Increasing sales within an existing sales team starts with choosing the work that will bring in additional orders: answering enquiries faster, taking proposals through to a decision, winning back lost customers, developing repeat purchases. To choose the first lever, compare the scale of the losses, salespeople’s time and the money that will remain after fulfilling the new orders.
The business owner removes additional advertising from the sales plan. The head of sales suggests working through the old customer database, following current proposals through more thoroughly and selling more to existing customers. Each task gets twenty hours. But the team has only twenty for all the changes. This is an illustrative example, not a RENTROP case study; we will use its figures to work through the choice.
All three suggestions are reasonable. The owner’s signature under the list, however, will not give the team forty more hours. Salespeople will choose for themselves: they will take the customers who reply faster or start with the task attracting the most attention. The rest will stay in the sales plan until the deadline is pushed back again.
I believe a proposal for growth should also state what the team will stop doing to make room for it. Without this, the business owner approves an additional workload that nobody has calculated.
Increasing sales: which orders count as additional
Before choosing a method, agree on the result with the head of sales. For our example, we will take orders paid for and fulfilled over two months, less returns. In another business, the unit will be goods dispatched or a service delivered. The main thing is to keep the unit unchanged throughout the work and track revenue, the number of orders and the amount left after costs separately.
Growth has several forms that look similar on the surface:
- The company sold more at the same price. Additional orders or units of goods are visible.
- The number of orders stayed the same, but buyers chose more expensive contents. You need to see what need the addition met and how much it cost to provide.
- The company raised prices. Revenue grew without any change in the salespeople’s work.
- Customers bought earlier than usual. The money arrived sooner, but the next purchase was pushed back.
The last option is particularly easy to mistake for the team’s success. Let us continue the illustrative example: without a promotion, one hundred identical orders were expected in each of two months. With a discount, there were one hundred and twenty in the first and eighty in the second. The total was the same two hundred. The monthly report shows growth of 20%, but there are no additional orders over the full period, and the company has already given the discount.
If the business needed money to arrive earlier, the promotion served its purpose. But the owner needs to agree specifically to faster payment and its cost. Otherwise, the head of sales will receive a bonus for growth and start the next month with buyers who have already stocked up.
Ways to increase sales: five places to make the first change
Choose based on a recurring loss that the head of sales can eliminate. Neither the size of the customer database nor the total value of open proposals shows, by itself, how many will turn into new orders.
Response speed: remove the queue before the conversation
An enquiry arrived in the morning; the first response addressing it went out in the evening. The customer received an automatic “thank you for getting in touch” immediately, but the question about availability was still waiting for a person. Here, you need to count the hours until a substantive answer: whether the product is available, when a meeting is possible, what information is needed for the calculation.
The task for the head of sales is to find where the queue forms and change how enquiries are allocated. For example, stop waiting for the busy salesperson to whom the enquiry was automatically assigned and pass it to the salesperson on duty. The owner authorises this reallocation and specifies which existing commitments cannot be moved.
The result is visible in two places: fewer enquiries are answered late, and more suitable buyers reach a substantive conversation. If responses are already quick but there is nothing to offer customers on the date they need, extra time on duty will not solve the lack of stock or an available specialist.
Closing sales: finish the work holding up a decision
The proposal includes a price but no answer to the question about installation. The salesperson writes to ask whether the buyer has made a decision. The buyer comes back with the same question. More frequent reminders here only repeat an unfinished conversation.
The head of sales gathers proposals with one resolvable cause of delay: a missing calculation, an unconfirmed date or product options that have not been chosen. For this group, they assign a specific action and a person who will complete it. The business owner gets involved only if the team needs permission to change terms or a resource from another department.
Measure the proportion of proposals after which the customer made a decision and the proportion that led to purchases. A justified refusal frees up time, although it adds no revenue. How this pause works is covered separately: who should take the next step — the customer or the salesperson.
Winning customers back: give them a reason to return
A buyer who left because of a delivery failure is offered another discount. But their production had stopped for lack of material. Until the company changes its delivery arrangements, the salesperson is asking them to accept the same risk again.
Focus on bringing back a specific group: customers who left for a reason the company has already resolved. The head of sales prepares a list and evidence of the change — available stock, different delivery arrangements, corrected order contents. Salespeople then propose the next suitable purchase. Before the calls begin, the owner decides whether the business is ready to deliver what it promises.
The result requires a renewed order and fulfilment on the agreed terms. One order placed out of politeness does not yet make the customer a regular buyer again: the next purchase will show whether the working relationship has been restored.
Repeat sales: be ready when the next need arises
A repeat sale differs from winning a customer back. The customer continues to buy, and the task is to avoid missing their next order. The reason to make contact comes from how the product or service is used: consumables will run out, servicing will be due, the next stage of work will begin.
The head of sales asks the team to track existing buyers’ next expected need. During the conversation, the salesperson checks the timing and quantity, then prepares a proposal for that event. Calling everyone on Mondays is no substitute for knowing who will need the product on Thursday and who will need it in six months.
The business owner receives the number of customers whose need has arisen and the number of completed purchases. These need to be compared over a full purchasing cycle: a buyer who stocked up early must not be counted a second time in the next period’s sales plan.
Order contents: offer the missing part
Buying something the customer actually needs alongside the main product — consumables, installation, servicing — helps increase the value of the deal. It is too early to start by sending the catalogue to everyone. First, find out who already uses the addition, where they buy it and what keeps them with another supplier.
The head of sales chooses one such need and asks salespeople to prepare a proposal only for suitable customers. The owner agrees the fulfilment terms. If the additional service overloads specialists or delays the main order, a high average order value hides the problem. There is a detailed example in the article about why the customer buys the rest from someone else.
How to increase sales volume with the same people
Now let us return to the twenty hours from the beginning. The list of losses is already there. The next choice is which one the team tackles first and why there will be enough time for it.
We will use illustrative figures to compare two options. This is a calculation based on hypotheses, not a forecast of results. Each task requires twenty additional team hours over ten working days; routine enquiry handling continues.
The option involving unfinished proposals:
- Take forty proposals with a question about the order contents that can be resolved.
- Under the usual process, the baseline for the calculation is eight orders out of forty, or 20%.
- The working hypothesis after the change is twelve out of forty, or 30%.
- The difference is four orders at 50 thousand roubles each: 200 thousand in additional revenue.
- After variable costs, including delivery and the salesperson’s bonus, 30% remains: 60 thousand roubles before fixed costs.
The option involving winning customers back:
- Take forty customers whose reason for leaving has been resolved.
- Without the new work, the baseline for the calculation is two renewed orders; the hypothesis with contact from a salesperson is five.
- The difference is three orders at 80 thousand roubles each: 240 thousand in additional revenue.
- After variable costs, 15% remains: 36 thousand roubles before fixed costs.
Winning customers back looks more attractive in terms of revenue. For the same time spent, the first option leaves 24 thousand more. If the team can actually achieve that difference, it is more profitable to start with unfinished proposals.
But whether it can produce four additional orders is precisely what remains to be established. The head of sales must explain the basis for the hypothesis: how many buyers are waiting for the missing answer, who still needs to make the purchase and when they are ready to decide. Arbitrarily putting 30% instead of 20% into the calculation is not enough. Without this information, the first step is a short trial with the chosen group, without including the expected money in the sales plan the team is committed to delivering.
Nor can you add the results of the two options together and promise 440 thousand: both tasks will require forty hours. If one deal appears on both lists, its order cannot be counted twice. Before starting, the head of sales checks the lists against each other and removes double counting.
The choice can also lead to another conclusion: the team already responds on time, follows proposals through and keeps track of repeat purchases, but there is too little available demand to reach the goal. The business owner will then need a decision beyond the team — about the offer, the market or attracting customers. Telling salespeople to push the remaining buyers harder will not create a need that does not exist.
An instruction you can give the head of sales
The business owner does not need to read forty records personally. Their decision is to allocate time, set acceptable costs and agree on the result that would justify continuing the work. Below is a completed example for the first option. The deadlines and limits belong to the illustrative example.
By Wednesday, 16:00, prepare a trial for proposals where the buyer is waiting for clarification of what is included. Show the initial list, the confirmed need and the work the team will set aside during the trial. The total limit on additional workload is twenty hours over ten working days. Keep prices and discounts unchanged.
Choose forty proposals for the new process and forty comparable ones for the usual work. Allocate them to the groups randomly, with the same mix of salespeople and similar purchase dates. In the second group, continue to meet all our usual commitments to customers.
At the end of ten working days, show the hours spent, the clarifications completed and the buyers’ decisions. Finish counting payments and fulfilment after the full deal cycle; specify the date for this final result before starting. If the cycle is longer than ten days, do not record open proposals as refusals.
We will discuss whether to continue based on the difference between the groups: how many orders were added and how much remained after variable costs. Show delays in current work separately. If the trial causes a missed response or fulfilment deadline promised to a customer, stop the added work and restore service.
Comparison with the group following the usual process protects against a simple mistake: crediting all twelve purchases to the new action. If eight bought alongside them without it, the difference of four is what needs to be examined. If the groups differ in size, compare proportions; if the observation periods differ, first wait until the same period has elapsed.
Forty proposals are no basis for applying the result to the whole team indefinitely. They allow the next limited decision: repeat the successful method with a new group, change the action or stop it. If twenty hours have produced neither buyers’ decisions nor new reasons to expect them, it is too early to increase the amount of this work.
When the owner has to organise growth again
If there is a list of opportunities but the owner personally allocates salespeople’s time and reminds them about every change, the owner has to run this work daily. At RENTROP, the “turnkey sales management” product takes over management of the team; increasing sales is built on response speed, closing sales, winning customers back and repeat purchases. The percentage is charged only on the increase.
At the beginning, the business owner had three reasonable ideas competing for the same twenty hours. A solution emerges when the owner chooses one task, frees up time for it and sets the cost of an unsuccessful attempt in advance. Then the next sales plan rests on what the team has already learnt to do, and the owner no longer has to promise three results from the same people at the same time.