Sustainable sales growth is the best indicator of success for any B2B or SaaS company. That’s where B2B and SaaS have an advantage over B2C. Everything centers around profit.
Prospects won’t buy products or services that don’t generate meaningful ROI. Your sales growth strategies must amplify this sentiment: “Our products bring profit.”
In this article, we’ll be discussing the key strategies to achieve just that. First, we need to understand the following fundamentals:
- The importance of sales team development
- Strategies for accelerating sales growth for B2B and SaaS
- How to create a scalable sales pipeline
- Essential tools for sustainable sales growth
- Sales best practices
The Importance of Sales Team Development
Sales training is essential for revenue growth. SDRs need ongoing training for prospecting, negotiations, and ensuring customer satisfaction—all core stages in every sales pipeline.
Investing in sales development equips your team with the tools and knowledge required to improve sales performance, customer engagement, and relationship building.
Sales teams with proper training also boost confidence, morale, and the ability to navigate objections. With an empowered sales team, motivation and productivity levels are high.
In short, when you care for your sales team, the results speak for themselves—this is true regardless of the strategy used to accelerate sales growth.
5 Fundamental Strategies for Accelerating Sales Growth
B2B and SaaS are dynamic markets with several viable sales growth strategies. Here are five of the most popular, tested-and-proven strategy to implement in 2024:
Create a Go-To-Market Strategy (GTM)
A go-to-market strategy helps you establish a footing, even in saturated markets. It enables you to identify ideal customers, the best engagement channels, and how to position value propositions.
To create a GTM, understand how your brand and products fit your market segment. Identifying the competitive landscape will help you make the best sales and pricing models.
Next, establish a clear prospecting strategy. Build your ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and buyer personas. You can leverage frameworks like BANT and MEDDIC or use lead finder tools.
Create brand messaging that resonates with your target audience. Segment and qualify your ideal customers to personalize the messaging further. Remember to put the customer first.
Always Put the Customer First
Put the customer first, from brand messaging to sales negotiations. Gone are the days when selling was "sales-driven.” The current landscape rewards a more personalized approach.
Sales cadences should emphasize the need for more in-depth discovery calls. Initial meetings must focus on understanding the prospect’s unique needs.
Follow-ups can directly tackle how your product or service can help prospects achieve goals and improve their revenue. One of the best ways to do so is through insight selling.
Insight Selling
Insight selling adds value to every stage of the sales process. It helps you uncover new opportunities, drive growth, and position products as a future-proof solution to prospect needs.
The key to insight selling is fully understanding prospect needs. When you do, you gain insights into positioning your products or services as a transformative solution.
The fundamentals of insight selling are information, insight, and action.
Information is how you capture user data. Insight is using that data to become more predictive and personalized. Action takes those personalized insights to data-driven, actionable steps.
Leverage Data and Analytics to Iterate Strategies
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to sales. It takes time to find what strategy works best for your business. Leveraging data and analytics helps you find and iterate these strategies faster.
Analytics lets you deliver precise insights, forecasting, and sales execution. For example, if your GTM includes cold emails, tools like Instantly can automate A/B testing and iterations for you.
Instantly allows you to create multiple email variations, then uses analytics to find the best-performing ones. Then, it sends these emails to the rest of the leads in your email lists.
All that’s left for your sales team is to properly monitor and manage the leads in your pipelines using the right CRM.
Leverage the Right CRM
There are dozens of CRMs in the market with robust features. But when you strip it down, CRMs are built to track and manage leads in your pipelines.
You don’t need that many features in a CRM if the sales process isn’t complex. Investing in expensive CRMs can affect your bottom line, as they are an additional cost to your tech stack.
Understand your needs first before investing in a CRM. You must invest time and resources—the more complex the CRM, the steeper the learning curve.
If you’re looking for something simple, Instantly has an integrated CRM called Dealflow that combines outreach and sales lead management.
How to Create a Scalable Sales Pipeline
The key to sustainable sales growth is identifying ways to replicate and automate sales strategies at scale. Here are three strategies to help you achieve scalable sales pipelines.
Align Marketing and Sales
Marketing-led strategies remove much of the weight from your sales team, so the messaging from marketing and sales should align. Both must create a structured sales cadence.
Marketing departments can generate organic leads online through content marketing, website copy, or blog posts. These leads already show interest in your products.
But interest isn’t enough to complete a sale. SDRs need to engage prospects using the same messaging from marketing campaigns—but on a more personal level.
Sales can also reach prospects through outbound lead-generation strategies like cold calling or emails. However, engagement should have the same voicing and tone as marketing efforts.
Streamline Tech Stack
Proper enablement strategies and streamlined tech stacks improve sales team productivity. Think about the time saved when you don’t have to switch between sales tools.
For most B2B and SaaS businesses, the sales process requires lead generation, outreach automation, and sales management tools. You get all three with Instantly.
Instantly B2B Lead Finder lets you find pre-verified leads who fit your ICP. You can then directly add these leads to automated sales email campaigns and monitor them through the Dealflow CRM.
Future-Proof Strategies to Operate at Scale
Future-proofing means leveraging tech stack and developing strategies that help you transition from a few hundred sales to thousands.
Let’s say you found a sales email copywriting strategy that helped boost your conversion rates. The next step would be to scale email sending volume.
If your tech stack isn’t scalable as you grow, you’d need to invest time and resources into new tools to fit your needs. Your strategy is sound, but the technology isn’t.
Tools like Instantly help future-proof sales growth by providing scalability options for small businesses that want to transition into the following significant steps.
You don’t need to pay extra to add domains, sending accounts, and warmups. If you’re ready to add more leads, you only need a higher-tier subscription.
Essential Tools for Sustainable Sales Growth
Every business has its own unique sales process. However, the fundamental tools needed remain the same. Here are five must-have tools for generating sustainable revenue growth.
Lead Generation Tools
The fastest, most cost-effective way to improve sales growth is through holistic lead generation. Leads must be verified, qualified, and segmented before being added to outreach campaigns.
Instantly B2B Lead Finder takes care of all three. The alternative is leveraging tools like Apollo to create a lead list and then running the list through verification tools like Neverbounce.
You’d also need another tool to help you segment and qualify leads. Skipping these steps can be detrimental to your overall prospecting campaigns.
Sending emails to unverified leads lowers deliverability and increases bounce rates. Without segmentation, you can’t personalize at scale. That’s where sales intelligence comes in.
Sales Intelligence and Enrichment Tools
Thanks to sales intelligence and enrichment tools, personalization at scale is possible. Lead generation tools like B2B Lead Finder have advanced filters to help you find leads based on their tech stack, company updates, and demographics.
You can then incorporate the data to personalize your outreach campaigns in Instantly using OpenAI integrations. There are dozens of pre-built prompts to choose from, all utilizing data from Lead Finder.
For example, each email can include specific pain points based on the company description or a unique intro based on your prospects’ latest company updates. You can also create your prompts and use advanced ChatGPT email integrations in your outreach.
Outreach Automation Tools
If you want to scale sales growth, lead engagement, sales cadences, and follow-ups must be automated. But automation isn’t enough. When prospects reply, you need the right email response strategies.
However, automation is where most businesses fail. Many use automation as a shortcut for sending large volumes of sales emails. This could get your domains blacklisted. Email outreach has always been a numbers game, but quality should never be compromised.
Before every automated outreach campaign, ensure that you’re sending accounts are properly warmed up. Instantly automates email warmups for all your sending accounts with no extra charge. The recommended warmup period is between two to three weeks.
For sending volume, the recommended amount is 30-50 emails per day per sending account. This should already include cold emails, follow-ups, and warm-ups. The safest way to scale sending volume is by adding a new domain. Each domain can have 2-3 sending accounts.
Sales Lead Management Tools
Every prospect must be monitored at every stage of the sales process. This allows SDRs to engage prospects with content, messaging, and value that best resonates with their needs.
Proper sales lead management tools, such as CRMs and marketing automation software, improve audience segmentation and content quality and help you identify the best timing and frequency for your outreach campaigns.
Sales Lead Management tools like Instantly Dealflow CRM help you identify what content resonates best with specific lead segments and run separate email campaigns that automate the nurturing process.
Sales Productivity Tools
We want our sales process to be customer-centric. However, your sales team’s productivity plays a huge role in ensuring the success of your sales methodologies.
Productivity tools streamline the sales process and help automate repetitive tasks. They save time, improve communication, and help align marketing and sales.
These tools can be categorized by time tracking and accountability, communication and engagement, prospecting and sales management, scheduling, and sales content management.
For example, you can use Instantly to automate sales engagement and management, and Calendly can be used to schedule meetings with prospects.
Best Practices for Achieving Consistent, Predictable Revenue
Help your sales team achieve consistent and predictable revenue by following these five actionable best practices:
Run Highly Effective Outbound Email Campaigns
Cold email campaigns are cost-effective, can be automated, and are fully scalable. Start by sending 30-50 emails a day. Leverage lead intelligence tools to personalize your copy.
Send 30-50 emails per day. Then, start scaling by adding more domains and sending accounts. Remember to qualify and segment your lead list. To ensure high deliverability, consider:
- Using plain text emails
- Mobile optimizations for email
- Using a single, low-effort CTA
- Focus on providing value
- Emphasize how you can help achieve your prospects’ goals
Sell the Goal
Selling the goal means creating email copy that directly resonates with your prospects’ long-term and short-term business goals.
Contextualize the value you bring based on something tangible and relatable. When you book a discovery call, ask open-ended questions about your prospects’ goals and challenges.
Emphasize the benefits prospects get from your products and how they can help them achieve their goals, not the features.
Supplement Sales Pipelines With Outbound Leads
Inbound lead generation is an excellent source of highly interested leads. But you can’t rely on them to sustain your sales pipelines. Leverage outbound prospecting tools like Instantly B2B Lead Finder to gain access to over 160 million pre-verified leads.
TLDR
Cold outreach campaigns are the fastest, most cost-effective way to scale sales growth. SDRs need the proper sales development tools and strategies to ensure effective and profitable campaigns. As a recap, here are the five strategies you can use to accelerate sales growth:
- Create a holistic go-to-market strategy
- Follow a customer-centric sales process
- Leverage insight selling
- Use data and analytics to iterate the best strategies
- Track leads using CRMs and sales lead management tools
If you’re looking to scale sales growth with email marketing, Instantly.ai is a no-brainer! Start small, create winning campaigns, and start scaling!
Try Instantly today!
