Expanding your sales department comes with certain sets of risks. If you do it at the right time, there’s no better way to expand your business growth. However, expanding the sales department done at the wrong time can overstretch your company or hurt its reputation.
Sales department expansion impacts a ton of areas that decide your company’s success or failure. That’s why you must avoid the following mistakes when expanding your sales department.
Mistake #1: Only Going with Your Gut When Hiring
Every company has a different approach when hiring a new member of their sales department. With so many impacts associated with a salesperson, you can’t just go with your gut and hire someone based on a feeling. Instead, you must craft an approach that accounts for specific skills, attributes, and metrics that will best suit the role.
Use your head when hiring salespeople. Even further, take emotions completely out of it. Establish uniform criteria according to your company’s culture and role expectations, and then hire people who fit them for the expansion of your sales department.
Mistake #2: Misallocating/Overpopulating Staff
Expanding your sales department can be an exciting process, but during this period, don’t misallocate or overpopulate the staff.
Before you hire a person or even post a job, take a close look at the existing people in your sales department. Create a report for your sales reps and analyze their performance. If they all are doing well, there’s no need to look for replacements or add more staff when they’re not needed.
To avoid the risk of overpopulating or misallocating staff, keep three things in mind: workload, existing people, and potential. This way, you’ll correctly be able to predict the number of people you need in your sales department.
Mistake #3: Hiring Just to Complete the Headcount
Hiring just to complete the headcount is often known as desperate hiring. No matter how vital it is for your sales department to expand, never settle for desperate hiring. Even if you have received the budget, posted jobs, and narrowed down the applicants, don’t hire just to complete the headcount.
If you aren’t completely sold on an applicant, look for another. For instance, it’s okay to pass on a sales rep who doesn’t have the experience you require for a more senior sales rep position.
It’s true that not hiring during the vital need of expansion can hurt your organization in the short run. But settling for an sub-par applicant can negatively impact your company’s performance.
Mistake #4: Poor Salary Plans
Sure, a good environment and promising values & traditions of a company attract a person, but that’s not all. One of the most powerful things that fascinate a talented salesperson is a good salary package along with other incentives.
Don’t set-up poor salary plans for the salespeople you are looking forward to hiring for your company’s sales sector expansion. As a matter of fact, lure in the top sales talent by crafting handsome salary plans with exciting incentives and additional benefits.
Last and certainly not least, create the salary packages in a way that the salespeople can easily calculate how much they can earn.
Mistake #5: Not Concentrating on Proper Staff Training
How can you expect the new salespeople to work wonders if you don’t devote time to their training program?
It’s easy to hire and expand your sales department, but what’s more difficult is creating a uniform training program that properly trains the new hires and keeps mor tenured salespeople growing their skills.
To expand your sales department and yield the right results from it, create an in-depth training program for the new hires.
Make sure that every new hire attends the program and passes it with good results. Don’t settle for the average passing result as setting the bar high of the training program will only benefit your company in the future.
Mistake #6: Ignoring Existing Salespeople
Expanding isn’t the only option to make your sales department more fruitful. Most companies expand their sales department to yield better results rather than training their existing salespeople.
Don’t ignore your existing salespeople. Train them to tune their efficiency and keep them motivated. It’s quite possible that once they are all polished, you’ll barely need to expand your sales department much at all.
Create a special training plan for your existing salespeople. Maybe hire some professionals from the outside to train your sales department in certain areas like leadership, new communication skills, and data analysis.
Lastly, training your existing salespeople rather than abruptly expanding your sales department builds a more loyal team and can increase their commitment to the role over time.
Mistake #7: Polluting Roles
It’s easy to overlook certain roles and to pollute others when you are expanding your sales department. Pollution means expanding the scope of someone’s work to include things that aren’t part of their job.
Polluting a role makes that role inefficient. For instance, if you haven’t hired a sales administrator and instead put those responsibilities onto sales reps, their role is polluted. It will make the sales reps waste their time doing other tasks rather than selling.
Don’t pollute the roles and keep a balance between certain roles so that everyone can efficiently work and provide good results.
Alternatively, make sure you aren’t diluting the roles. For instance, if your sales reps aren’t reaching a certain target, don’t just hire more reps to achieve the goal. Instead, replace or train them before adding to the headcount.
Mistake #8: Over-Hiring Talented People
This is where many companies stumble – over-hiring talented people. Yes, hiring talented people is essential for good results of the newly expanded sales department. However, over-hiring talented people can turn out to be a stumbling block.
Most companies are overwhelmed by the idea of talented people running their sales new department, and they don’t realize they are over-hiring.
Over-hiring not only burdens the hiring budget but also makes things more complicated than they need to be. As too many cooks spoil the broth, the same goes for over-hiring talented people when expanding the sales department. Focus on the number of roles you need to fill, then choose the best candidates for those roles. Just because there are other strong candidates out there doesn’t mean you need to snatch them up.
Final Words
Don’t make these mistakes when you are looking forward to expanding the sales depart of your company. One decision that’s never a mistake is using the Callingly Lead Response Management system. Callingly helps sales teams respond faster and close more sales the right way. With additional features like reporting, analytics, call recording, and lead routing, Callingly eliminates the risk of all the common mistakes in the sales process.