Depending on your startup goals, success can look different from one startup to the next. To some Founders it is revenue, profitability, customer satisfaction, employee retention or cultural change.
Despite the difference in the goals, the measurement of startup success can be defined by three categories.
- Sales strategy implementation
- Structuring your team to facilitate growth
- Onboarding process and adoption.
Sales strategy implementation
The implementation consists of a plan with the right focus, measurement, and discipline.
- Lost productivity and poorly managed leads cost companies at least $1 trillion every year
- 50% of sales time is wasted on unproductive prospecting
- Nearly six in 10 salespeople say that when they figure out what works for them, they don’t change it
Crafting a winning sales strategy is the first step towards gaining clarity around how to deliver predictable revenue at your startup and, more importantly, how to do it quickly.
Without a strategy, sales teams and leaders make decisions based on what is best at the moment and fail to consider the big picture. In the current state of flux, your proposition, people and processes will be the thing that sets your startup apart from the competition.
The sales strategy requires input from the core team including: leadership, product, sales, marketing and customer success.
Structuring your team to facilitate growth
Once you are clear on your vision for the business and your sales strategy, you can start to communicate the plan to your employees and create a culture that supports and enhances this growth of a sales operation.
- Growth teams are twice as likely to appear among businesses growing their ARR by 100% or more annually
- 78% of candidates say the overall candidate experience indicates how a company values its people
- 59% of millennials report that opportunities to learn and grow are extremely important to them when applying for a job
Once your team members are behind your growth strategy and it’s built into your company culture, it will be easier to grow and structure your team accordingly.
Companies that address their organisational weaknesses as they implement growth strategies give themselves an advantage when building sales operations.
Onboarding process and adoption
Don’t underestimate the importance of a solid onboarding process.
- 69% of employees are more likely to stay with a company for three years if they experienced great onboarding
- Organisations with a standard onboarding process experience 50 percent greater new-hire productivity
- Only 37% of companies extend their onboarding programs beyond the first month
Onboarding is a prime opportunity for your business to set clear expectations for every new hire from the start. Good habits and a consistent, high quality approach should be established from day one with a uniform training schedule for both new and retained employees.
Setting clear expectations and committing to reviewing them regularly, enables you to get the most out of your employees. I’m sure we are all aware that under uncertain circumstances, employees are prone to jump to potentially damaging conclusions and may leave the company prematurely.
To sustain your scaling business you need to both trust and inspire your team to reach their goals and invest in the overall company mission. This should look something like balancing the right level of motivation and healthy competition amongst employees. What works for one will not work for the other, so your structure needs to accommodate all. One team may be driven by competition, another by commission and another by collectively achieving sales goals.
Find out more about how Sales for Startups builds successful sales operations for B2B Tech Founders by downloading our Winning sales strategy guide or booking a call with James Ker-Reid.