Building A Sales Team – 11 Ways to Make it Successful

Building a sales team isn’t as simple as putting a bunch of A players in a room and getting them to start selling your product. Sure, you might get a few more deals across the finish line and maybe even score a lighthouse logo. But this approach rarely succeeds in today’s environment.

Then you take it to another level when you are trying to build a sales team for a small or medium business.

Concerns such as costs, hiring the right person, do they have enough work, etc. One bad hire can put your business back as much as a good hire can put you ahead.

If you want to build a revenue engine that will fuel long-term growth, you need to build and scale your sales org with intention. Only then will you have the foundation to consistently win new customers, upsell existing ones and see the kind of predictable growth that’ll be the making of your company.

This is especially tricky in the early stage of a startup, when the job of selling falls on the founders (along with pretty much every other imaginable duty). So, how do you know when it’s time to make that first sales hire?

Some of the best signs you’re ready to start building your sales team include:

• Consistently receiving positive feedback from existing customers
• A clear and growing demand for what you’re selling
• A steady stream of leads – almost more than your current team can manage
• Enough revenue to justify the hire

If your business checks all or most of these boxes, you might be ready to start building your sales team.

At The Serial Seller we provide guidelines to help businesses set up and structure their team for sales capabilities and success.

Tips to Building a Sales Team

Know Who You Need and What They Do

You’ve evaluated your environment. You know what you have. Now you need to understand what you do not have. To realize your next step, determine your sales team’s end goal. Is this a customer care team? Or a pack of aggressive cold callers? What does the team structure look like? Building accurate, functional job titles is critical to building the team itself.

Track Progress and Success

To build a winning sales team, you need to define what it means to win. However, understand that measurements for progress and success are different depending on your starting point.

Sales success is a factor of both Behavior and results. Focusing only on activity won’t encourage closing. Likewise, it can be discouraging to focus only on results, especially during a sales slump.

Have a Rock-Solid Hiring Process

We’ve discussed the value of thorough hiring processes before, but it’s worth repeating. Ensure that your vetting procedures identify the right candidates in general, of course, but also gear your interviews carefully. You want to test your potential hires for how they’ll fare in your unique sales force.

Hiring is an incredibly time-consuming process. To find the best and build a great sales team, though, you’ve got to play the numbers game.

Or you can utilise a outsourced HR company or recruitment firm to free up your time to do what you do best.

Keep the Cash Flowing

Money isn’t every person’s key motivator. More often than not, however, dedicated sales professionals have money on their minds. Even if the team you’re building isn’t primarily payday-driven, money is always important for security and comfort to some degree.

For building a sales team that needs a little security, offer base pay.

If that approach doesn’t align with your business objectives, try spicing up your commission scheme. Offer unpredictable incentives – monetary and otherwise – for performance.

Pull Out All the Stops on Training

What caliber training program do you plan on implementing? If you want your sales team to win (and win big), put everyone – that’s new hires, current employees, and even yourself – through rigorous sales training. Training teaches your sales team how to win. When your team knows the path to victory, walking it is simple.

High-quality sales training programs, like Sandler’s, focus on skills-based training. These courses test trainees’ learning in real time with hands-on exercises. Too often training programs focus on theoretical best practices, not real world applications.

Of course, the best sales training bakes reinforcement into every step. To keep your team winning, implement ways to maintain reinforcement training. Keep your team’s skills sharp at all times.

 Don’t just Fire Fast. Fire Lightning Fast

Your sales process doesn’t guarantee that every hire you make will be successful. In the sales world, time is a deal killer. This applies to having a low performer on the team as well. If they are dragging along and just don’t seem like the right fit, you need to be quick to pull the trigger on letting them go.

We had someone that we offered the job to and he seemed great on paper. Then he started acting really weird because we gave him a 2 week grace period to start. He started blaming us for the delay and asking us why he couldn’t start earlier. Then he started talking about getting promoted.

Then it occurred to me. He was broke and desperately needed a job.

Desperate people don’t make good salespeople and he just didn’t seem like a cultural fit. He had to go.

Investor Mark Suster said it best here:

Trust me: if you know, you know. If you know, do it now. Things don’t get better. Your “Blink” instincts are right. You won’t patch things up. Delaying the inevitable is not going to make things smoother with your investors, biz dev partners, customers or employees.

There is only one answer: fire fast.

Firing somebody is no different than the other 10,000 decisions you need to make in your company to survive. You free up much needed budget. You free up the org chart to bring in new blood. Almost universally your staff will come out of the wood-works and say, “thank you, he needed to go.”

When people aren’t pulling their weight other members who are know it. And they’re grateful to work in an organization where they’re valued and slackers aren’t.

Managing a sales team is already hard enough. Managing a BAD sales team is even harder obviously.

Ramp Periods

It’s tough to have salespeople hit your quota right at the gate so we do a 4 month ramp up period. For example, if our quota is $50,000/mo per rep, it’ll look like this:

• Month 1: $12,500
• Month 2: $25,000
• Month 3: $37,500
• Month 4: $50,000

Find your Optimal Structure

The optimal sales team structure is one that is accretive, where, roughly speaking, each sales rep brings in at least 5x his or her total compensation.

If the average sales rep produces more than 5x the comp she takes home, then:

• An SaaS company should be able to be cash-flow positive, at least by a few million in annual recurring revenue (ARR);
• You should be able to hire as many reps as you can find;
• Sales will not be a stress center from a cash perspective;
• Marketing costs can be managed;
• Sales Development Representatives (SDRs), specialization, and account management can all be funded; and
  it all “works”.

The sales-driven SaaS companies that are very capital-efficient generally end up at 5x or greater as a ratio of average quota attainment / average on-target earnings.

Structure Your Sales Organization for Maximum Efficiency

A pod model for your sales team creates focused tight-knit groups, or “pods” that comprise team members playing different roles. A pod-based organization is customer centric.

For example, a six-person sales pod would be composed of three SDRs, two AEs, and one customer success rep. Rather than having large teams, you create little pods of specialized roles, and each pod is responsible for the entire journey of specific customers.

Align Compensation to How your Buyer Buys

This is my #1 rule in sales compensation. If you don’t take anything else away from this article, take the time to inspect your data and understand the natural buying process of your customer. Do your most successful customers start with a point of contact, land and expand, and add modules/users/etc. over time, or do you have one shot to maximize your sale? If you do have a land and expand model, what drives that expansion – buyer, user or product? Between your data and your team you should be able to come up with a few hypotheses. From there, we recommend talking to your customers and lost prospects to validate.

If the most natural path to a successful customer is to land with one area of your product and grow the account over time, you need to ensure your sales team is incentivized to do that – do not pay them less for an upsell than you would for a new sale, or tell them they can only upsell for the first 3 months after purchase if you know that will put undue pressure on the buyer. You have to consider the customer experience when writing your sales incentive plan.

How to Create a Sales Territory Plan for Your Team

Traditionally, sales territories were geographical areas assigned to a sales rep or team. But now that so much of your sales activities can be handled remotely, it’s not always necessary to define your sales territory plan by physical locations.

Of course, location-based territories are still an option if it makes the most sense for your company. Otherwise, you should feel free to define sales territories by more relevant characteristics, like customer type, industry, purchase history, referral source, product, or account size.

If you’re creating a sales territory plan for the first time, here are the basic steps you should follow:

• Divide your current leads, prospects, and customers into relevant segments. This can be based on their location, vertical, or whatever trait is most relevant to your product, service, or sales process.
• Compare how different segments are making purchases. Are they buying online without much input from your team? Do they require extra nurturing to make a decision? Do they convert best after an in-person demo? Which solutions perform best with each segment? Where in the pipeline do conversions tend to stall, if anywhere?
• Conduct a simple SWOT analysis to determine your sales team’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as opportunities and threats to your territories. For instance, do some of your reps deliver better live sales demos than others? Which stage of the sales process is most challenging for your team? Is there an under-serviced customer type you should assign more reps to? Are there competitors fighting for customers in a particular vertical or location?
• Set practical targets for your team to works towards. What do you want to achieve? Why are you bothering to create or redefine your sales territories? Start by looking at your sales pipeline coverage to determine how many leads you need to ensure your reps meet quota. Make note of where your best leads are coming from, which products are the most profitable, and which customer type tends to have the highest lifetime value.
• Based on your targets, come up with tangible goals to challenge your sales reps. This might be something like: “We want to double the number of customers we service in this industry over the next six months;” “We need to shorten the sales cycle for leads in this vertical;” or “We want to bring in X new leads with a budget of Y by next quarter.”
• Take what you know about your customer segments, your team’s abilities, and your sales targets to create a realistic territory plan. Define your territories and assign each rep to specific regions or markets. Think about how you can maximize coverage of high-value segments, match the right reps to the right type of territories, and ensure even distribution.
• Put your plan into action. Once you implement your new sales territory plan, it’s important to track your team’s activities and progress over time. This allows you to see whether the new territories improve or hinder your sales.
• Optimize and adjust territory division as needed. For example, if one territory is consistently outperforming the others, look for ways to replicate that success. If certain reps are failing to make quota, check that your territories are balanced to allow everyone on your team to succeed.

Build a Sales Team Destined for Success

Building your sales team is setting the foundation for the success of your business.

When you’re first starting out, you want flexible, self-motivated reps who can drive growth and build your brand reputation. As your revenue grows and your business matures, you can look into bringing on specialists and help your current reps specialize to fulfill specific functions.

As your business and sales team grow, give yourself, your sales reps and your sales managers the tools you need to succeed.

At The Serial Seller we can help with the efficiency of your sales team, the structure of your hiring process, hiring templates and more. If you need some help building a sales team, Book A Call With Us Now!