Speed + Simplicity = The 2 secret weapons of high performing sales teams

One of the most common challenges preventing small sales teams from scaling up?

Structure!

Some sales managers try to enforce too rigid a structure, and turn their reps into mindless telemarketing robots.

Some sales managers think structure is mostly dead weight and don't care for it at all. That works in the very early days. But as their team grows, everything turns into a clusterfuck real fast.

Aim for the sweet spot: where you have a clear structure around the elements that create an aligned team, while also giving your reps the freedom to soar.

One simple example are qualifying calls. Let's say at the end of the quarter, you want to review which lead acquisition channel converts best within a 90 day period, measured in revenue closed.

If you're a 3 person sales team—cool, you can ask your reps for input, and you'll probably get a good enough answer. (Although even here, people's intuition around these kinds of things is often off.) But a team of 10, 20, 30 reps? You really need structured data now, and you need it in a way that's easy to work with. If you have to export and convert data from 5 different tools, and pivot table 3 different spreadsheets, that workflow is not just too laborious, but also too error prone. I've come across way too many sales teams making really bad, data-driven decisions. Not because data-driven is bad, but because ensuring accurate data gets exponentially more difficult the more data sources are involved.

That's why having all your sales activity, all your sales data, and your revenue numbers in one place is so crucial.

Because it allows you to access accurate data, that leads to meaningful insights so much faster and easier.

Speed and simplicity. I think of these two as the secret weapons of high-performing sales teams.

When sales teams struggle or falter, even though there's more opportunity in the market, it's oftentimes because complexity slows them down.

We've build Close around this insight. With Custom Activities, you can create a templated qualifying call to help your reps ask the right questions, while also capturing structured data in the CRM.

Here's an example of what a Custom Activity for a simple qualifying call could look like:

But there's so much more you can do—it really depends all on your team's own sales process.

Think of Custom Activities as a way to tailor your CRM so it fits your workflow perfectly, and gives it just the right amount of structure you need to create a scalable sales team, while also empowering your reps to act on their own instincts and sell exactly how they personally sell best.

But whatever sales tool your team is using—strive for ways to create structure and clarity. If your reps show up at the beginning of each work day, and they have a clear sense for their goals and clarity around how to achieve them, you're on the way to building a high-performance sales culture.

Give them a goal.

Show them how to accomplish it.

Let them win.