Growing Your Company Means Growing Your Salespeople

by | Dec 24, 2020 | Sales & Marketing

The success of your sales team can impact the success of your whole business. Here are three common Challenges we see arise within your sales team when you are trying to grow your company.

Open Territories and Positions

According to Repsly, “64 percent of organizations feel they are either ineffective (31%) or only somewhat effective (33%) at territory design.” Open Sales Territories or positions are among the most common factors that hurt companies’ ability to grow. When no one is calling on the customer, the chances of them growing is about zero. When there are not enough people to take advantage of the opportunities available, you lose revenue.

If you have open positions, get them filled. The longer a job is available, the more opportunity you create for a competitor.

You’ll want to field the team first and then upgrade and improve it continuously.

Enough Salespeople

To grow your business, you need to have the right amount of salespeople. You can ask your team to sell a million more in 2021, but unless you take into account their sales capacity, they won’t be able to hit that goal.

Sales Capacity is the average amount of revenue/margin your salespeople should be able to bring in at any given point. Knowing your team’s capacity allows you to create the space required to generate more leads, close more deals, and manage time more effectively.

Make sure you and your sales leader sit down with your superstars and explain that you understand that they have developed these opportunities initially but, to grow, assignments sometimes need to change.

If you do your research, set expectations early, listen to what your team has said, be mindful of strong customer relationships, and create a fair and open transition plan. This will allow you to grow your company even quicker.

The Right Type of Salespeople

Although two classic types of salespeople are often categorized as hunters or farmers. Hunters – go out and find new clients. Farmers – grow existing accounts. You need both types to grow your company.

Hunters are also known as the go-getters. They get their sales energy through “hunting” or the thrill of chasing new opportunities.

However, if you only have “hunters,” you will often find yourself with a retention problem. You will always need to keep finding new business, and customer relationships can sometimes suffer. According to Convince and Convert, “79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. Lack of lead nurturing is the common cause of this poor performance.”

In contrast to the hunters, farmers are more focused on developing long-term relationships and finding ways to expand within them.

If you only have “farmers,” you will find yourself unable to fill your pipeline, smaller deal sizes, and no new market growth. This can create an annuity effect where the salesperson is happy and busy managing their accounts while the company ceases to grow. According to Small Biz Genius, “82% of businesses that fail do so because of cash flow problems.”

It would be best to find a balance within your company between farmers and hunters to maximize your growth.

In The End

To grow your company, you need to focus on filling open positions “field the team,” increasing your overall capacity to make enough space for pursuit work toward an appropriate balance between farmers and hunters.

Mike Braun is a founder and co-owner of Pivotal Advisors: A sales execution firm dedicated to building the best sales organizations on the planet. Over the past 30 years, Mike has had the opportunity to provide hundreds of organizations with methods and strategies to achieve consistent sales growth.

Reach out to Mike Braun at (952) 226-3375 or mbraun@pivotaladvisors.com.