Growing Pains; one of the most significant issues businesses experience. And the idea of growth is two-fold – growth in the size of your team, as well as professional growth of the existing team. As your government sales team grows in numbers and develops internally, it is imperative to implement strategies and techniques that allow you to continue to manage your team effectively.
Leverage Your Team’s Experience
As the size of your team grows, utilize existing and more seasoned team members to serve as mentors for incoming personnel. Mentors can be utilized to teach and monitor new members, ensuring that they comprehend and execute existing internal policies and capture processes. This also provides an opportunity to initiate a succession planning strategy for your government sales team, and can be a useful tool to review the leadership skills of existing team members.
Develop Objective Technology-Drive Processes
Employment of technology-driven processes is a vital tool in sales team management. Adopting a software that supports your internal sales goals and strategies will help senior leadership manage multiple facets of these goals and strategies. To assist with this, organizations should adopt (if possible) automated, repeatable business solutions that define their sales processes completely. A centralized option for complete sales process management is imperative.
Define Critical Decision Points (and Responses)
In addition to complete process integration, the software should tell the sales team what questions to ask, and when to ask them. Those critical decision points in the sales process can set in motion a win or loss for your organization. By streamlining the questions, and clearly defining their application within the government sales process, you ensure that all team members are on the same page, and using the same strategy.
Focus on Collective Process Improvement
Further assisting in managing a growing sales team, the selected system should automatically evaluate and grade every capture process. Capturing, understanding, and addressing lessons learned from each capture process will assist your organization in continued process improvement. No process or strategy is perfect, nor will it apply to every capture situation. Appreciating the post-capture evaluation, and identifying areas where decisions should have been different, will support this internal improvement and organic growth.
Utilize a Software that Can Expand with Your Company
Lastly, find software that helps manage at multiple levels – the individuals, the executives, the teams, the departments and the divisions. Even if your company has yet to reach such a complex level of organizational structure, it will get there. The ability to grow with your company, and expand as the organization grows, will continue to streamline your efficiencies. Consider what growth is anticipated, and what needs you will have moving forward, contributing to your ability to proactively manage your capture managers, your entire sales team, and the effectiveness of your processes.
In Conclusion
Having a focus on collective knowledge and experiences, with the creation of repeatable processes and responses, and automated technological tools, your sales team can continue to grow while you focus on the more executive, strategic aspects of running your business.
