. With a 360-degree view of all the possibilities, your sales organizations won’t miss any opportunities even while growing at warp speed.
Micheline Nijmeh is the CMO for LiveHive, Inc., whose award-winning sales acceleration platform provides engagement analytics to understand buyers’ interests and improve sales follow-up.
