How to Scale a Sales Organization from the Ground Up (Ask Jeb) - podcast episode cover

How to Scale a Sales Organization from the Ground Up (Ask Jeb)

Jun 24, 202610 min
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Episode description

If your sales organization is new and growing fast, the worst thing you can do is hire more people before you have a system for them to run. In this Ask Jeb on the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount answers two sharp questions from John, who leads sales for a Catholic nonprofit that is about to double in size through an acquisition.

Jeb's core message is clear: slow down, map your system, then scale. Without a documented sales process, every new hire is an expensive experiment. With one, you can bring someone in and get them producing results quickly, which means more resources going back to your mission instead of into onboarding chaos.

What You'll Learn:

  • Why documenting your sales process from prospecting through close is the foundation for scaling
  • How a repeatable, teachable sales system accelerates onboarding and protects your mission's resources
  • Why you should hire salespeople before you hire sales leaders when building a sales team from scratch
  • How to segment your prospect base by potential to help new reps win fast
  • How the Rogers Innovation Curve applies to niche markets and what to do when you hit the wall of late adopters
  • Why social proof and peer-to-peer influence matter more than brute force prospecting when selling to resistant prospects
  • How to use executive-level endorsements as a strategic multiplier when selling into slow-moving organizations
  • The role territory segmentation and CRM tools play in setting your team up for consistent execution


Whether you sell into churches, nonprofits, or any niche market with distinct adoption patterns, this episode gives you a practical roadmap for sustainable sales growth.

Submit your question: salesgravy.com/ask

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Transcript

[SPEAKER_01]: This is The Sales Grady Podcast. [SPEAKER_01]: Hi, I'm Jeb Blunt, guest-selling author, fanatical prospecting objection, sales EQ and ink. [SPEAKER_01]: And I'm here to help you open more doors, close bigger deals, and rock your commission check. [SPEAKER_00]: Jeff, I had a question. [SPEAKER_00]: I worked with Catholic terraces and we're in a growing organization. [SPEAKER_00]: We have about a $3 million budget.

[SPEAKER_00]: We're about to acquire another nonprofit that's in our space. [SPEAKER_00]: So we're actually going to be doubling in size and staff, but we're very nascent with our sales forces. [SPEAKER_00]: Pretty much just me and one other guy who is just doing [SPEAKER_00]: clear cut sales stuff we use sales force and what we're trying to figure out is what do we need to do to start scaling and growing? [SPEAKER_00]: What are the different pieces to put into place?

[SPEAKER_00]: Our organization we've been around for 25 years, but we just started getting very serious with sales force and thinking in a sales kind of professional manner, only about four or five years ago. [SPEAKER_00]: So we basically kind of threw a couple of people into sales. [SPEAKER_00]: We're doing our best to figure it out. [SPEAKER_00]: But we don't know if we need to create an area director level, a sales manager kind of level. [SPEAKER_00]: We're just trying to figure that out.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so as you think about young sales organizations, a young sales shop, how should you grow? [SPEAKER_00]: What should that look like? [SPEAKER_00]: Can you tell me what you sell into the parishes and we have a process called reach more which helps to just activate lady within a Catholic church setting to get more engaged in both sharing their faith and engaging with kind of the outside community through different ministries, different outreach efforts.

[SPEAKER_00]: Our decision makers are usually Catholic pastors. [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes they're lay people who are like directors of evangelization or faith formation. [SPEAKER_00]: We do that in about 220 parishes around the country right now. [SPEAKER_01]: Number one thing would be get a team hob on salesgrabbing University. [SPEAKER_01]: That's just gratuitous promotion there. [SPEAKER_01]: So, forgive me.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, if you're going to invest in Salesforce and invest in a team hob, because from a training standpoint, bringing people on in the ability to take your own content for onboarding new salespeople, and you can drop that into your team hob on salesgrabbing University. [SPEAKER_01]: So, all of that is housed in one place. [SPEAKER_01]: It essentially can become your learning management system, and it can become your onboarding process.

[SPEAKER_01]: team, what you really want to do at this point because you've been doing this for a while and you're thinking through and you're asking great questions you're in this mastermind group is that you want to make sure that you have your sales system.

[SPEAKER_01]: You want to be able to say this is exactly how we sell from prospecting to the way that we engage in our first time appointment to what the demo processes to all the people that we need to meet and you want to get that documented and that's going to take a little bit of time. [SPEAKER_01]: The only way to do this is to slow down for a minute and go think about it and write it down.

[SPEAKER_01]: Because in order to scale up and add another salesperson, without it taking forever and costing a lot of money, money that you could spend on your mission, right? [SPEAKER_01]: What you're trying to accomplish, if you can bring someone in and say, like, here's the system that works. [SPEAKER_01]: Like, we've perfected this.

[SPEAKER_01]: We know that if we're running this system that we have a 50% close rate, or we have a 30% close rate, or we have a 100% conversion, or whatever the number is, but we know when we run this system. [SPEAKER_01]: then you want to build a build your initial onboarding around that particular system.

[SPEAKER_01]: And that's why I mentioned the team hub because with the CellsGovie team hub, which is on CellsGovie University, if you're building out that content, you can actually add that content directly into CellsGovie University just for your team, but you'd be able to actually build that into the system. [SPEAKER_01]: And then you can hook some of that into Cells Force as you scale. [SPEAKER_01]: That's what I would do first. [SPEAKER_01]: If you say, well, we need a leader for this.

[SPEAKER_01]: If you get the leader for that, if it's you, that will be great, but I would say bring a salesperson on leader no leader. [SPEAKER_01]: If you can't bring a new salesperson on and you focus on bringing a leader in, you may be a year and a half from now or two years now before you're in a place where you can really move.

[SPEAKER_01]: And because you're a mission-driven organization, [SPEAKER_01]: that has a purpose behind what you do, the faster that you can get more perishes using the more likely you are to accomplish an achieve your mission. [SPEAKER_01]: So that's what I would do first. [SPEAKER_01]: You've got Salesforce in place, which is good. [SPEAKER_01]: We know where all the perishes are. [SPEAKER_01]: They're not making very many more of them, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: So we know exactly where they all are. [SPEAKER_01]: That hard to find the people who are leading these places. [SPEAKER_01]: So what you've got to be able to do is bring a salesperson in and then they've got a system to work through that makes them successful really quickly. [SPEAKER_01]: That's how you scale. [SPEAKER_01]: Then you can start thinking about territories and how do we segment out parishes, segmentation from high potential, medium potential low potential.

[SPEAKER_01]: So you've got like the Catholic parish in my town, you know, it's just small parish, but it's not nearly as small as the one that's the town over that's got like eight people that go that church. [SPEAKER_01]: You can look at patterns. [SPEAKER_01]: Like here are the patterns that we see. [SPEAKER_01]: The early adopters have these things in common. [SPEAKER_01]: So then when someone comes in, they've got a segmented group of perishes that they're responsible for.

[SPEAKER_01]: They've got that set up. [SPEAKER_01]: So you've got some system for them to slot into, and then you can manage the system. [SPEAKER_01]: And then you can think about what type of a leadership structure do I need in order to manage all of this. [SPEAKER_01]: But that's what I would do first if that makes sense to you. [SPEAKER_01]: But that's where I would begin.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, that makes sense and we've done some of that as far as trying to identify who are those people and parishes at it would advance with our mission. [SPEAKER_00]: Well, the problem is we've kind of jumped right to that and our organization has been very little time thinking through the process. [SPEAKER_00]: I think.

[SPEAKER_00]: And quite frankly, our president of our organization is very driven and it's very hard to get him to just kind of pause and to say, you know what, we need to spend the next three months just charting out our sales process. [SPEAKER_00]: We've never done that. [SPEAKER_00]: That would be a really tough sell to convince them to do that. [SPEAKER_00]: That's part of the challenge right now. [SPEAKER_01]: The can use is that if your organization needs that, this is what we do.

[SPEAKER_01]: It sells gravy, we have a whole team of consultants who can help facilitate that process and help you figure that out. [SPEAKER_01]: We do this for companies every single day where we start breaking down sales processes and make them easier. [SPEAKER_00]: Okay. [SPEAKER_00]: I've been kind of following the Rogers innovation curve.

[SPEAKER_00]: I find that the people that are the innovators and the early adapters are pretty easy to reach and to kind of purchase our product and engage it with their parishes. [SPEAKER_00]: It's kind of that early majority late majority. [SPEAKER_00]: Those ones after that I find that I can get about 13 to 15 percent. [SPEAKER_00]: adoption, but I'm not getting passed into those later adopters.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if you have any thoughts on how to get people that are just kind of on those later adoption curves. [SPEAKER_01]: The issue is that you'll have a group of parishes that are like this totally makes sense for us. [SPEAKER_01]: We're ready to go. [SPEAKER_01]: in those parishes. [SPEAKER_01]: You've got a really dynamic connection between the clergy and the lay people as well, pretty good dynamic structure where they're all working together.

[SPEAKER_01]: Think about selling into the church. [SPEAKER_01]: You've got a group of people. [SPEAKER_01]: It's like pushing a rope. [SPEAKER_01]: They don't feel like they need to do new things. [SPEAKER_01]: The things that I would say to you and not knowing your world as well as I probably should, do you think about the diocese as the way in? [SPEAKER_01]: The way that I would think about this. [SPEAKER_01]: I'd love to hear your opinion on this.

[SPEAKER_01]: But I would think that if you go into parishes, you pick off the ones that are forward thinking and it's working for them. [SPEAKER_01]: You want to go back to creating those stories. [SPEAKER_01]: I want those [SPEAKER_01]: proof cases as stories of how we've been able to advance the ministry through this particular tool or process or product that you've developed and the impact that is made on the church.

[SPEAKER_01]: Then the perishes that are not going to be early adopters, the ones that are going to hold back pushback. [SPEAKER_01]: You can take the stories directly to them, but it's unlikely that you're going to break through old ways of thinking and that particular environment just through brute force. [SPEAKER_01]: Now, I still would use that because social proof matters. [SPEAKER_01]: You've probably got a group of early adopters.

[SPEAKER_01]: You've got a group of parishes that are probably waiting on the fringes and if they see that it's working over here, they're willing to work together. [SPEAKER_01]: And especially if you can get one priest to talk to another [SPEAKER_00]: archdiocese or an archdiocese and level just to throw that out together. [SPEAKER_01]: But that's where I want to go because what I want to do is I want to go to that level. [SPEAKER_01]: I want to be talking to the bishop.

[SPEAKER_01]: I want to be talking to someone who says, this makes a lot of sense for us. [SPEAKER_01]: And then I can use that credibility like, help me out here. [SPEAKER_01]: Even if they just said, we endorsed this. [SPEAKER_01]: This is something that we think is a good thing.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then you can leverage that to go to the folks that are I'm not sure if this is the right thing for us and say that the diocesan level we've got approval for this or we have endorsement for this based on what's happening over here, but I think those microstories are going to be super important because I do think you're going to have like three levels you're going to have the early adopters we totally see this dynamic churches that are forward thinking and let's do everything we possibly can to advance the ministry.

[SPEAKER_01]: Then you're going to have a group that if they see that this is something they should be doing, they'll do it. [SPEAKER_01]: Other people are doing it so they use social proof and they'll adopt if you can make the proof case for them. [SPEAKER_01]: And that's why you want to surround a group of parishes in one diocese versus picking one off you're in there. [SPEAKER_01]: And then there's a whole group of churches that are going to be laggards.

[SPEAKER_01]: They're going to look at it. [SPEAKER_01]: We can't take anything else on. [SPEAKER_01]: This is too much work. [SPEAKER_01]: It won't work for us. [SPEAKER_01]: We're not that type of a church. [SPEAKER_01]: And you won't pick them all off, but you'll be able to get some of those to move because you can get at the diocesan level to want to endorse you because what you're doing with the other churches.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's at least as I'm listening to you, how I perceive what your problem lies. [SPEAKER_01]: I would be going up another level in order to once you've picked off those early adopters to try to cascade down [SPEAKER_01]: to get more of those parishes involved. [SPEAKER_01]: Yep, thanks. [SPEAKER_01]: Perfect.

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