But how then can you, dear founder, build a high-performing sales team? By learning from others who’ve done it before you, and using this proven 7-step framework that’ll guide you through the different growth stages of your venture.
A straight-forward strategy for building your first sales team
Here’s how:
1. Don’t Build a Sales Team Too Early
This is an easy mistake to make. You’re excited about your product and you want to make sales, so you hire a sales team. It makes intuitive sense.
But you can hire too early.
In the beginning, you—the founder—should be your only salesperson. First, you’ll sell to your co-founders, your team members, your investors—anyone involved in bringing your idea to market. Then you’ll sell to your first customers.
Even if you don’t like sales or think you’re terrible at it, you need to be your first sales rep. It’ll be hard and not seem worth it, but it pays huge dividends later, both in hiring and product development.
Eventually, of course, you’ll need to start hiring a sales team. How do you know when it’s the right time? When you’ve successfully acquired a couple of customers and have some rough playbook that you can give to a sales person. It doesn’t have to be a great playbook, and it should be their job to optimize and improve upon it, but you want to have a sales process v0.1 the very least.
Until you meet these conditions, you (and your co-founders, if you have them) should be selling yourself.
2. Don’t Hire Sales Veterans
Okay, you’re ready to start hiring a sales team. You’re prepared to go out and hire the best salesperson you can possibly find.
Stop. That’s actually not what you need to do right now.
I’m going to be brutally honest with you. You won’t be able to hire a successful, proven sales veteran. Why?
Because they all have (very well-paying) jobs. And whatever it is you could offer them—there are companies with bigger budgets and established processes that want to recruit them just as much as you do.
Instead, you should be looking for people with sales potential. People with drive and ambition. In short, you need hustlers.
How do you know if someone’s a hustler? Look for these characteristics:
- Strong (written and verbal) communication skills
- High tolerance for rejection
- Charisma
- Shamelessness
- Results-driven
These are the people that will help you grow your company the right way. They’ll build their sales skills with your organization and turn into some of your most valuable assets.
3. Build a Network of Sales Talent
I’ve listed this as step 3, but there’s an argument to be made for making it the first step in the entire process. It’s crucial for your long-term sales success.
As a founder, you need to know a lot of salespeople. You won’t hire them all. In fact, you might not end up hiring any of them. But they’ll be the key to finding the best sales talent for your organization.
Ask to chat with talented salespeople that you meet as you build your company. Don’t put the pressure on; be clear that you’re not trying to steal them away from whoever they’re working for. Let them know that you just want to talk about their sales experience and learn from them.
You can get a lot of really useful information from these conversations.
- You might ask what made them take the job at their current company so you can offer a great job to your own future reps.
- Find out what’s working well for them currently.
- Learn about the tools that help them succeed in their role.
- Get to know them and find out about what’s made a positive difference in their careers.
- Make introductions or provide value in other ways.
In short, just start building relationships. It can take a while—I knew my Close co-founders for five years before I convinced them to start a company with me.
But these are the people that will either end up taking a job at your company or refer you to others who will be a great fit. Those referrals are priceless (and don’t forget that anyone who rejects your offer of a job could refer you to someone who will be even more valuable).
4. Start With Two Sales Reps
When you start building your sales team, hire (at least) two sales reps. Having a pair of salespeople gives you more power to make sales and encourages friendly competition. But it also gives you more data to work with when you’re ready to start making improvements. And not depending on a single rep’s performance is always nice.
If you have just 1 sales rep and things aren’t working out, you really don’t know why. Is it the sales rep? Is it the product? The market? The pricing? Who knows?
When you have two or more sales reps, and one isn’t performing but the other is, then at least you know that it’s possible to acquire customers, and that the problem lies with the non-performing rep. (Either coach or fire them.)
SMB SaaS advisor and executive mentor Justin Welsh, recalls this cautionary tale:
“Back in 2015, we were faced with two impressive sales reps and looking to make our coveted first hire. One of the sales reps looked the part: a big, strong, charismatic guy with previous experience in healthcare technology sales. The other salesman interviewing for the role also had healthcare technology experience, but was a bit more timid, subdued and mild-mannered. On a hunch, we hired both.”
“Four years later, the latter is a Director in my organization, leading a $15M revenue team. The charismatic one? He lasted a month or so, and I learned so much about what not to do when hiring your first rep from this experience.”
At this point, you’ll still be very involved in the sales process. You should be meeting with your reps every day to find out how things are going, coaching them on how to better sell your product, making changes to your selling process and so on.
5. Find What Works
Once you’ve hired a couple of people, it’s time to experiment more systematically. This is where you try different sales strategies, selling processes and anything else you can think of to see if it improves your sales and capture the learnings in some formalized way.
Try different cold emailing and cold calling strategies. Experiment with different ways of handling discount requests. Go through product pitches and demos differently. Do whatever you can think of to try and improve your sales process.
This is where it’s important to have more than one rep. Not only can you compare their results to see what’s working, but you can also encourage them to experiment and bounce ideas off each other to see what they come up with.
Before you bring on more salespeople, you’ll want to establish a predictable sales funnel. That doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a lot of trial and error. Some things will work. Others will go down in flames. This is the time to do that. Don’t rush the results. Focus on the process and the results will come.
6. Always Be Recruiting
Now that you’ve hired your first two sales reps and you’re working closely with them on getting sales for your company, you’ve reached an important milestone. But there’s no time to rest. Keep recruiting.
You don’t need to hire anyone else right away. In fact, you shouldn’t rush to bring on more salespeople. But you should continue to build your network. Talk to salespeople and learn about what they’re doing, what’s working, what they’re looking for in a job and anything else that might be useful.
Those connections will often turn into valuable employees, either through future opportunities or referrals.
Just remember to take small steps. Start the conversation by asking if you can talk to them about their sales experience. Find out more about them—what are their goals? What are they passionate about? All of this information will help you build a strong relationship.
This isn’t about recruiting people away from their current jobs (not usually, anyway). It’s about building up a strong network.
And here’s one more piece of advice when it comes to recruiting: One of the best ways to attract top sales talent is to design a top sales culture. Make sure to take good care of the sales people that are currently working with you. If they’re good at what they do, they’ll know other good sales people—and they will inevitably talk about what it’s like working in your company. So constantly invest in keeping your sales team motivated, and create a culture that high-performers can thrive in.
7. Know When to Expand
At this point, you have
- sales experience as a founder in your company,
- two sales reps that have landed some solid deals,
- some great information on what works for your sales process and
- a fairly predictable sales funnel.
It’s time to grow your sales team.
This is when you bring on more sales talent. But how many people? How fast? What should their exact roles be? That’s up to you. It depends on your sales process, your growth goals, your market potential, your CAC and many other factors.
It could be one more rep. It could be another dozen. At this point, though, you should also start thinking about bringing on a sales leader. This could be a sales manager, a sales director, a sales VP or anyone else who can oversee your growing sales program.
A great blueprint for scaling your sales team at this stage is the book From Impossible to Inevitable by Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin.
Ideally, they’ll have started as a sales rep at another company and grown into a managerial role. They’ll have managed a team that’s larger than yours at a company that’s further along in their journey than yours.
This is the kind of experience that will help them turn your small sales team into an unstoppable selling machine.
At this point, you should be able to draw on the network you’ve built to find someone who fits the bill. And now you do want to bring in experienced sales talent. People who know what they’re doing, and not just people who have what it takes to figure it out.
You’ll still be involved in growing your team. But there’s a lot more to the sales process now, and as a founder, you don’t want to be involved in the day-to-day running of that process. You want someone else, someone you trust, ideally someone who is better suited and more capable at running your sales organization than you, to be in charge of it. That’s the person to bring on now.
Look ahead and have a clear vision
At this point, you’ve built a sales team.
You have experienced reps that understand your company, your product, and your market, a sales leader that will help add more talent to your team, and a process that’s generating significant revenue.
Once you have product-market-fit, the number one challenge is usually a shortage of sales talent. The more performing sales people you can add to the team, the better.
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