How to Scale Your Sales Process Without Hiring
When you think of how to scale your sales process and increase revenue, hiring is usually the first idea that comes to mind. More people = more activities = more opportunities = more revenue…right? Not always.
Hiring more people comes with its own set of challenges — new talent comes at a cost of both time and money.
- Good people are expensive and if you cut corners here, you’ll probably regret the decision later.
- Even great talent needs nurturing to adapt to your process before they start adding value. Count on at least 30 days+ for the new hire to get up to speed.
- The process of finding the right people takes a lot of time and energy away from other, more important things, and it can be expensive if you work with outsourced staffing agencies.
If you want to scale without draining all of your resources, don’t put all of your eggs in the hiring basket. Instead, find ways to make your existing salespeople more productive.
Here are a few ways to scale your sales process without hiring:
Automate Prospecting
Most people in sales spend a major chunk of their time prospecting and booking meetings. And then, during the later stages of the sales process, the same people shift their focus to follow-up and closing deals, making it harder to generate new leads after prospecting has taken a backseat. It’s an endless cycle.
Prospecting is not a complicated process, but it’s very time consuming. Moreover, most salespeople hate it, and as Aaron Ross says, many good salespeople are terrible at it.
Automating this process with a sales prospecting solution like RevBoss takes the heavy lifting off your plate by sourcing leads and automating multi-touch workflows that fill the funnel. This helps your team eliminate most of the routine work and concentrate on the later stages of the funnel which actually require a human touch.
Focus on What Moves the Needle
Measurement is the cornerstone for performance. Metrics are especially critical for sales because they are direct indicators of what’s working and what’s not. Measuring how many hours spent on a given task in the sales pipeline makes it easier to cut out the non-performing tasks and spend more time on tasks that have a higher impact on conversions.
For example, most salespeople don’t spend enough time on follow-ups, which reduces their conversion rates. Or for us, when we slow down our RevBoss’ing efforts, we see a drop in monthly demos.
Figure out which activities move the needle the most, and make investments and adjustments to spend more time doing those things.
Define Clear Processes
A great way to build sales pipeline is to define repeatable sales processes that are easy to execute. A good process is something that is tried and tested — if your salespeople apply that specific process, they have a higher likelihood of success.
For example, messaging templates can be created to help the sales team achieve the right results by reaching out to thousands of people while still maintaining a friendly, personalized tone. Similarly, a defined prospecting strategy can make a massive difference to the sales pipeline by eliminating ad-hoc, individualized prospecting approaches, which may or may not work.
The more processes you have, the more predictable your revenue will become.
Invest in Training
Why not invest money in training your existing salespeople, rather than spending those resources on new hires?
It takes a lot of time to get a new rep trained up on the ins and outs of your product, and even longer before they’re ready to sell it to other people.
Most salespeople have potential to improve their game if they’re given adequate training and opportunities to do so. This is one of the easiest ways to grow revenue and increase productivity without adding additional manpower.
So, if you want to scale, focus on working with what you’ve got first. You’ll certainly save time and money, but there’s more to it — you’ll build the foundation for a high-performing team.
And whenever you do hire more people in future, the systems and processes will already be in place for them to perform at their very best.