How to Increase Your Sales Team’s Capacity — And Keep it There

Editor’s note: This is the third post in a series on creating a high-performance sales culture, building up to a free webinar with Michael Hanna on 4/15 at noon ET. Click here to register.

Business is a simple rhythm of creating capacity and filling it. Every function in your company exists to either create or fill capacity. Sales, marketing, and product management collaborate to generate new business. Research & development, engineering, and support work to increase the amount of business your organization can fulfill.

Your capacity cadence is the rate at which your organization will continue to grow, given your current structure, processes, and practices. Your sales culture sets the pace for that cadence. Sales is leading the dance!

How to Accelerate Your Capacity Cadence

The following three steps show you how to repeatedly increase the rate of your revenue growth by accelerating your sales team capacity cadence.

1) Hire High-Capacity Performers

Some call them “A Players,” others call them “Top Performers”. I like to call them “High-Capacity Performers”. They are simply salespeople who, when at their best, have the ability to far exceed quota over and over again. This requires a candidate qualification process designed to identify the three pillars for high-capacity performers:

1. A personal vision that aligns with your company’s corporate vision.
2. Character that aligns with your company’s corporate values.
3. Capabilities that align with the needs of the role you are hiring for.

Unfortunately, no one performs at their best all the time. Sales leadership and sales operations collaborate to solve this problem.

2) Increase Their Capacity

Great sales leaders recognize that a sales person’s performance potential is not static. They seek to increase the capacity of their team members. Sales leaders and sales operations must provide the direction, support, tools, and insights to keep your reps performing as close to their full potential as possible.

The other articles in this Sales Culture series show you how to do this.

3) Keep Them Performing Near Capacity

To keep a sales person performing at peak levels requires a regular dose of motivation. That’s what your sales compensation plan provides. A well-structured compensation plan provides clarity of focus and fuels the one’s desire to execute accordingly. Refer to our article on “Creating a Scalable Sales Compensation Plan” for insights on how to design and implement a great sales compensation plan.

Your sales culture is the environment in which your salespeople collectively develop the attitudes and habits that determine their sales results. Effectively managing your sales capacity and compensation will expand that culture and accelerate your revenue growth as a result.

Free Upcoming Webinar: Wednesday, 4/15 at Noon ET

Getting your sales reps to perform consistently and at their full potential can be a very painful exercise. But what if you could cultivate a sales environment that organically keeps your reps’ performance high and constantly improving? Exceeding aggressive quotas can become the norm.

Join me to learn five keys to cultivating a high performance sales culture by registering below.

Photo by: Scott*