Scaling sales key takeaways:
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:
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:
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:
Scroll down for their tips for scaling B2B sales 👇
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:
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:
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 👇
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
Nelson made a pretty neat basketball comparison:
We totally agree - always put your prospects’ and buyers’ best interests at heart.