Building a Sales Team through the Expansion Stage

When working with our management teams at our expansion stage companies in our portfolio, we are often focused on the profiles of the sales people we should hire.

When building a sales team, do we hire experienced people or try to build with a younger, hungry team?

Here are a few simple questions that will help you to arrive at the answer….

“Do you have a sales process in place that is highly supported by content and resources and consistently repeated numerous times? Did you implement a training program that can be completed in a week followed by a sales person executing it the following week?”

Most of the time the answer is no. That’s OK!! It just means you need to hire experience in the early stages to figure this out.

So….am I saying hire high cost, seasoned professionals and that’s it?

NO, I am saying RIGHT NOW you should hire professionals. I believe scaling the team will only be effective if you can then position yourself for the younger, hungry people early in their career profile.

This is the work your sales leader needs to focus on:

• Build a repeatable Sales Process
• Develop a Sales Methodology to support it
• Work with marketing to button up sales messaging and content
• Develop a training program that will prepare a new representative in a three day period
   

I do realize many variables may prevent this….enterprise solutions, limited resources, etc.