It’s time to scale your sales operations
It’s time to scale your sales operations
The only way to stabilize revenue as a market shrinks is to take market share from that contracting market
What?
We’re in an economic downturn – maybe even a recession.
Headlines are full of layoffs, cutting business lines, and cutting marketing budgets.
Why would you scale sale operations?
The only way to stabilize revenue as a market shrinks is to take market share from that contracting market.
Ironically, taking market share is more accessible in a contracting market.
Competitors panic, make many bad decisions, and cause a lot of self-inflicted wounds – taking uncalculated risks, slashing the wrong things, becoming paralyzed, stopping investing and innovating, and generating a lot of unproductive, frenetic activity.
This smells like opportunity.
So, let’s take some market share.
You take market share by scaling your sales and marketing activities into the market by increasing your top-of-funnel activities and product offerings.
Regardless of your circumstances, you will be asked to do more with less in a shrinking market environment.
That’s why scaling your sales operation must be your number one priority.
Here’s a checklist to start scaling.
Get more out of your marketing budget.
Review all of your marketing tactics, channels, and campaigns.
Like tending a garden, pruning the dead and dying, and watering and fertilizing for new growth.
Too often, we slash budgets or turn off entire channels and campaigns without understanding where sales and revenue production comes from.
Arguably, this is a routine practice, but we know that in good times many operations run on autopilot, especially marketing spending.
From experience, most marketing budgets can yield 10-15% more leads and revenue by trimming the losers and reallocating to the winners. I also advocate taking a small slice of that reallocation and putting it into new channel/campaign tests.
Get more out of your sales operations.
Like marketing, there is sure to be some fat to trim in sales operations.
Unfortunately, when markets tighten, most executives cut with a dull hatchet. Cutting hundreds and thousands of sales agents based on sales director recommendations or a loose sorting of sales performance reports.
Here’s the problem with these methods:
In a transitioning market, the sales skills that worked in the previous market probably won’t cut it in the new environment
Sales performance reports are a lagging indicator, and you need to forecast for success
Most sales operations aren’t using predictive sales performance models yet
So, the first step in squeezing more from a shrinking market and a downsized sales team is to know who your rising stars are and identify your falling stars.
With this data, optimize your sales team for maximum potential production.
Next, tighten up your sales processes.
Done right, this will be your most significant production lift.
Look for:
Statuses (steps in the process) where deals pile up or die on the vine
Steps in the process where sales agents spend a lot of time doing unproductive things
Deal characteristics or products/services that never close
With this data, tune your sales process and products/services to push more through the pipeline faster.
Here is an advanced tip: Redeploy a few intelligent sales agents that struggled to hit their quota and put them on a mission to optimize sales operations. In my experience, this can be a big win. Many times mediocre sales performers know sales inside and out but get lost in the details - this is the perfect job for them.
Get more out of every lead and every sales agent
First and foremost, leads are people.
They get confused, distracted, anxious, excited, and motivated, and sometimes life and priorities can whipsaw whether they are hot or cold.
Of course, the problem with that is that your sales agents can burn up a lot of productive time working on the wrong lead - unqualified, dormant, or unresponsive leads.
But, the secret to closing more deals (with people) is being there reliably and responsively when they’re ready to close the deal.
The only way to do that is with two essential systems in place:
Predictive lead scoring – Models tell you which leads will likely close next. This isn’t science fiction. As we speak, AI/ML solutions are being used by your competitors, and they are easier to implement than you think.
Sales and marketing automation - Email, text, and phone call touches that are personalized, friendly, helpful, and consistent but 100% automated. Sales agents ONLY respond to prospect engagement.
Implementing both of these ensures that your entire sales team is only working on active and engaged prospects that are moving towards closing.
Depending on your current business objectives, these two priorities will significantly increase the capacity of your sales team to pull through more deals or allow you to strategically reduce the team.
Either way, you will squeeze more closed deals out of your current lead flow and sales team – even if you don’t change the quality of your lead generation or sales agents.