9 Effective Tips to Scale Your B2B Sales Team

Your sales team is the lifeblood of your B2B service. From scouting leads to the entire process of converting leads to customers, the sales team is responsible for bringing in revenue and maintaining revenue levels.

However, after a certain point in time, it is no longer worth simply retaining old revenue levels. You are bound to want to scale your business, ideally while retaining the same team size and infusing minimal resources to not increase expenditure.

For this, it is important to know how to build a B2B sales team. This team must be not just efficient but scalable. Let us look at some ways you can achieve this.

9 Tips for Building a Scalable Sales Team

1. Understand the Sales Funnel Through Data

The importance of data in any field cannot be understated. Data can help you understand significant deficiencies in your sales funnel.

Through the data your sales team generates, you can develop a deeper insight into which step of the sales funnel prospective customers are leaking out of. This can help you take requisite remedial steps to plug holes and improve retention.

You may have to reassign a few roles or make changes to the B2B sales team structure to improve customer acquisition and retention. Continuous generation of data helps in the continuous improvement of your sales team.

2. Targeted Lead Generation

All leads are not the same. Running a B2B service is all about obtaining the greatest volume of high-quality leads possible from a limited market of eCommerce leads. To improve the quality of your leads, targeted lead generation is the way to go.

To grab the attention of your target audience, you must put yourself in your ideal customers' shoes. Try to understand the reasons they would choose your service and the features that might appeal to them.

Based on this understanding, you can develop a lead generation strategy that gets right to the heart of your prospective customers and attracts them toward you.

3. Customization Doesn't Scale

Many B2B services will make the mistake of highly customizing their offerings to improve customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is indeed an important consideration for any business. However, another important consideration is the expenditure on customization.

Providing a generalized product instead of performing alterations for every customer might help you scale. But your margins will likely remain the same due to an increase in expenditure.

Instead, try and achieve the right balance of customization and scalability to improve your margins while also improving customer satisfaction.

4. The Importance of a Sales Leader

Making room for an experienced sales manager in your sales team structure template is crucial, especially if you are a new business.

During the initial days of a business, scouting leads can be next to impossible in the absence of a leader. Even old businesses just moving online need to bring a sales manager onboard. A sales team without a competent supervisor is often unproductive - it may generate revenue but might lack the motivation or skillset to scale it.

An experienced sales leader with the right contact book, however, can maneuver your sales through teething issues. Any expenditure you incur on hiring a sales manager will likely be returned many times over.

5. Respond Quickly

As a B2B service, your customers expect you to be forever online and answer their questions with very low lead time. In the online world, your response time determines your opportunity cost.

Your customers are likely looking at multiple competitors concurrently. Whichever of you answers quickly and appropriately gets an early edge.

Quick responses do not require extra personnel, expenditure, or infrastructure. Training your team to respond as fast as possible is the surest way of scaling your business without any cost.

6. Get Data From Better Sources

When scouting leads, it is important to be prepared for the eventuality that your source of lead data could be outdated.

An important consideration while looking to scale a B2B sales team is to identify reliable sources of information. Make sure they are up to date with the latest status of your leads.

Trying to contact dormant leads or ones that have purposefully provided wrong information can cause a reduction in your efficiency and scalability.

7. Align Sales and Marketing

Every step in the lead generation process requires sales and marketing to be perfectly aligned. If you are looking to build a B2B sales team, it is important that you build the marketing team, too. All messages that you communicate to the sales team must also be relayed to the marketing team.

Sales and marketing teams working in different directions are likely to communicate different messages to customers. On the other hand, teams working in perfect alignment could lead to minimal leakage from your sales funnel.

8. Do Not Compromise on Technology

Regardless of where you look to save money, do not be frugal in choosing the platform your sales team is working on.

Shopify, for instance, contains features for all teams involved in a B2B service, including sales. This is why thousands of Shopify stores are doing well and helping businesses generate credible leads.

A technologically robust platform improves the efficiency of your sales team. Moreover, it allows you to scale better when your customer base increases.

9. Focus on CX

A B2B sales team's job isn't merely to get new customers but also to retain old ones. Thus, alongside a sales team, you must also maintain a customer experience team that increases the chances of retention. Customer retention can work in tandem to form a strategy to scout, convert and retain leads efficiently.

Final Take

Scalability is one of the primary features a business is ranked on. The above points will aid you not just when you build a B2B sales team, but also when you are looking to grow your business. Following each of these steps will lead your business to high revenues with low added expenditures.