The Big Mistakes Organizations Make When Scaling Their Sales Teams

A successful sales team is the life force for any successful business. As the sale’s performance increases there is a boost in morale which leads to even stronger performance.

But what happens when you and your team realize that the current size of the team needs to be increased? For instance, when the sales team is being overworked, discovering new markets, or a major shift in the organization (product launch, or big contract.) While an effective expansion plan is crucial to business growth, a bad call can lead to financial collapse.

In this post, we will look at some of the biggest mistakes organizations make in scaling their sales teams.

 

Hiring with Instinct Rather than Analytics

While automation tools are used to assess the existing sales force performance, some sales executives chose to ignore this technology when scaling the sales team. Instead of taking analytics and data into account, they go with their gut instinct in the hiring process. This mistake can result in many issues including, mismatched team culture or failure to increase production through the sales force expansion.

This may be from an executive felling rushed to scale up the sales force, but this can cause the company to lose valuable operational support resources for the rest the team. The lack of support to reps can result in downward trend in sales. On the other hand, a slow scaling process increases the vulnerability of profit regression. Executives need to understand that every sales hire has its own unique context. To avoid these mistakes, executives must rely on data analysis like potential sales revenue, operational support resources, product profitability, competitors’ position, and the cost for additional sales employees.

 

Misallocating the Sales Reps

A rapid expansion in the sales force can prove difficult to handle for a sales leader. Hiring too many people at the same time may result in chaos if not done properly. As a result, the executive may misallocate the members, thereby over-populating some territories, while under-populating others.

In both scenarios, often the new or less-experienced recruits prioritize their time on the low-hanging leads, for a quick sale. The issue with this is that they fail to generate high revenues and bring in lucrative clients with strong lifetime value.

Before scaling up your sales force, it is important to have a look at three factors. These include the sales force market potential, the existing accounts, your sales process time line, and the time needed to train each new hire. By studying these four factors each new sales recruit will have a balanced market and be able to successfully bring in new long-term clients.