How To Build a Super Sales Team From Scratch as told from a Data Scientist
My first job out of college was an outside sales job selling printers to local businesses. I was hooked. What I loved about sales was that I felt I was helping people solve problems in their businesses while making a decent income. As I grew older, I didn’t like the grind of sales, and I saw that data was becoming more and more important in making business decisions, so I began a deep-dive into data, got a masters in Data Science, achieved a Google Data Analytics professional certification, and what I learned that I could help people within my organization and our clients if I helped shaped sales and marketing strategy with data backed insights.
As a Strategic sales and analytics manager at P3CA, I take data from our CRM, perform data analysis and predictive analytics for insights, and create dashboards and our sales strategy. After three years, this is how I would build a successful b2b sales team.
1. Make data-driven decisions
The sales process can be broken down into numerical terms. You can make educated guesses about revenue by using a sales growth model and providing it with information such as the number of salespeople, conversion rate, and average sale value. Determine the size of your sales staff by beginning with a revenue goal, then working backward from there. Once your team is up and running, the next stage in building a revenue acceleration model is collecting data on each sales process step. This will assist you in locating and fixing any bottlenecks in your system.
2. When hiring, make sure to do so in pairs and be careful
Begin with two people in the sales department. Take, for instance:
A sales development representative, or SDR, will be responsible for prospecting new customers (i.e., cold calling, cold emailing, and booking appointments)
An account executive (AE) whose responsibility it is to finalize negotiations initiated by the SDR
If you hire two employees, you can fire one of them if they aren’t productive without having to replace the entire team. It is likely that the employees won’t be productive if you hire too many individuals too quickly.
Because successful salespeople are skilled at selling themselves, it can be difficult to evaluate prospects and test applicants on four essential areas from the past, the present, and the future. Do not let individuals with successful performance records at large organizations fool you with their resumes. In a setting with fewer resources and less assistance, it’s possible that they won’t be able to thrive.
3. Outsource training as soon as possible and use a standardized sales procedure.
Founders who do not come from a sales background are advised to defer to the professionals in the field when it comes to training. Training should occur anywhere from twice to three times per week and include call listening and role-playing. When managing a more experienced workforce, managers should provide in-call instruction in real-time.
If you choose to perform the training on your own, you need to plan out a certain order of client interactions, such as the following:
Call the customer two minutes after they download a brochure, perform a follow-up call on the third day, and send an email on the fourth day of the campaign.
Call scripts and email templates ought to be utilized by representatives. It is simple to differentiate difficulties with individual rep performance from issues that are caused by the system itself if the process is uniform.
4. Setting realistic sales targets
If the sales targets are unrealistic, the sales reps won’t be motivated to achieve them. Inquire as to what is practical and what can be accomplished with the available funds. If your company is supported by venture capital, the commission might be as high as 100% of the original transaction. This is because it will bring in further investment money when the consumer renews or upgrades their plan after six or twelve months.
