This is the final piece in a four-part series about activity-based selling. Read part one, part two and part three.
Are you ready to scale sales? You must have the following:
- Defined key selling activities and metrics.
- A sales organization aligned key metrics.
- Sales managers who course-correct performance with metrics.
When you understand the cascading chain of activities that leads to sales for your team, scale sales by making them happen more often. More activities means more results.
Here’s how to do just that with your activity-based selling strategy:
How to Scale Sales with Activity-Based Selling
1. Use performance data to uncover best practices.
Use your activity data to identify top performers for each activity in your sales process. Observe their specific behaviors for each and make notes. What are they doing better than the rest of your reps? Here are a few questions to ask about specific activities:
Calls:
- Are they targeting ideal buyer personas?
- Are they using personalized reach-outs?
- Are they educating prospects about the market?
Meetings / Demos:
- Are they identifying the key players in the buying process?
- Are they confirming alignment between the prospect’s objectives and your company’s offering?
- Do they focus on features and functionality or problems and solutions?
Close Rate:
- Are they sending relevant thought leadership content throughout the process?
- Do they review each proposal with sales managers before sending them to opportunities?
- Do they confirm alignment between objectives and your solution?
- Are they creating a timeline of success for prospects when they become customers?
These questions build the foundation for a coaching strategy. Take the best practices from your top performers and turn them into repeatable process for the rest of your team. You’ll create a sales team of high performers.
2. Invest in sales stack technology.
Technology can also increase the activities that lead to sales. Decide which activities can be more efficient and find technology to enable that.
If calls are a critical activity in your sales process, consider a dialer solution like Intelliverse or Velocify. Want to have better demos? Clearslide and join.me are great solutions. Looking to make your proposal process more efficient? Try PandaDoc, Octiv or DocuSign.
Don’t purchase software because it’s the new shiny thing. There is no silver bullet for your sales process. Carefully evaluate each vendor, and run pilot programs to determine the ROI of each solution before you buy.
3. Hire sales managers who are modern sales leaders.
As Vantage Point Performance partners Jason Jordan and Michelle Vazzana state in “Cracking the Sales Management Code”: Sales managers are the most powerful point of leverage in any sales team.
Hire sales managers who understand activity-based selling. They will reinforce it to your sales reps daily. They’ll monitor your metrics, course-correct sales performance and coach your reps. Be picky. Choose modern sales leaders to be the platoon leaders carrying out your marching orders.
4. Hire and onboard salespeople against established metrics.
When you reach the full capacity of your sales team and technology, hire more reps. Established metrics get new sales reps ramped quickly.
Even talented sales reps need to understand your company’s specific process. Introduce them to your key operating metrics. Explain what their quota will be in three months, as well as the activities it will take to get there. Provide them with an activity scorecard, and coach them around the best practices.
When you scale sales, remember that simply increasing activity won’t lead to closing more business. Bolster your sales team activities with best practices, technology, modern sales leaders and more reps.
