Scale Your Sales Team By Design, Not By Chance

So, here’s the problem:  Inside sales teams with high turn-over are tasked to go after CxO’s with stiff targets, so they turn to hacking and scripting.  Within the sales organization, process, and training are afterthoughts.  This often results in scaling by chance, not by design.

In the Prezi below, Jacco van der Kooij does an incredible job of presenting this common problem in the environment of quickly scaling organizations and how to resolve it.  

Here is my executive summary:

What if everyone on your sales team understood your customer problem and understood how you solved it?  What if your sales team loved your solution, immersed themselves in your market, and developed a vision for a better tomorrow?

How do you fill the gap between reality and “ideality?”  You need a process, you need tools, you need content, you need training, and you need to be agile.  But how do you get these things?  

You make a process consisting of best practices.  Each series contains best practices broken into simple tasks.  The key is to enable everyone across your organization to act as one.  The market moves too fast to take a siloed approach.

You add tools to these processes.  Build your sales teams a tool stack, and enable your sales team with them.  The tools allow them to do their job better - they act as a force multiplier.

You add content to these processes.  Content provides valuable insight on how to solve a client's problem. Use this content in context when you reach out.  Use it to advance the sale.

Create a playbook.  Train your sales team on these processes.  Step one, “visualize” the concept. Step two, provide a checklist. Step three, highlight best practices.

Don’t overwhelm your team by giving them everything at once. As their performance increases, increase the availability of processes, tools, and content to them.

“Make how you sell as important as what you sell and the way you sell will become your unique selling point.”

-Jacco van der Kooij