Grow Your Business with an Effective Sales Process

Somewhere between a start-up and a full-fledged company is the “growing business.” This recent article on Inc.com got our attention. Karl Stark and Bill Stewart (Avondale) write about the unique challenges CEOs face once they move beyond the start-up phase and are defining key initiatives to continually grow their business. They write:

“The growing company is different. The organization is large enough that the CEO is no longer aware of every action and decision that takes place, but he or she has not yet established organizational processes or sometimes even clear accountabilities. The CEO no longer has the ability to put the business on his or her shoulders. Growth requires a team of people to contribute in a well-coordinated fashion.”

We deal with a lot of growing businesses that are looking to improve sales performance. Our experience shows that developing organizational procedures in a way that supports the growing business is crucial to success.

We’ve worked with organizations of every size with a wide-range of business problems. We’ve found that no matter where the business is in terms of growth, establishing consistency among all the moving components of the organization should be a top priority.  It could be a long-established company like RSA or a start-up with a small sales team like DynamicOps. Regardless of the size of the business, creating uniformity around key areas of the sales process is an integral component to driving revenue.

As a sales leader, you can almost guarantee lagging sales if there aren’t repeatable processes driving the fundamental areas of sales effectiveness.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the mechanisms that we believe create success for growing businesses in these key areas:

Sales Messaging – Creating a framework around your messaging will drive consistency across departments.  A messaging framework also ensures your sales team links customer needs to your solutions and differentiates your products and services from your competitors.

Sales Execution – Successful sales organizations have an operating rhythm behind their selling process. Developing a repeatable approach to that process will align your sales cycle with your customer’s buying cycle. This also helps create consistency around deal qualification criteria and gives you the tools necessary to qualify, advance and close sales opportunities.

Sales Planning – A structured territory, account and opportunity planning process will build healthy pipelines and increase forecast accuracy. Creating a seller-friendly toolkit of planning templates and productivity metrics can assist your sales leadership in coaching their sales teams. 

Sales Talent –  Do you know how much a bad hire can cost you? You can’t grow a business without attracting and retaining top talent. Developing a Success Profile can help you define the traits that people need to succeed in your organization. Follow that up with the creation of a process to help sales managers coach their teams to success, alleviating the burden of unnecessary administrative duties. These talent management tools will help you create a strong recruiting bench for growth.

With these practices in place, the growing company’s CEO won’t be overwhelmed with being “all things to all people." The business will be in a position to grow effectively because the sales team can:

• Sell more – at higher margins
• Qualify and close deals sooner
• Exceed quota more frequently

What challenges do you see with growing sales organizations?  What would you choose as the most important sales component to support the needs of a growing organization?

Have we piqued your interest?