As your startup business grows, you have to keep up with more customer demands. Here, you will also find more business opportunities. To take advantage of all of these, you should expand your organization.
One particular department you need to scale would be your sales team. After all, it would be at the forefront of engaging new business leads and getting them to convert. But the process can be rather challenging. Discover how you can make the expansion work with the help of Virtua Solutions.
The Challenges Of Growing Your Startup Business Sales Team
Arguably the first thing you would think about when expanding your sales team is how to expand it fast. After all, leads and opportunities will not wait for you. So, you have to capture them quickly.
But there are also risks in attempting that faster expansion. One of these would be that you end up using your resources faster. As such, you might not have enough resources for future business developments. That can slow your overall company growth.
Getting Employee Buy In
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Another challenge of expanding your sales team is getting an employee to buy in. Your earlier hires might feel threatened once you bring in new people to the team. You have to come up with a way to involve them in the effort. That work can also take time, as not everyone would be on the same page.
Creating A Sustainable Model
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Scaling your sales team is not just a one-time effort. You will continually grow your team as you discover new opportunities. However, ensure your team can effectively navigate these successive growth periods. That includes ensuring your team can effectively handle the increased workload. Also consider how the organization as a whole can sustain the momentum of your growth.
The Pillars Your Startup Business Needs To Follow
With all the above challenges, you should know how to proceed with your scaling efforts accordingly. Here, you need to consider these strategic points. These points will help you better direct your scaling efforts toward the right path.
A Clear Sales Process
The first thing you would want to have before expansion is a clear sales process. Your goal is to make it repeatable on a larger scale. That way, new sales team members can quickly get into the workflow.
To ensure that your current sales process is indeed as such, assess it in several key areas.
- Pipeline stages: Are your sales process steps simple enough and easy to follow for your new hires?
- Lead qualification criteria: You need to provide a structured set of lead qualification criteria for the various stages of your pipeline.
- Activities: Break down each sales stage to specific activities agents should perform.
- KPIs: List the most important key performance indicators at each stage of the sales process.
Compile all this information into a simple rulebook. Agents can then use this rulebook as a guide to accomplishing sales.
This is where Virtua Solutions’ assistance begins. When you sign up with us, our sales agents will use their expertise to help you better develop your sales process. They will also give you insights into the latest strategies to help the process.
Creating Better Focus For Agents
With increasing workload also comes the challenge for your team to stay in focus. Here, your goal is optimize the sales process so incoming agents will feel less pressured to meet targets. Since these targets can change as your business grows, your new agents should also be ready to take on the challenge.
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One strategy that you can use here is activity-based selling. Here, you focus on controllable activities that lead directly to a sale. You put greater emphasis on activities most likely to produce those sales. This strategy helps you align your business more toward your desired sales goal.
However, those activities that you pivot from might still be important to your startup business as a whole. Virtua Solutions is ready to take these activities from you and handle them in the background. With that, your growing team will be more confident about working on the above-important activities.
Proactive Development
As you can see from the above, expanding your sales team is no easy road. There will be a lot of issues that you will encounter that can impact the success of your efforts. In this case, you should be more proactive in handling these issues.
Use all the key performance indicators you have set up to keep track of the developments in your expanding sales team. Once you see signs of potential problems, work on them immediately.
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Your goal is to create solutions that can apply to these and similar issues in the future. With that, you will need adaptable support for your sales team. Virtua Solutions gives exactly that. We can customize our services to fit your needs here.
For instance, we can field more agents to support your sales team during anticipated times of increased demand. That is crucial, as hiring new agents for those times can be a lot more cumbersome for your startup business.
Managing Multiple Teams For Your Startup Business
Once you scale your startup business sales, you won’t just deal with one big team. Instead, you might end up with multiple teams. For instance, you might need to create several teams for each product in your lineup.
Managing all of these teams can be rather challenging. You need to be able to stay in touch with the happenings in each team so you can make effective decisions. For this, you can once again lean on Virtua Solutions.
Our virtual assistants can serve as liaison officers for each team. They will handle the monitoring work while you focus on bigger business tasks. The VAs will be able to provide you with the feedback coming from them while also helping send directives back.
Expand Your Startup Business Sales Team With The Right Partner
Growing your startup business sales team is more than just adding new people. Create a complete plan to lead your growing team toward success. And you need the right partner to ensure proper execution. We at Virtua Solutions are always ready to be that partner for you. Contact us today to learn more.