by Samuel Gitukui
As an entrepreneur, you want your business to grow and naturally, getting more salespeople should translate to getting more clients, right?
As much as this is hard to argue with, you also want to ensure that your sales team is highly capable, highly efficient and are all up to date with the most effective strategies. You can’t just have each member of your sales team approaching the market differently.
A well-defined strategy for acquiring and retaining clients is essential.
Let’s take a look at a few steps to build an effective and efficient sales team from scratch.
1. Have the right product for the target market
It doesn’t matter how talented your sales team is. If your product doesn’t satisfy a need or a want, then customers are simply not going to be interested.
If you are a startup, a safe way to approach the market is to gather a small group of customers that you can contact easily to get feedback and create a product according to their interest.
Once you are confident that the final product is satisfying the customers you can then scale up and expand your sales team.
Imagine having many people selling a product that customers are not overly excited about. Eventually, the business revenue will decline.
2. Get a strategy that can be easily scaled up
In business, things are not as black and white as they may sometimes appear. Take cold calling, for example, one of the reasons it is not a favorite of many is because research shows that it has around a 1% success rate. Social marketing, on the other hand, has a good 15% success rate.
However, the question now becomes, which of the two strategies is easier to scale up? Without a doubt, it is far easier to use different technologies to scale up cold calling. This is not easily done with social marketing.
Entrepreneurs with such knowledge should be quick to educate their sales team. The salespeople will then know how to approach the market every time they go out fishing for clients.
3. Get the right Salespeople
As an entrepreneur looking to increase the size of their sales team, you might be tempted to hire anyone with previous experience in the sales and marketing field. This approach is too generic.
Instead what you should aim to do is to get someone who has the skills that are needed in your particular line of business. Think of it this way, if your business requires rapid-fire transaction sales, the salesperson needed will be different from one needed in a complex organization where business relationships are needed.
4. Improve the post-sale experience
A lot of emphasis is placed on making sales that people forget that the post-sale experience is equally as important. How you handle a buyer will remain stuck in their memories for a good long time. If the experience is good, then they are very likely to come back. And if it was less than ideal, then you will not remain in their favor for long.
Once you have set the above steps in place, then you can go ahead and scale up your sales team and watch your business grow.
As an entrepreneur, you want your business to grow and naturally, getting more salespeople should translate to getting more clients, right?
As much as this is hard to argue with, you also want to ensure that your sales team is highly capable, highly efficient and are all up to date with the most effective strategies. You can’t just have each member of your sales team approaching the market differently.
A well-defined strategy for acquiring and retaining clients is essential.
Let’s take a look at a few steps to build an effective and efficient sales team from scratch.
1. Have the right product for the target market
It doesn’t matter how talented your sales team is. If your product doesn’t satisfy a need or a want, then customers are simply not going to be interested.
If you are a startup, a safe way to approach the market is to gather a small group of customers that you can contact easily to get feedback and create a product according to their interest.
Once you are confident that the final product is satisfying the customers you can then scale up and expand your sales team.
Imagine having many people selling a product that customers are not overly excited about. Eventually, the business revenue will decline.
2. Get a strategy that can be easily scaled up
In business, things are not as black and white as they may sometimes appear. Take cold calling, for example, one of the reasons it is not a favorite of many is because research shows that it has around a 1% success rate. Social marketing, on the other hand, has a good 15% success rate.
However, the question now becomes, which of the two strategies is easier to scale up? Without a doubt, it is far easier to use different technologies to scale up cold calling. This is not easily done with social marketing.
Entrepreneurs with such knowledge should be quick to educate their sales team. The salespeople will then know how to approach the market every time they go out fishing for clients.
3. Get the right Salespeople
As an entrepreneur looking to increase the size of their sales team, you might be tempted to hire anyone with previous experience in the sales and marketing field. This approach is too generic.
Instead what you should aim to do is to get someone who has the skills that are needed in your particular line of business. Think of it this way, if your business requires rapid-fire transaction sales, the salesperson needed will be different from one needed in a complex organization where business relationships are needed.
4. Improve the post-sale experience
A lot of emphasis is placed on making sales that people forget that the post-sale experience is equally as important. How you handle a buyer will remain stuck in their memories for a good long time. If the experience is good, then they are very likely to come back. And if it was less than ideal, then you will not remain in their favor for long.
Once you have set the above steps in place, then you can go ahead and scale up your sales team and watch your business grow.
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