4 things I've learnt on scaling up sales
As we're a pay on results sales agency, a core activity of ours is testing sales campaigns; letting our clients dip their toe in by us selling for them on a very small scale, so they can see how we operate.
From testing out sales campaigns & working in the Bristol Entrepreneurial Spark, here are a few things that I've learnt about scaling the sales in your business.
I'm sure you've heard a lot (if all) if these things before, but these are the things that I've noticed are of particular importance when building your reach.
You may notice that these tips centre around these key principles:
- Be resourceful
- Arm yourself with information about your customers
- Make best use of your time
You need to be an expert in selling your product
To make any meaningful sales projections, you need to know it inside out. You may have someone else in the business who does the actual sales, but even if you're not selling, you need to be an expert in how your business finds customers.
Don't make cold calling part of your long term plan
When you're starting out, cold calling definitely can get a level of good results for you. If you're contacting companies who know little about you, it's necessary to make a personal connection with them and cold calling is a good way to do that.
As you scale your business though and bring in a sales team, you'll want them to make you as much money as possible. One way that you can do that is by making sure that they spend their days only speaking to people who are already interested in your product.
You want to provide your sales team with as many good leads as you possibly can. If you did so much marketing that they're practically drowning in leads on their desk, then you have made their job of making you super-rich a whole lot easier.
I write about this more on one of my other articles, which you can check out here.
Sales is all about what you know
Make it part of your culture to collect as much information as possible about your customers. Believe it or not, the goal of most cold calls isn't necessarily to get a "yes" in one call. It's actually to find out:
- A bit more about that particular person or organisation
- What their needs are and letting them know a bit more about you
- If they're looking to talk more about your product or service now
- If not now, when they are looking to talk about it
What's more important is to make this information incredibly easy to access by using searchable tags on your CRM system. (As a side note, if you don't have a CRM, get one. A lot have free user accounts)
As your sales team to find out and record key bits of information about your customer. What information should you record? Think of certain criteria which affects how quickly someone would buy your service e.g.
- What's their purchase budget?
- The review date of their current contract
- If they can choose suppliers on a site by site basis, or do you need to go to Head Office
- Any key problems that they're currently facing
Record key bits of information that you know would be helpful to your sales team, so they can focus their efforts on the ones who'd buy sooner rather than later.
Where to expand next? Where's best for you?
If you're well established in an area and are wondering where to expand next, ask yourself what you know about other areas/customer types?
Give yourself the best head start you can by stepping into regions/new customer types where:
- A region where a client of yours already has a site, so you can build a local presence there
- An area where you already have leads there
- A region where you used to live, so you have a network there already
- Moving into an industry that you know a lot about already
- An area that makes delivering the service very easy to do for you