Keys to Drive Successful B2B Sales Teams: Insights from Modern Strategy’s Principals, Exited Founders, and Venture Builders

What drives a successful B2B sales team? Two critical factors—Ramp-Up Rate and Payback Period—can significantly impact your team’s productivity and your overall business growth. Understanding and optimizing these metrics will help you build a more efficient and high-performing sales force.

In continuation of our previously published blog on Effective B2B Sales Processes, we've gathered expert insights from the Principals at @Modern Strategy. These growth champions and business builders share their proven strategies for improving sales teams performance and accelerating growth.

Optimising Your Sales Team's Performance

Ramp-Up Rate: This is the time it takes for a new hire to reach full productivity. Faster ramp-up times mean quicker contribution to revenue and growth goals. Effective onboarding, clear role expectations, comprehensive training, mentorship, and a supportive work environment are crucial to shortening this period.

Payback Period: This refers to the time it takes to recoup the cost of hiring a new employee. A shorter payback period improves cash flow and demonstrates the value of hiring. To optimize the payback period, focus on hiring candidates who have the right skill set and potential to quickly adapt to their roles, and provide tools and resources that support their success.

In our case, enterprise sales was extremely hard to measure the above, as the typical sales cycle could range between 6-12 months. Hence, what we did was to measure earlier indicators of pipeline progressions, eg: meetings, calls, and optimized the funnel way earlier to study early engagement with champions. 

Expert Insights: Training and Developing Elite Sales Teams

We asked @Colin, whose reputation includes being the CRO of Pathlite.ai, Managing Partner of Konnect Partners, and an Advisor for ENGIE Factory Asia-Pacific, to comment on elite B2B sales processes. Colin noted that elite sales processes include training and coaching. By deliberately training customer empathy, the entire organization will be equipped to adapt the process and tailor their approach.

@Jeffry, founder of SalesCandy—which he scaled to customers all over Southeast Asia, including six Global Fortune 500 companies, and eventually sold—pointed out a few key elements, not limited to:

• Structured Onboarding: Clear milestones and ongoing training can reduce ramp-up time.

• Mentorship Programs: Pairing new hires with experienced sales reps can accelerate learning and integration into the team culture.

• Performance Metrics: Regularly track metrics like customer acquisition cost (CAC), customer lifetime value (CLTV), and sales quota attainment to monitor ROI.

• Incentive Structures: Aligning compensation plans with performance, such as offering commissions or bonuses tied to specific targets, can motivate salespeople to reach their full potential faster.

Structuring Your Sales Team for Growth

In the early days, some employees wear multiple hats, but as your team grows over time, transferring knowledge of 3-4 different roles as you scale can be immensely tough. Hence, you want the growth engine to be as predictable as possible, and this is where specialized roles for specialized tasks are required:

• Sales Development Representatives (SDRs): Focus on lead generation, cold outreach, and initial qualification of prospects.

• Lead Generation Specialists: Use data-driven strategies to identify potential customers and nurture them until they’re ready for sales engagement.

• Business Development Managers (BDMs): Responsible for deeper engagement with qualified leads, managing the sales pipeline, negotiating deals, and closing sales.

• Content Specialists: Create compelling content to drive inbound leads, improve SEO, and establish brand authority.

For a deeper dive into these specialized roles, including practical insights and real-world examples, check out our video series on TikTok and Instagram by following @ask.mingwang. 

CRM and Metrics: Tracking Success for Long-Term Gains

We asked @Stuart, who has 25 years of experience running commercial teams for global MNCs and founding venture-backed startups, what the key to success in building a successful B2B sales team is. Stuart shared his early experience: "When I built my first startup, step one was to invest and design a CRM system to match our sales process. This really helped to drive our success early as we could track our pipeline data and present it back to our investors."

A good CRM will fit seamlessly into the respective sales stage and support deal forecasting. A sales team needs to be trained for optimal usage and to incentivized to use the tool. I’ve seen so many people revert to spreadsheets."

Stuart added, "Many companies are not systematic with their target setting. Often, a company defines what they need to achieve rather than considering what can be achieved. Put incentive plans in place that aren’t fit for purpose, and you will create distrust, the wrong behavior, and toxic negative environments. Adding more people is also not an answer. Knowing the market is vital, and listening to the commercial teams on the ground is key."

Creating Clear Career Paths to Drive Motivation

Stuart also noted that "surprisingly, money is not the biggest motivator for the majority. The biggest driver is career progress, learning, and responsibility (which doesn’t mean leadership). It’s vital again for a commercial leader to outline clear career progression opportunities to motivate the team."

Objective and Key Results (OKRs): A Framework for Growth

Jeffry highlighted the importance of aligning OKRs with specific, actionable outcomes. His experience scaling SalesCandy shows how setting precise objectives and tracking key results can drive significant growth and enhance overall team performance.

Objective and Key Results (OKRs) help growth teams focus on high-impact activities and measure success objectively. For example:

• Objective: Increase new customer acquisition.

• Key Results: Achieve 20% growth in qualified leads per quarter, reduce lead conversion time by 15%, and maintain a customer retention rate of 90%.

Implementing OKRs can align the team around common goals, encourage collaboration, and provide a clear roadmap for growth. Regular reviews and adjustments are necessary to ensure alignment and focus on achieving these objectives. This approach helps unify departments and drive results toward the founder's vision.

In our future editions, we’ll dive deeper into managing your team’s interactions with prospects, optimizing training and recruitment, and exploring the tools needed for success. We’ll also cover how to recruit your A-players for the sales team. 

Interested in implementing the practices we’ve discussed? Leave us your details, and we’ll get in touch to explore how these strategies can benefit your team.

Customer Journey Commercialization

Book Now