Adapting your sales machine for software growth

Beringea recently gathered sales leaders from a number of software companies in its portfolio to consider the challenges involved with creating well-oiled sales machines that deliver rapid, reliable, and sustainable growth.
From marketing technology firm ResponseTap and communications platform ContactEngine to SEO analytics business DeepCrawl, education technology company Firefly Learning, and streaming platform Simplestream, attendees spanned a diverse set of software specialisms but shared many of the same sales challenges.
To consider these issues, Beringea convened the group for a discussion introduced by Graeme Hall, the founder of Sales Blueprint, a consultancy that advises sales teams at portfolio companies of the UK’s leading private equity businesses to deliver higher growth through improvements in their sales and marketing functions.
The discussion focused on two key challenges — nailing the sales process and the effective recruitment of sales teams — and delivered three recommendations to scaling software companies.
Define every step of the sales process
As Graeme Hall commented, “the sales process is not simply a map of what you do designed around how a CRM system is built. It is a process to maximise the chances of you winning business.”
Critical to maximising the efficiency and consistency of your sales is, therefore, defining every step of the sales process in detail so that you have a clear understanding of the inputs and activity required to optimise your outputs.
Ultimately, Graeme added, “the sales division is a factory that makes orders. At each stage, you should know the inputs required, state of orders in progress and expected output.”
Listen more, speak less, and ask the right questions
A recent study in the Harvard Business Review evaluated more than 500,000 business-to-business sales conversations through phone calls and online platforms — its resounding conclusion was that asking more of right questions was a key factor of successful sales.
Attendees at the discussion overwhelmingly agreed that the ability to ask the correct questions during the sales process was an important characteristic of effective sales professionals.
Not only do insightful questions engage customers and enable them to think critically about what they require, this type of dialogue is a valuable tool for lead qualification. Whether through written documents or discussions, understanding how to tease information out of your customer and listening carefully to their responses is vital to the sales process.
You need attitude, as well as aptitude
When it comes to recruitment, it is vital to develop a clear profile of the candidate you are after. Do not focus only on recruiting specialist knowledge — also understand the attitudes and experience that will suit sales in your business.
For some attendees, extroverts had proved successful salespeople, while for others ruthlessness or inquisitiveness were the qualities that set a valuable recruit apart.
The challenge of recruitment has never been greater — a survey by San Francisco-based investor First Round found 26 per cent of founders say that sales roles were the hardest positions to fill. Understanding the attitude as well as the aptitudes required means that you can quickly filter the candidates that you truly want to pursue.
Want to learn more about Beringea’s experience in scaling software companies and how we could support you? Head over to our website or get in touch.

