With a fast-growing business comes more responsibility for your team to shoulder, which can quickly become overwhelming. Expanding your team can also come at a cost; it takes time and money to train up new staff, not to mention the taxes and operational costs later down the line. However, with the right growth strategy, the return on investment (ROI) when you hire new employees will outweigh any concerns you might have now. 

How To Optimise Your Team Structure

All product businesses have a unique way of operating, and maximising output will depend upon varying factors across wholesalers, manufacturers, and distributors. However, there are a few universal ways in which you can work towards optimising your team structure that don’t depend on subjective circumstances like the nature of your market or number of departments.

Manual vs. automated processes

Moving away from performing admin tasks manually can significantly reduce processing time and costs. For example, moving through the sales pipeline without any automated aid can make the sales process disjointed; records can easily get lost when distributed across multiple software and applications. But with a system that stores all of this data in one place, attracting new business becomes a structured and predictable process rather than one that’s incoherent and arbitrary.

Keeping up with rapid growth means adapting your processes so that they’re efficient without taking short cuts. So, when you’re recruiting new employees, less time is spent on training for onerous admin tasks and more time is spent focusing on role-specific duties.

Hybrid & remote working

Hybrid and remote working models have become commonly implemented in recent years due to the flexibility they offer. Working remotely allows you to expand your catchment requirements when recruiting and seek out a wider pool of talent, meaning you can be more selective in the hiring process. Hybrid working can also have a significant impact on productivity, as giving your team the flexibility to work in or out of the office means employees can continue to work even if the office is closed. 

According to Shopify’s B2B Ecommerce Trends and Statistics report, approximately two-thirds of buyers around the world in 2021 opted for digital or remote human service. So, transitioning to a remote way of working not only improves your own team’s productivity, but it can also make the buying process more streamlined and convenient for your customers. 

If you’re thinking of expanding your team without blowing the budget, a hybrid or remote working model might be something to consider so you can downsize your office space whilst maintaining business productivity.

How CRM Can Help

When business is growing quickly and you’ve hired a new set of employees, it can be difficult for managers and executives to keep track of employee progress. However, here are just a few ways introducing a CRM to your team can help to combat these problems.

Standardised sales pipelines

Using spreadsheets and loose pieces of paper to track the progress of a sale just won’t cut it for a large Sales team that takes lots of orders. It’s easier than you might think to lose or forget to log a small but crucial bit of information, and a small human-made error can quickly lose you a big sale. 

A quality CRM with tight integration, however, keeps all customer, sales, and stock data in one place so you can follow your prospects’ journey from start to end without missing out on an opportunity for engagement.

Track employee progress

CRM is designed to give you full visibility of your team’s interactions with customers, whether that’s during the sales process or solving post-sale issues. With a CRM system, all of the interactions your employees have with customers is stored in one, accessible location, so you’re always in the loop.

It’s important that you set SMART objectives and goals for your employees that are measurable and time-bound and, with a growing team, a CRM system makes it easy to oversee the progress of these goals.

Work from the cloud

Introducing a cloud-based CRM to your daily operations is a game changer for product businesses selling B2B. From ease of use to seamless integration, there are a number of benefits that come with working from the cloud rather than on-premise. Cloud-based CRMs are designed to grow with you; CRM structures both old and new data in a way that’s accessible to any user at any time. 

Working from the cloud keeps the entire database up to date, so your whole team has real-time access to customer, stock, and sales records at all times. In a growing team, this feature will be invaluable for improving communication across your business and ensures that everyone is supplied with the same information – optimising any process that involves customer interaction.

Ready to expand your team? Prospect CRM is designed to store large quantities of data in a digestible format, so the system can grow alongside your business. Sign up to our 14-day free trial to see your data in action from day one.