How to Scale Your Sales Engine

If your business isn’t scalable, you typically have to add salespeople to grow.

In a non-scalable company, there’s a limit to how much business an individual salesperson can handle. It doesn’t matter what their title is — Account Manager, Account Executive, Production Manager, etc. Each individual has a capacity.

What’s wrong with this model?

I’ll give you an example. Years ago, I was hired by a company that was struggling to get each of its production managers to handle more than a million dollars’ worth of business each year. One production manager handled $1.6 million worth of business per year, and they wanted the others to do the same.

The issue was pretty simple to diagnose.

All the production managers handled exactly six shows per year. The guy who was doing $1.6 million happened to have one show that was bigger. That’s why he had a bigger book of business.

The problem with getting all the other production managers to increase their volume of business was a problem with process. They literally could not handle more than six shows a year because of how much work they had to do to ensure each show was successful. The only way to increase the capacity of the production managers was to remove some of their responsibilities and put them somewhere else in the process.

It was a great lesson for me. I realized that processes can significantly impact capacity.

What Does It Mean to Scale Up?

Having a scalable business means that your business functions whether you’re busy or slow. Being able to scale up means you don’t sacrifice quality when you get busier. From a business standpoint, scaling up also means you’re more profitable when you’re busy than when you’re slow.

This has challenged a lot of businesses in our industry.

When you scale up, not only does your revenue increase, but your profit as a percentage of revenue should also increase. This is the very definition of being scalable.

It makes sense that your company will be more profitable if you can get your salespeople to handle more business. You’re not adding overhead or adding extra salespeople.

With all this in mind, a valuable question for owners to ask themselves is, “How can I make my sales team more scalable?”

Sales Team Scalability

Adding more salespeople increases your sales, but it also dramatically increases your overhead. On the road to scalability, the question becomes, “How do I make my existing sales team more efficient?”

Rather than adding a salesperson to your team who can only handle $1 million worth of business per year, add a technical resource to the sales process who will allow your sales team to get quotes out faster so they can handle more opportunities effectively and accurately. Give your sales team a resource who can attend meetings, come up with technical solutions, and build orders into the rental management system to get the correct budget — so the salesperson can write up an invoice or a proposal.

A technical person who can make salespeople more effective is valuable. Not all salespeople are good at technical matters, but adding a technical resource makes all of them good at technical matters.

If you want to increase the capacity of your sales team, give them a production manager who doesn’t go out and do shows but only helps them sell and prepare for future shows.

This is the final step in a three-step process.

3 Steps to Dramatically Increase Sales Team Volume and Quality

1. Fix your labor pricing by better understanding labor costs.

If you don’t understand your labor costs, don’t apply the right margin to your labor costs, and don’t put the right number of people onto jobs, your sales efforts are going to fail. It’s that simple.

You have to get this right.

2. Sell the end result, not the plans.

Salespeople should never have to worry about resource availability. They should sell as though they have a bottomless pit of resources. If your salespeople have to pause to see whether equipment is available before they can build a quote, you’ll never increase your sales.

Resource availability is someone else’s problem.

This may alarm you, but it’ll be taken care of when you...

3. Add a technical designer or production manager who helps your sales team design, sell, and prepare for future shows.

The technical designer won’t go out to do shows. Instead, they’ll provide technical support so the sales team can sell from a bottomless pit of resources.

They’ll also specify the correct equipment and get the right headcount on labor. This will ensure that the job is executed successfully.

Final Thoughts

Instead of hiring another salesperson with limited capacity to increase your sales, hire a production manager or technical designer to boost the capacity of all your salespeople. Volume will go up, show quality will stay consistent, and profits will climb.

Take the first step toward scalability and notice how quickly you see results. Then, let’s talk about the next step.