Building a successful sales team for a small business requires a strategic approach that involves several key steps. Here’s a comprehensive guide to help you create a stellar sales team:
1. Determine Your Sales Needs
Before building a sales team, it’s essential to understand your business development and customer needs. Consider the types of products or services you offer, your company’s growth curve, and the roles, skill sets, and number of people you need to hire. For instance, inside sales teams are popular among small businesses because they are a lower cost than field sales. However, if your clients require on-site handholding and guidance, or your product is best showcased with a demo that’s hard to deliver over the phone, perhaps a field sales team makes more sense.
2. Define Operational and Sales Strategies
Before bringing in a team, an initial sales strategy should be in place as well as key operational components that will get your new team started on the right track. This includes figuring out who your target customers are, using customer segmentation to divide your universe of customers into buckets based on importance to your organization, and delineating sales territories to prevent sales reps from pursuing the same prospects.
3. Recruit Talent
Recruiting talent is the most important part of creating a winning sales team. To improve your odds of success, create a recruitment strategy that aligns recruiting efforts with the business and customer needs defined earlier while also factoring in workforce planning to ensure you hire just enough to meet those needs without breaking the bank. This involves creating a job description that not only lists the qualifications you’re looking for but also conveys a sense of the company culture and the expectations of the organization.
4. Structure Your Sales Team
The structure of your sales team depends on your company culture, industry, and overall goals. For example, whether you want a more competitive sales team or a collaborative environment will impact which structure you choose for your team. The three most common types of sales management structures are the island structure, the assembly line structure, and the pod structure.
5. Choose the Right Sales Channel
There are two sales channels to choose from: direct and indirect. Which one you choose depends on several factors, including what you are selling and whether you would like to support or complement your sales team. Direct sales mean selling directly to the consumer, whether at your location, on your website, or your customer’s premises. Indirect sales use an intermediary during the process.
6. Focus on Your Client’s ROI
When selling to small and midsize businesses (SMBs), focus on your client’s ROI. Respect the owner’s limited time, and keep interactions small, intimate, and personal. SMBs tend to make decisions faster than enterprise companies, in part because there are fewer decision-makers involved.
7. Arm Your People With Tools
To build a small sales team that achieves big results, one needs some essential tools. In times of technology, those are SaaS tools for time planning, contact management, video calling, password management, meeting scheduling, etc. A CRM is THE weapon of choice for a salesperson. It has some cutting-edge features, like Nimble prospector, social insights, email marketing module, scheduling, deal management, and more.
8. Automate Your Sales Process
A successful sales team can take a small business to the next level. Sales automation software like Keap can do the most good for a sales team by automating workflows such as lead delivery, follow-up emails, and customer onboarding. This can nurture prospects by providing them with personalized and useful marketing content that prepares them for a sale, and it can also help with the follow-up email, which may be an unsung hero in the sales world.
By following these steps, you can create a stellar sales team that will drive your company to success. Remember to structure your team, who you hire, how you onboard them, and what they get paid will impact your ROI.
