Making any recruitment decision can be difficult, and especially when it comes to your sales team. Making sure that your sales team is adequately resourced is one of the main keys to sustainable growth and customer retention. So, what are the signs that it’s time to expand your sales team or hire a new salesperson?
1. Missed Sales Opportunities:
An obvious signifier for expansion is if your current sales staff are consistently unable to close as many deals as they should, or capitalise on leads due to limited time and resources. An early sign of a resourcing issue is if salespeople can’t follow up on high-potential leads because they are too busy managing existing customer accounts. In this scenario, the cost of hiring a new salesperson could be repaid in increased new business sales revenues.
2. Increased Customer Demand:
An uptick in customer enquiries, inbound requests, and business opportunities is a nice problem to have, but it’s still a problem if you don’t have enough sales representatives to handle the increased volume. Hiring one or more new salespeople will help you manage increased demand. However, the best time to do this is before the spike occurs, so it’s worth evaluating your average month on month sales capacity before a new product launch, marketing strategy, or growth drive to make sure you are adequately resourced. Also monitor sales activity during seasonal peaks in which your team might already struggle to maintain high customer service levels – any spike in demand at these times could push your team beyond their operational capacity.
3. Overworked Sales Staff:
If your sales team is showing signs of dissatisfaction or burnout, they’re making more mistakes or their efficiency has dropped, it may be because they are stretched too thinly. This might be a good time to bring a new person on board, because an overworked team can lead to decreased morale and higher staff turnover, costing your business more to replace them in the long run. Pay close attention to direct feedback from your sales team about their workload, and from customers about slow responses.
4. Inability To Follow Up Leads:
A backlog of unanswered leads due to insufficient sales capacity can result in lost business opportunities and disappointed customers. Leads must be contacted quickly to deliver a reasonable chance of conversion. Investing in a marketing automation platform, such as HubSpot, can help reduce your time to response and automate a lot of your lead nurturing communications. However, in most cases a salesperson is still required to close the deal. Expanding your team can shorten your sales cycle and avoid the risk of delays and bottlenecks.
5. High Customer Churn:
It’s not just new business sales that can be impacted by inadequate sales sources, but customer retention, too. If your customer churn rate has increased, it may be due to an overwhelmed sales team being unable to provide adequate follow-up and support for new customers. Expanding your team, or reallocating roles within the team so that some designated reps have more time to deal with existing accounts, can improve your customer relationships and reduce churn by giving space for more personalised attention and service.
Find Out More
Recognising these signs in your business can help you decide when to expand your sales team at the right time. For more information or to speak with one of our sales specialists, please call JDR today on 01332 982198.
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