If you’re an entrepreneur or a start-up founder, no matter what industry or field you are in, you are also a salesperson. You are selling investors on your idea and you are selling potential partners and c-suite colleagues on your vision. Let’s face it, sales is important for any startup.
You may also be the chief salesperson when it comes time to start pitching your services or products to actual clients and customers. But once you get beyond early adopters and want to scale your sales efforts to build market share, you can’t do it alone – and you shouldn’t.
You’ll eventually need a solid sales team to scale your startup.
Sales is a skill and an art, and there are people who were born to be in that line of work. You likely know many of them. Also, as the driving force and ultimate authority in your company, you have one hundred other fish to fry, which can make it hard to focus on sales.
That’s why building a powerful sales team is so important. An effective sales team can make the difference between a great idea and a profitable one.
Four tips for hiring an effective sales team for your startup
Educate yourself about the sales cycle.
If you are going to assemble an effective sales force, you need to understand what qualities make for an effective salesperson. You also need to understand the sales cycle and the sales challenges in your particular niche. An effective sales strategy is necessary to find the right people, the right number of people, and the right type of people (inside sales v. field sales) to execute that strategy.
Develop a scalable and repeatable hiring process.
You are making a big investment when you hire your sales team, especially early on. Each salesperson will have an outsized impact on the growth of an early-stage company, so it is important to have a thoughtful and strategic recruitment and evaluation process from the get-go. This may involve recruiters or headhunters, but make sure that they have a full understanding of your business and goals. Once this has been done, and shown to be effective, you can use the same process and criteria as you add more folks to your team.
Establish an attractive compensation program.
If you are going to get exceptional salespeople to join your as-yet well-established venture, they need to know what they are getting into in terms of compensation, as do you. Develop a compensation structure that will be attractive to top talent while at the same time minimizing your risk. Commissions and bonuses may not be enough early on, when sales have yet to reach critical mass, so some creativity may be called for when you make your initial hires.
Stay involved.
You are hiring people with the experience and skill to sell your products, and you should let them do their jobs. But to do their jobs well, they need to have the resources, acquire the institutional knowledge, and receive the motivation and encouragement necessary to perform optimally. Conversely, you need to listen to your sales team about the challenges they face, the feedback they get from prospects and customers, and the insights they have gleaned from their experience. This information can be crucial in terms of improving your strategy and approach to foster greater growth.
You’ve built your company from the ground up. Now, build the sales team that will take your company to the next level.