7 Essential Tips for Scaling Sales - Fast

Scaling sales key takeaways:

• Get your lead targeting right; this will focus your team’s resources on buyers who are most likely to convert.
• Inbound and outbound leads are different; it pays to split your sales team.
• There are real advantages to internal promotions.
• A data-driven approach helps your team optimise performance.
• Incentives will motivate your sales team.
• The right tech stack eliminates friction.
• Buyer-centric content speeds up the sales process.

What does scaling sales mean?

Scaling sales means growing your revenue without increasing costs or headcount.

In other words: closing more deals, faster, without just hiring more reps.

It’s about building a sales engine that:

• Repeats what works: playbooks, cadences, messaging.

• Automates processes: prospecting, routing, follow-ups.

• Measures and optimises performance in real time.

• Focuses on the highest-opportunity leads using data and buying signals.

• Leverages AI sales tools to multiply output per rep.

Think of it this way:

When is the right time for scaling sales?

The right time to scale sales is when your business has a proven, repeatable, and profitable sales process.

Here’s how you know you’re ready:

You’ve nailed your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

• You know who your best-fit customers are.
• You know where they are and how best to reach them.

Your reps are consistently closing deals

• More than one rep is hitting quota.
• You can trace success to a clear, repeatable process, not just individual heroics.

You have a reliable lead flow

• Marketing or outbound consistently delivers qualified leads.
• You’re never scrambling for pipeline.

Your tech and data foundation is solid

• You’ve got clean CRM data.
• You’ve got automation in place, and you have visibility of performance metrics.

You can train new reps and ramp them fast

• You’ve documented your playbooks, messaging, and workflows.
• New sales hires don’t need extensive training to get started.

Unit economics make sense

• Customer acquisition cost (CAC), payback period, and LTV show that adding salespeople will grow profit, not just revenue.

7 tips for scaling sales

Over the last three years, the Cognism sales team has almost tripled in headcount. It’s safe to say we know a thing or two about scaling a sales team!

Here’s the expert panel we spoke to:

• Jonathon Ilett, VP of Global Sales, Cognism.
• David Bentham, VP of GTM, DinMo.
• Nelson Gilliat, Founder of Marketing-Led Growth via The Buyer Centric Revenue Model Community.

Scroll down for their tips for scaling B2B sales 👇

1. Get your targeting right

When your business is scaling up, you have finite resources. You’ve got a specific number of salespeople who only have a certain number of hours in the week.

As a result, you have to focus your resources on where they will have the most success - and that means targeted leads.

At Cognism, we categorised our target companies as follows:

• Green – those businesses most likely to benefit from our B2B prospecting solution.
• Amber – medium-interest companies that would find some benefits from using Cognism, but aren’t best-fit prospects.
• Red – organisations that wouldn’t benefit from what we do.

Using this system, our sales team knew exactly who to target and who to leave alone. 

This process was entirely data-driven. We ranked the companies using these criteria:

• Renewed customers per company size.
• Renewed customers by industry.
• Total Addressable Market (TAM) size.
• Ease of acquisition.
• Annual Contract Value.

2. Split your outbound and inbound sales teams

It’s a rule of B2B lead generation that all leads are not created equal.

Leads that come to you (inbound) are more valuable than ones you prospect yourself (outbound).

Why?

Because they’re more likely to move through your sales funnel and become customers.

And because of this, you should treat inbound and outbound marketing leads differently.

We found that splitting the sales team into two teams - Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) focused on outbound, and Marketing Development Representatives (MDRs) focused on inbound, made a significant difference to results.

Jonathon said:

This is the structure of Cognism's sales team 👇

3. Promote internally wherever possible

When scaling sales, you need to hire the right people and, ideally, hire them quickly.

The question is:

Should you promote internally or hire external SDR candidates who may have more experience?

Cognism’s sales managers always aim to promote from within. 

But what about external candidates? 

A good idea is to use them as benchmarks to assess your internal people against. Are there any missing skills or requirements you hadn’t thought about before? 

Hopefully, assessing external candidates in this way will reassure you that you’re doing the right thing by promoting internally.

David explained:

4. Leverage data to give you insights

Take a data-driven approach to your sales team in everything they do. Create dashboards that measure the sales metrics that matter. 

At Cognism, it’s not about creating a Big Brother culture or even measuring activity; we like to focus on outputs more than inputs. It’s because studying B2B data is the most effective way to identify training opportunities.

For example:

You can measure the percentage of a cold call that an SDR spends talking with a prospect. Ideally, you want it to be as low as possible; you want their prospect to do most of the talking.

You can work out an average percentage of time for the team. If someone’s percentage is much higher than the average, they might need some training on how to leave space for the prospect to talk. 

A rep whose talk time is much lower than the average should be the one the rest try to emulate.

5. Be creative with your incentives

Incentives are powerful when you scale sales. They can jump-start team motivation and promote healthy competition.

It’s always a good idea to get creative with your comp plans.

David is famous for running ad hoc sales incentives for his team. They drive the right behaviours and help to keep them motivated.

He said:

Think outside the box when it comes to motivating your salespeople. It’ll help you to scale sales as we did.

6. Buy the right tech

Routine tasks eat away at reps’ time - it’s a common problem.

But with the right tech, you can eliminate friction, leaving the seller to focus on what they do best.

The B2B technology space is booming, so how do you know which ones to buy?

Here are three sales solutions that Cognism couldn’t live without:

• Salesloft – Increases efficiency by creating a structured workflow. It’s especially helpful for AEs.
• Reachdesk – Data-driven gifting and direct mail - it’s making a comeback! A great tool to build deeper connections with prospects.
• Vidyard – A powerful software that allows you to harness the power of video for your sales activities.

And we also couldn’t do without Cognism! Our sales team uses our tool to find and connect with the right buyers.

Here are some useful links:

➡️ Read about Sales Companion, our latest tool for smarter prospecting.

➡️ Check out our list of Cognism competitors.

➡️ Or head straight to booking your demo.

7. Create buyer-centric content

In B2B sales, it should always be about the buyer. 

And having a structure or model in place means you’ll never forget this when scaling a sales team. Because, as Nelson said: 

Who doesn’t love efficiency in the sales process? 

After all, time is quite literally money in sales!

And if you’re stumped on what type of value-led marketing content to create, here are some suggestions:

• Podcasts.
• Social posts.
• Webinars. 
• Blogs or case studies. 

Nelson made a pretty neat basketball comparison:

We totally agree - always put your prospects’ and buyers’ best interests at heart.