Velocity, Speed. Take any object and make it go faster and it will have more force. Take any Sales Team and make it go faster and you will sell more.
What if you got 13 months of selling in a 12 month year? All other things equal you’d have an 8% increase in sales. What if your sales cycle shortened by 2 weeks? 4% increase. What if your new hires were hired and effective 1 month sooner?
This is not suggesting we do things poorly or we rush things that can’t be rushed. It is suggesting that with a little planning and better execution you can increase sales significantly with the same headcount.
- Hiring – Plan better. If you have a Q1 hiring budget start interviewing the previous Q4. Have the new hire committed and ready to start on January 1. Why wait to start the process and waste 6 weeks of interviewing and dead time for the new rep to start. 6 weeks is 12% of the selling year, take advantage of time, plan better and increase sales.
- Ramp Time – Tighten up the process. Have laptops ready, plan for the Salesforce licenses, if you have formal training start it the day the new hire starts. If there’s classroom training have out of class training before and after the formal training so you’re not killing time waiting for the rest of the new hires to start before the classroom training starts. Focus on getting the sales rep competent in the quickest amount of time. 2 week faster and you increase your new hire sales by 4%.
- Sales Cycle – Cut out the wait times. It’s hard to rush a prospect into making a decision in an un-natural timeframe. You can still cut down the sales cycle by being more responsive to the predictable requests from a prospect. References, proposals, price quotes all can add time to the closing cycle. Be ready. You know they are going to want references, get them ready before they ask. Get the proposal process streamlined, whether with CPQ or a more efficient Ops team and faster turnaround from engineering have your resources and processes ready to react and get deals closed faster. 1 week off the sales process increases sales 2%.
Speed increases sales.
Hiring, training and executing your sales process are critical to success, but accelerating the pace at which you accomplish things can be a big boost to your sales.
