5 Essential Steps to Build and Scale Your Sales Team Successfully
Are you struggling to scale a sales team, or are you looking to build your first one?
I have successfully built and rebuilt multiple sales teams in B2B, and today, I will share my top five tips for building your sales team quickly and effectively.
Fundamentals of Building a Sales Team
The best teams are built with simple, effective processes and frameworks that can build a repeatable business.
The process is critical.
If you skip steps, you may be in trouble later. If you make a mistake now, it might derail your success later.
That is why I want to give you a quick and practical guide. Here are the five steps you need to build a successful sales team:
Which roles to hire first
How to find and recruit the right people
How to onboard them effectively
How to set sales goals and pay them fairly
How to build a strong coaching culture
1. Which Roles to Hire First
Depends where you are at, let's make two assumptions:
You are building your very first sales team
You have a few team members, and you need to scale
In the case of option 1, my suggestion is to hire your first Sales Development Representative, a person who can help you prospect and build the pipeline.
After successfully onboarding this person, you can consider hiring an Account Executive.
If you already have some team members, consider maximising their productivity first, then looking to expand to other team members.
2. How to Find and Recruit the Right People
The first challenge when building a sales team is finding the right talent.
The best way to do this is to go and find the talent yourself.
Reach out to Founders or people you know who have successfully sold in previous companies and chat with them.
Understand if they are open to it. After you have a list of potential people, structure a killer recruiting and hiring process.
From the job description to the screening interview, role-play their skills to see if they fit your product or service.
Ultimately, there is a process to decide who the right person is with a final motivational interview.
3. How to Onboard Them Effectively
Now that you have found the person(s), you must ensure they ramp up quickly.
The biggest mistake in building a sales team is stopping here and thinking that everything will be fine.
Most leaders forget about onboarding and how crucial it is.
Structure the onboarding process correctly: Create a document and make it live on your company's knowledge management system. Call it "Sales Onboarding."
Include all the nuances of the product, pricing, and your company's mission and values.
Then, add a section about sales and explain the whole sales process.
4. How to Set Sales Goals and Pay Fairly
Now that you have your stellar team in place, it's time to ensure they successfully do what they expect: selling and earning money.
Most founders miss this part, giving unachievable goals and losing the talent they found, recruited and onboarded.
But it doesn't need to be that way: set the right goals and have a 3X cover of the goal vs the cost at the end of the year.
Example: if you pay your Account Executive 50K, at the end of the year, you want at least 150K in bookings.
But you can't achieve it right off the bat. In the first two quarters, you usually need to lower their goal and ramp them up.
5. How to Build a Strong Coaching Culture
The ultimate goal of building a sales team successfully is to grow and coach them effectively.
Make sure to have a system and work individually with each team member.
Assess their skills first, then the output needed within their role, and ultimately build an individual coaching plan.
You build a coaching plan for the entire team, with open floor weekly sessions focused on growing together in a safe environment.
Summary
You can start building your sales team today. It may be time to scale up if you have achieved product market fit or already have a successful team.
We can help you, too.
Our consultancy firm aims to help 100 founders build their sales teams. We do it through fractional employment and proven tactics used by Fortune 500 companies.
Send us an email today for a free consultation at matteo@matteopapaluca.com.
