In today’s oversaturated marketplace, businesses are always looking for strategic approaches to boost revenues. One such method is sales scaling, which means increasing the scale of your sales team’s results without necessarily adding more members.
Knowing both how and when to do so might be the difference between your business growing or failing. If you do know how to grow sales, your business could get left behind and fail to meet customer expectations. Here are four common strategies for scaling sales that you can integrate into your sales playbook:
Rethink Your Existing Methods
It can be a difficult pill to swallow for business owners to accept that a once effective sales approach is no longer viable. What worked once upon a time won’t necessarily work forever. In fact, old strategies can even become so stale, they turn potential customers off. If you’re unwilling to adapt to new strategies, there’s a very good chance your company will pay a heavy price in the long run.
Thankfully, you don’t always need to throw the baby out with the bathwater and start over. Sometimes, all those old tried and true methods need is a bit of updating. Find ways to fine-tune your existing sales strategies, but to tweak obsolete practices to better serve the needs of your current customers.
Use SMART Goals
One of the most common pitfalls for any growing business is not having any concrete goals and plans to work towards. However, as outlined by George T. Doran in an old article he wrote for Management Review: “There’s a SMART way to write management goals and objectives.” He then proceeded to break down what SMART goals are; that is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time Sensitive.
This strategy has been used by many goal-oriented people – from entrepreneurs to athletes – ever since. The point of this strategy is to make sure your goals are as well-defined as possible, so that you know exactly how and what you need to do to achieve them. It also gives you a plan that is easy to evaluate, allows you to easily tweak it, and ensures that everybody is on the same page.
Focus on Customer Retention Strategies
The pursuit of new customers is always a wise practice for any business. But if you ignore your existing clientele, you could be hurting your business rather than helping it to expand. Rather than spending hundreds on advertising for new customers, a business should focus on satisfying its existing clientele because those clients are more likely to buy from a company they know and appreciate.
Thus, you should figure out and understand your demographic and what your customers both want and expect from you. Then you should do everything in your power to cater to their needs, which includes giving them what they want and fixing what they don’t want. There are more people in your chosen demographic than you think and if people in those groups like you, word will spread, and you will get new prospects.
That said, there is nothing wrong with branching out either. You could find ways to cater to multiple demographics and still be successful. Just remember to never neglect your current group or your attempts to branch out will be more likely to crash and burn.
Check Your Stats Regularly
Your attempts at scaling sales will be all for nothing if you’re not willing to keep track of your metrics and the revenue you are making. Scaling a business means preparing for future expansion. If you want your business to thrive, you need to pay attention to how lead generation, conversions, and other metrics are impacted by any changes you make.
If they are shrinking, then maybe you’re taking too big of a gamble and your company doesn’t have the resources to properly grow yet. If they are staying the same, then maybe you should push a little further or scale back a little to see what will make a difference. And of course, if it’s growing, then you know you’re going in the right direction.
