Are you growing your sales team? Congratulations! However, rapid growth tests every aspect of sales management. It’s an exciting task, but intense. When all your charts are sharply trending upward, just a small turn can lead to disappointing results at the end of the year. Meanwhile, all needs – from security to marketing and the sales process – demand your attention.

Where should you focus? As you grow your B2B direct sales team, three factors have the greatest impact on results:

• Hiring the right new salespeople,
• Quickly getting new salespeople to full productivity,
• Building a repeatable sales model and process.

Can CRM help? Yes. CRM can enable results during rapid growth because it helps focus your team, like a laser, on what you need to reach your goals.

What should you focus on to make CRM a growth accelerator?

1. Focus on activity reporting – to assess (and train) new employees faster.

What to do?
Focus your team on logging sales meetings in the CRM. Track who is and isn’t logging meetings. Hold the team accountable for gathering this simple information.

Why will this work?
With modern mobile CRMs, salespeople can easily capture key information about what’s happening with customers. You’ll gain better insights into what’s happening with customers, and your team will spend less time in status meetings reporting on what happened and more time improving effectiveness.

Why will this help you succeed?
In addition to greater sales transparency, activity reporting will help you see that your key goal has been achieved: hiring the right salespeople.
Most sales leaders don’t realize that new salespeople aren’t performing properly for several quarters – and by then, it’s too late to catch up.
With simple activity reporting, you’ll be able to identify problems much earlier. In just a few weeks, instead of quarters, you’ll see if one of your reps isn’t scheduling enough meetings, if their meetings aren’t with the right people, and/or if their deals aren’t progressing as expected. You’ll be able to intervene and take action sooner.

2. Eliminate unnecessary tasks – to onboard new hires faster.

What to do?
Put your CRM on a diet! Remove all unnecessary fields from the mobile CRM app.

Why will this work?
Mobile CRMs are task-oriented and designed exclusively for salespeople. With such a small screen size, it’s crucial to eliminate fields that require support, finance, or other departments.

Why will this help you succeed?
This tip is about time to boost productivity. It’s far better to make CRM so simple that salespeople don’t need training or reminders on which fields they should fill out. If you don’t absolutely need a field completed, hide it!

3. Spot trends faster to find your niche.

What to do?
Choose one or at most two questions you want to add to your team’s activity reports to spot market trends. This might be tracking customer use cases, customer industries, or solutions being replaced.

Why will this help you succeed?
This helps build a repeatable sales model. In growing markets, various trends emerge. You might discover that your product is a huge hit in financial services. Or perhaps certain existing solutions are ripe for replacement.
Once you’ve identified that repeatable model, you can target marketing and sales efforts on the path of least resistance. Sales cycles shorten, sales productivity increases, and you achieve your goals. Typically, though, these patterns are first found through anecdote, and only later through actual data.

In the hustle of growing your team, CRM might seem like a distraction. Indeed, it can be if you start adding everything that ever comes up in the sales process to your CRM.

But in the new mobile, task-oriented world of sales apps, CRM can become a tool to focus – not distract – your attention and help drive your team’s success.