Running a sales team these days is more complicated than ever. You need to juggle multiple softwares, spreadsheet and performance reviews in order to ensure that the entire sales team is performing to the best of their ability. 2019 is one of the most important years, when it comes to inside sales.
What’s so special about 2019?
Well, in 2019 inside sales will finally reach digital maturity and become more connected to the overall marketing of a brand on the internet. Your sales team need to make sure that they are following up with leads and personalizing the sales process as much as possible for each individual prospect. The old school techniques will stop working and you need to set standards for your sales process going forward. Let’s take a look at 5 tips that will help your sales team generate more revenue in 2019.
1.Use Outreach.io To Standardize Your Follow Up Strategy
I have been using a software called Outreach.io that sits as a skin on top of Salesforce to standardize your sales team’s follow up strategy. I think it’s a great tool if you want to generate some neat data as to where your team needs more improvement.
In Outreach.io you can build something called sequences. A sequence is a series of steps that a rep has to follow in order to connect with a prospect or move them between stages.
I know that this sounds a bit confusing in the beginning but in Outreach.io sequences will help your reps connect more and follow up with potential prospects.
Outreach has a bi-directional sync with Salesforce which ensures that your leads, accounts and opportunities always stay in sync when a sales rep is using either of the two softwares.
Follow up should be a key element of any successful sales team. In fact in 2019, you need to take a closer look at your company’s follow up strategy with prospects. Start using emails and retargeting in order to engage more prospects during followups.
2. Supercharge BDR’s with Inbound Marketing Methodology In 2019
Only a handful of sales coaches are talking about this strategy. Many companies have a 2 step sales cycle where the BDR’s pre-qualify a lead and then the closer closes the account. If your company falls in this category then I have some amazing strategies to share with you.
Your BDR’s should be mini-inbound marketers helping you not only pre-qualify leads but generate tons of value for your prospects. Create ebooks white papers, branded case studies and share these inbound marketing assets with your BDR team. You can use a shared Dropbox or Google Drive folder to give access to all of your inbound marketing content to your reps.
The more inbound content your BRD’s and sales reps use, the better it is for your brand in general. Inbound content helps generate trust and establish your authority in a certain niche within the industry.
3. Invest In Your Hiring Strategy To Find The Best Closers In Town
In order to create a sales team that’s constantly crushing goals your need to hire the right kind of people that are a culture fit for your organization. When you are not spending time analyzing potential candidates it can be very costly especially when a top closer leaves the company.
The main goal for hiring sales rep is to ensure that you are trying to spread your company revenue as evenly as possible between all members of your sales team. Although that’s never the case (there are always top performers), you should still focus on reps hitting their minimum target and balancing out the curve. In sales the best thing to do is keep hiring as the churn rate is quite high.
Create a step by step system a potential hire goes through before they are ready to join your company. Test key elements like their closing ability and ability to follow the script and coachability.
4. Create The Best Possible Training Program For New Sales Reps Joining Your Company
In order to truly scale and grow your inside sales team in 2019 you need to fine tune your sales script and invest lots of time training your sales reps. New sales reps often fail due to lack of proper training and coaching in their early days of selling your product.
Even before you start hiring lots of inside sales rep, create a detailed outline of how you are going to train these individuals and help their achieve their monthly targets in the first few months.
Ideally, the first few days should be about your company history, vision and mission. Go through successful calls and ask them to take notes. Make your reps practice the pitch and eventually come up with their own version of your script. Review everything and manage expectations when they are ready to start calling.
One important thing to keep in mind when new reps join the sales floor is that you should test them out with a few of your good inbound leads. I have seen this mistake sales managers do over and over again and it can be costly. They reserve the best leads for their top closers.
Well, I am not saying you stop giving leads to your top closers. What I am suggesting is that you give you new reps a fair platform and a fair share of leads if they perform. However, in the first few weeks you have to overfeed them in order to gauge who is a good fit for the company. Go over your value proposition over and over again until it is crystal clear what you are doing and who the target audience is and most importantly why they should buy your product.
In 2 – 6 weeks (depending on your sales cycle) you will figure out who is a good fit and who you need to let go.
5. Create Specialized Sales Roles And Scale Each Division To Maximize Revenue
This is a secret strategy many companies are using to rapidly scale their sales team and grow their revenue. Here is how it works:
- BDR’s qualify all kinds of leads.
- You assign different lead types to different sales team. For example build out a dedicated team to handle enterprise sales. A separate team to deal with renewals and another team that deals with mid sized business owners.
- When you adopt this technique you are not only closing new clients but you can measure how your product is doing on various market segments allowing you to double down different market segments as you see fit.
Always remember that these specialized roles should have their tailored commission structure for their particular division. Enterprise sales reps might get a lower percentage and that’s ok. Their deal size is likely higher than mid-sized business.
Breaking your sales team into specialized teams is something you should definitely focus on, while expanding your overall sales team in 2019.
2 Comments
Rachel
With so many different options for companies to track their sales and growth, it makes absolute sense to find the best elearning software out there to keep you and your sales team on the same page with consistent data. Especially now, when a lot of teams are still working remotely. The tips you listed here were very helpful. In addition to monitoring growth, you stressed that it is equally as important to ensure that your training among new team members is equally as consistent. As someone who has been in sales in various companies offering a variety of products, there is an absolute need to make sure the team is on the same page. And I understand that training can vary as sales leaders promote within a company, or leave to go elsewhere. Again, I think this is where solid elearning software plays a huge role. Companies where I felt successful as a sales rep used a combination of approaches, but each let me know what they expected from me right from the start. Your suggestions to invest a lot of time and energy into new sales reps were spot on. Setting specific goals and expectations is great advice. Between in-person, high-energy training, and a great remote training strategy, companies have nowhere to go but up.
admin
Yes I totally reocommend that companies should use a course creator to systemize their onboarding so that they can scale fast. Sometimes a hybrid solution is preferred where a new sales rep goes through a course then some one on one training before starting calls.