Structuring a commercial department is far more than hiring sales specialists and handing out job titles. A successful sales department combines technology that accelerates performance, sales support material and an agile team with specific skills — all held together by a customer-centric sales process.

And it isn’t only us saying so. Consultant and author Jacco van der Kooij, a SaaS sales specialist based in Silicon Valley, argues that these are the five best sales practices he has seen working inside successful startups.

1. A customer-centric sales process

First, what is a sales process? It is a guide to how a sale should unfold, standardising and systematising everything so that the buying experience is consistent and high quality. From a manager’s point of view it is equally useful: it makes it possible to evaluate people and activities, and to act precisely on what is going wrong.

In a sales process, everything is planned: contact cadences, how to uncover pain points and objections, lead qualification, how to run a product demo, call scripts and every step through to close.

Companies without one end up in a precarious position. They struggle to train new hires, they don’t learn from their mistakes, and they depend on the experience of a handful of individual salespeople — who may leave and take their best practices and contacts with them.

Now that we’ve defined the sales process, let’s look at why it should be designed around the customer.

Centring the process on the customer means adapting to their needs at each stage of the funnel. Over time, it builds a dialogue in which the customer feels heard and becomes an ally in solving a problem.

Accounting for those stages is what prevents the mismatch between where the salesperson thinks the deal is and where the buyer actually is in their journey.

That risk is real. Salespeople are results-oriented, so it is tempting to push a prospect from stage to stage as quickly as possible, straight towards a decision.

Picture a rep preparing a proposal while the buyer is still coming to terms with the problem they have. Because the rep has misjudged what that person needs to know, the deal is set up to fail.

To stand apart from competitors, take a consultative role and work with each prospect’s specific pains, challenges and goals. That way you help them make the right decision and build a relationship of trust that lasts.

2. Content that supports the sale

In 2007, it took an average of 3.68 call attempts to reach a prospect. Thirteen years later it takes 18 attempts, and only 23.9% of sales emails get opened.

Despite that decline, and despite the rise of social selling and referrals, phone and email remain important channels for direct contact. How do you make them work harder? Through content: insights, tools, news, statistics or studies — anything that adds something to the prospect’s day.

Sharing a genuinely useful resource, instead of more of the same about your product and your company, is increasingly the best way to start a conversation, earn attention and move a deal forward.

That means hiring salespeople who can step outside the traditional script (“I’m calling about the upgrade we’ve made to product XPTO”) and bring something relevant instead (“the latest figures in your sector show that X% of companies already run a solution like ours”, or “have you seen the free tool we launched to improve team productivity?”).

Done well, they position themselves as trusted advisors, reduce the perceived risk of buying and shorten the sale.

3. Sales-accelerating technology

Also known as sales enablement technology. However well trained your team is, you cannot expect exponential growth without tools that multiply their effort — particularly since your competitors are almost certainly already using them to make more and better contacts.

These belong in the sales stack of any B2B company, whatever the industry:

• Marketing automation software — automates contact management, segmentation and content nurturing.
• CRM — prospect management, pipeline management and tracking of key metrics.
• Inside sales software — to plan and run remote calls and product demos, integrated with the CRM; it also tracks each rep’s metrics and recordings, which is what makes coaching possible.
• Dashboards, proposal software, email marketing and LinkedIn Sales Navigator, among others.

4. Coaching for the right skills

Traditional sales coaching is light years from today’s reality. It doesn’t develop the skills needed to sell online, it isn’t customer-centric and it ignores the tools that accelerate sales.

Modern coaching should follow each rep’s specialisation — Sales Development, Account Executive, Customer Success Manager, Account Manager — and consistently emphasise problem-solving in a digital environment.

5. An agile sales team

High turnover, sometimes within months, is a fact of life in commercial departments today. That makes it important for managers to run a process solid enough to train new talent quickly and to support individual coaching. Together, those two things create agile teams that hold their performance even as people come and go.

It may sound counterintuitive, but hiring only highly experienced, top-tier salespeople isn’t always the right bet here. The most experienced reps tend to be less open to coaching, and in this model success depends on a consistent experience across every stage, from marketing through sales to customer success.

Grow with Digital Selling

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Predictable growth isn’t bought, it’s built. Talk to our team and see how managed execution fits your numbers.

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