The problem often lies in the rapidly expanding sales team. The “chamber” situation in the sales department is changing, and the head of the department stops at a proportional increase in the sales plan. But if you scale the department, focusing only on the sales plan, there is a non-zero chance of overlooking other equally important factors that directly affect sales efficiency.
Here's how we at Epom expanded our sales force while maintaining a healthy department environment. A careful analysis of these factors helped us not to lose efficiency in the quarantine and to manage the sales department remotely without communication failures and misunderstandings.
Command
Most managers choose a team for themselves. But when selecting it, it is also important to keep in mind the business objectives and internal values of your company. In the process of marketing research by 4Service Group, almost 40% of surveyed consumers cite professionalism as the criterion of first-class service.
More than once I have met in sales departments instead of a professional team - a get-together of interests. Managers come to work with pleasure, consider the team a “friendly family”, but at the same time:
- mercilessly procrastinate 90% of the working time;
- complaining about the customer instead of looking for solutions;
- afraid of wrong decisions;
- not ready to adapt their plans and work schedule for the sake of the client;
- not interested in professional development.
We wanted to avoid hiring such employees, so we worked with HR on all the requirements for candidates in advance. It is important not to copy and paste a vacancy from someone published, but to write it taking into account the specifics of your company. For us, a valuable life hack when choosing candidates was the article by Mitch Harper and his classification of employees.
Harper divides applicants into three types:
- A-players or First-class employees : Only 5-7% of people fall into this category. They work efficiently, develop quickly and quickly climb the career ladder.
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- - : 10%, « ?». , , , . — , , , , .
When interviewing employees, we asked them seven questions:
1. What do you like and what do you dislike about our company? How would you fix the things you don't like?
Players A google information about the company they are going to interview. It is important to hear in what form the applicant criticizes the company. If aggressive - you need to think about his future loyalty to the company. Another interesting thing is his train of thought on solving problems: will he pass it on to others or will he think about how he can be useful.
2. What book are you reading now? What are your favorite profile sites?
An optional item, but it is always interesting to know about the range of interests of the applicant. Cool if he is looking for new techniques and life hacks that will help him in his work.
3.Have you been assigned to lead a large project in your previous job?
Speaks about the degree of responsibility of a sales person. If not a single large client has been entrusted to him in a year, this is a bad sign.
4. Have you ever had a project / client that went wrong? How did you manage?
This is a replacement for the standard "Tell us about your weaknesses", where half of the applicants say that their weak side is workaholism. We were interested in the stories of defeat and what lessons a person could learn from them.
5. What else drives you besides work?
It is important that the person has hobbies that help him relieve stress. If it is any kind of sport, great.
6.Do they want the same range of responsibilities and position as in their previous job?
Good managers are looking for new challenges, complex tasks and pumped up clients, with which you can grow yourself.
7. What questions do you have about the company and how everything works in the sales department?
For us, an interview is an opportunity for an interesting dialogue with a potential employee. If he asks only about salary and working conditions, but is not too interested in the processes and tasks in the company, we will try to arrange a second interview in order to understand more about his motivation.
We didn't have a goal of hiring all Class A players, but to develop a team in each department, at least a couple of such people are needed. To retain effective employees, eliminate all flaws in the motivation system and make it as clear as possible. And immediately consider the financial expectations and ambitions of each from the standpoint of the company's realities. Because initial utmost honesty eliminates manager frustration and saves time in new selection processes.
The working process
A minimum of new customers and the bulk of the profit from existing ones is a 100% regularity, if the head of the sales department does not assign specific deadlines for tasks, does not control the implementation of each one, and in general the department works without a clear focus. This situation is common in companies without CRM.
Installing a CRM will allow you not to lose sight of any of the incoming requests, to guide customers through the sales funnels faster, to keep the customer base guaranteed and to analyze the effectiveness of each manager at any time. As soon as our sales department began to grow, we immediately began the process of selecting and testing CRM.
There is a large number of CRMs on the market, each with its own pros and cons. We work in Gmail and were looking for the simplest and most flexible solution, so we chose CRM natively integrated with GSuite (a full list of such CRMs is here )
What else did we pay attention to when choosing a CRM:
- no costs for integrators and the fastest start of work;
- convenient visualization of sales funnels;
- the ability to control the amount of sales for each manager;
- personalized bulk mailings;
- availability of a convenient mobile version;
- integration with messengers;
- task manager;
- reporting and analytics;
- no hidden fees for the features that we needed.
My advice is to write down all the requirements for the functionality before choosing a CRM and determine who will use CRM in the company. In the first month, we transferred not only the sales department to CRM, but also marketing and support.
As soon as the work of managers becomes extremely transparent, it is easy to track the workload of each of them. Sales managers can also see the total sales of colleagues and estimate how close they are to meeting the sales target.
Sales funnel
According to Hubspot statistics , six out of ten buyers prefer to find out the cost of a product on the first contact, and half of potential customers want to test the product as soon as possible. We have a rather complicated product: an ad server, and before giving a test account for setting up and serving ads, we must make sure that the lead understands the basic information about it. Our product sales cycle is also quite long: it can take up to three months from registration to purchase.
Previously, the stages of interaction with incoming leads were as follows:
- When filling out the form on the site, the lead was automatically placed in the New folder in our CRM.
- We set up an automatic chain of letters in CRM, the first of which was sent at the time of registration.
- With the lead who responded to our letter, we agreed on a general call, the purpose of which is to find out more about the company and determine the requests and expectations from the platform.
- After that we set up a separate day for the demo.
- After the demo, they gave a free account for two weeks.
- If after the demo the lead stopped responding, after some time we stopped interacting with it.
To identify all the key issues, we decided to dig deeper and go beyond just interacting with leads. We conducted a full audit of the sales force that went far beyond our original funnel.
We divided the audit of the sales department into five main stages, which included
1. Analysis of the current regulations of the sales department
The head of the department added the rules for the work of the sales department: many of the rules were unspoken and this caused a lot of discussion. We have finalized the memo for employees and prescribed all work processes in detail.
All force majeure officers were taken out in a separate FAQ and an algorithm of actions for each of them was prescribed.
2. Analysis of the technology of working with clients
We assessed the interaction with clients at every stage: the speed of processing the application, communication and conducted a survey among clients.
As a result, we developed a product training program for customers, sent it to the mailing list and sent it to the “Interested” categories and those who just got a 14-day trial period.
3. Evaluation of employees using the "Mystery shopping" method
We did not hire professionals, but asked the marketing department to come up with an interesting use case, go through the entire sales funnel and track bottlenecks in interaction with the manager.
We evaluated:
- knowledge level of product managers;
- communication and reaction to non-standard situations;
- the degree of qualification of managers;
- the effectiveness of the measures taken to return the departed customers.
4. Interviewing employees
We interviewed the sales staff, the head of the sales department, the marketer and the owners of the company to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the sales department. This helped to find a lot of insights: all employees were involved in the process of optimizing the sales department and offered ideas for improvement.
We put the best of them to a vote and decided to implement them in stages.
5. Processing information and drawing up a plan for sales growth
Perhaps the most difficult stage: you need to structure all the strengths and weaknesses of the department, prescribe the best practices for working with clients, which will support the managers. Separately, we prescribed a sales growth plan for six months and a year and made it available to all employees.
After conducting a sales audit, we adjusted the standard sales scheme in this way:
1. We removed all intermediate stages of interaction with the client from the funnel in CRM and left only the main thing:
2. We rewrote the letter chains and made them more informal, without officialdom. We also added goodwill in the first letter and tried to ask as many questions as possible that would help us better understand the client before calling.
3. They began to offer to hold a demo on the first call: the number of closed deals increased by 21% in the first couple of months. We worked out the timing of the demo in detail: before, they could take from 30 to 50 minutes, and with customer questions - more than an hour. In an hour, few people could remember at least half of what we told.
4. We recorded demos of each product, published them on Youtube and began to add them to the brief summary of the meeting after the call. This allowed us to minimize typical questions after the call and freed managers 3 hours of working time per week.
5. Thought over and added several chatbots to the site and landing pages to help site visitors decide on the product without involving the sales department. This helped to relieve managers and minimize routine work. We plan to create the same chatbots for the support department in the near future.
We started out with easily measurable changes that had a quick impact and kept the sales team from losing motivation. Then more fundamental and extended in time changes are perceived by the team not as stress, but as an understandable and logical step.
A well-developed department structure and sales system are the foundation that will not allow the company to lose its profit. And in order to build effective sales plans on this foundation, the usual strategies and tactics will have to be changed periodically. I would be glad if you could share your sales optimization life hacks that worked.