How to scale your small team to operate like a big one

In today’s coaches corner, we’re discussing how to move your sales team upstream from making small sales to small business, to engaging and closing enterprise business, without adding necessarily new members to the team.

Kevin Ascher, Founder and President of AcousticSelling, joined us to show how a combination of process, the right technology, and great coaching helped his client’s team of fewer than 5 members perform like a team of more than 25, and how you can repeat their success.

Symptom: Poor consistency across the team

Many sales teams operate in a state of constant chaos. Salespeople evaluate each opportunity on subjective personal assessments of how they’re progressing.

This provides managers with no way to measure effectiveness or predict the probability of a close, let alone know where their coaching is most needed.

Worse, it means teams operate in silos that create confusion for customers and undermine overall team effectiveness.

Diagnosis: Inconsistent rules of engagement

Reps recording activities?

Sometimes.

Clear definition of the stages of the pipeline?

Not really.

Visibility into where reps need coaching?

None.

Lack of coherent sales strategy?

Bingo.

In this real world example, the source of inconsistency on the sales team started with a lack of coherent sales strategy, amplified by no clear way to execute a strategy even if they had one.

Prescription: Prescription

No, that’s not a typo. In this case, Ascher worked with the organization to implement a prescriptive, consistent set of rules of engagement that defined how their reps should be pursuing, qualifying, and working opportunities through the pipeline.

This prescription included using Membrain to provide guidance on what each rep needed to complete at each stage of the pipeline, with a clear definition of a successful outcome.

For instance, a discovery call is only successful if the rep identifies their business objectives, their challenges, and who the key influencer is. Only then can the rep move the opp to the next stage in the process.

With everybody on the same page and operating consistently, the organization was able to move upstream to larger sales, and increase their overall coverage so that their small team of five salespeople now operates like a team of more than 25.