Jennifer Terrell Outlines How Companies Can Grow Their Sales Teams
Establishing an effective sales team is a vital component to the long-term growth of an organization. However, scaling your company’s revenue does not just require additional sales representatives. There is an entire infrastructure that needs to be put in place and many factors to take into consideration. But for those ready to take the leap, Jennifer Terrell provides a few tips.
Building Documented Processes
One of the first steps to establishing a sales team is to implement a clearly defined process, and document it in a clear and concise way. This ensures that when things start going well and your company starts yielding great sales results, you will have a replicable process that you can refer back to when you want to further accelerate your growth.
Talk to Customers Every Day
According to Jennifer Terrell, there is no excuse for poor communication with customers. It is easy to deprioritize this outreach as an entrepreneur and delegate everything to your sales team, but you need to make time to hear what your customers are saying.
That is the only way to keep iterating on your product or service and get ahead of your challenges.
Measuring and Adjusting
Your sales process should be set up in a way that allows you to measure its results. Not only does this allow you to adjust the process for maximum efficiency, but this will give you an idea of what is achievable when you are just starting out.
Clearly Define Compensation Strategies
If the above is not something you are adept at doing, Jennifer Terrell suggests hiring someone in your sales team who not only understands this process, but that is compensated based on their performance improvements. Salespeople will do what they are paid to do, which can be both a blessing and a curse!
Your compensation strategies should be clearly defined from the get-go. It should be set up to incentivize the behavior you need to see from your sales reps and discourage the behavior that you do not want. This is the quickest way to get your sales team to maximize their capacity.
Final Thoughts — Get a Handle on Your Sales Funnel
Do you have a good understanding of your entire sales funnel? According to Jennifer Terrell, this is necessary to fix any leaks that occur at any step of the funnel and optimize your sales process.
This includes knowing the capacity of each rep of your team. How many people can they contact per day? Of those contacts, how many should result in qualified appointments? From there, how many should yield in presentations with qualified decision makers, and ultimately into follow-ups and closed sales?
You need to understand every single step, because a lot can go wrong if you don’t fix issues that arise.
