Three Challenges Organizations Face when Building or Expanding Their Sales Team

Building or restructuring often takes place during periods of growth. Your team may be experiencing growing pains, with more work than your current sales organization can keep up with. Or perhaps you’ve had a huge wave of revenue growth, and you realize the importance of capitalizing on it to grow even faster.

Maybe it’s the opposite: your team has had steady numbers, but wants to increase revenue potential, or has started to stall.

These are times when organizations feel a lot of urgency to have their sales team start performing at a higher level, and they feel the answer to that is adding a sales superstar to their team.

It’s an exciting prospect. It’s also a scary one.

Building or expanding your sales team is a risk. There’s a high cost associated with adding to your team. From the financial cost - a salary, benefits, extra equipment - to the valuable time and energy it takes to hire, onboard, and offer continuous training support, expanding your team takes more work before it alleviates pressure on your team and costs you money before it increases your revenue.

Doing it the right way takes time - but the cost of doing it wrong is high. Keep reading to learn the three most common challenges organizations face when building or expanding their sales teams and the steps you can take to overcome them.

Hiring Your First Salesperson

Many small businesses have their first initial leaps of growth (and continued business) simply from word of mouth. Their reputation is their biggest selling point and biggest selling tool. Through close customer relationships and consistently providing quality services or products, they get new customers from referrals alone.

However, at some point, they’ll likely decide they want to grow faster or on a larger scale than their one-on-one connections will enable them to do. They need to get intentional about getting more business.

The natural next step is to hire a salesperson or form a sales team. Of course, for businesses that have never approached selling strategically, it’s hard to know where to start. They wonder:

• How many salespeople should I hire?
• Should I just turn somebody on my team into a salesperson?
• How do I train a salesperson?
• How will the salesperson go about finding new business?
• Where do I start? And how can I avoid big mistakes that will cost my business money?

Sales have always happened organically instead of intentionally, so approaching the process with a different mindset is a big adjustment and a bit unsettling.

Trying to Clone Yourself

In many small businesses where selling is an intentional part of the outreach and growth process, it’s not uncommon for one person to hold all the keys to the castle. The owner or founder of the company is the sole person who is truly responsible for revenue growth, or given the opportunity to close new customers and expand existing relationships.

It’s obvious why this becomes unsustainable as the business grows. The owner suddenly needs to be on every sales call. They need to have touch points with every customer. They’re involved in every aspect of the business, no matter how small, when they should be focused on the big picture.

However, transitioning away from this model isn’t easy. When one person is responsible for managing and building all client relationships, they rarely have a set process. Instead, they work intuitively, drawing on their extensive knowledge of the industry, customers, and business. And while this may work really well for them, it gives new team members joining the sales force or existing team members transitioning into a selling role no roadmap to follow.

The owner may think the answer is finding someone who is essentially their clone in order to circumvent this problem. “I don’t need to develop a process,” they think, “if I work with someone who just gets it the same way I do.”

This is, almost all of the time, a big mistake. Even somebody with the same selling style as the owner will need onboarding and training, and in the absence of that, you end up in a frustrating situation for both parties.

The salesperson will start to feel micromanaged, like they lack autonomy, and aren’t given the trust or ownership they need to actually do and succeed at their job. Meanwhile, the owner will continue to be so hands on, their workload likely won’t decrease much at all.

Scaling Your Team by Adding More Team Members

When your current team is overloaded by the demands of a growing company (in many ways, a good problem to have!) it may feel necessary to quickly expand the size of the team. However, bringing three extra people onto a two-person sales team overnight isn’t easy, might not be necessary, and should absolutely be done with caution.

Sales teams that are small often lack solidified structure, processes, and routines. The success of the existing team is, in large part, due to the fact that they’ve established relationships with clients and industry partners, have extensive industry knowledge, and have found a personal system that works for them.

In small, adaptive companies, this can work for a time - but it causes big difficulties when adding new people into the mix.

There’s no roadmap or strategies for growth, aside from “sell more stuff.” There’s no process to onboard the new hires because there likely aren’t any processes to begin with. There may not even be a clearly defined person in charge.

Without processes in place, it’s impossible for new hires to learn and adapt to the company quickly, to understand and communicate the nuances that set them apart from competitors, or to get up to speed so they can succeed at their jobs.

Businesses may not even need as many new team members as they initially think - they just need to be intentional about who they hire and what exactly they’re providing to the team.

How to Overcome These Challenges

Put simply, the way to overcome these challenges is to create a selling process, determine how exactly your current team fits into that process, and understand where your gaps are.

For small businesses looking to bring on a dedicated salesperson for the first time, consider how you picture bringing in leads, nurturing them, and closing deals. What part of that process, if any, would somebody on your existing team continue to do? What parts do you need assistance with? Now, when you start the hiring process, you’ll understand exactly what kind of salesperson (link Hunters and Farmers blog) will best fit your needs.

For businesses looking to expand their sales team, it’s time to create a clearly defined selling process. Start by figuring out how your funnel currently functions. Where are the leads brought in from? What are the different touch points they experience? How do they move from “lead” to “customer”. If you don’t have a process here, now is a great time to make one.

Next, identify where your current team is falling short. Is the team so busy that there isn’t enough time to dedicate to bringing in leads? Or maybe you have so many leads that consistent outreach has started falling through the cracks, making it harder to close customers. This will help you figure out how your funnel needs to be improved - and how a new hire would fit into your organizational structure.

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A healthy relationship between sales and marketing is vital to an organization’s success. Dive deep into this effective strategy in our book  Sales & Marketing Alignment. If you'd like more insights on how you can improve your sales leadership, contact us.