5 ways to make hiring good salespeople easier, to fuel your startup growth

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Founders lack either the time or the experience to build a repeatable sales process

Way back I was in a band and we thought we might have a shot, but the lead singer got assigned to a recording contract and the rest of the band didn't. So I started a finance career at a big bank. I quickly realized that, because it was moving too slowly, it wasn't for me. So I started working with small, fast growing companies. And over the last 15 years, I've helped founding teams in the US and the UK and Australia to develop their sales processes and accelerate growth. And some of the results, those teams that I've worked with have achieved include a hundred million dollars sale of a service business, number 61 on the Inc list of a different business, winning fortune 100 companies as clients for others. And really over those years of supporting fast-growing businesses, I've noticed a couple of common things. Most founders lack either the time or the experience to build a repeatable sales process and prepare for growth effectively. That causes so much pain, missed targets, missed goals, wasted money, bad feelings, and a bad fit. And there are many ways to solve that. And so we're really focused on solving that problem and helping businesses to grow.

How can startups grow with finding and hiring the right salespeople?

It's always a very big question. Isn't it? The first salesperson hiring the first salesperson always seems to be the hardest thing. And once you've got that first sales person in place, at what point can the CEO or the founding team really begin to look to adding the next person and beginning to grow? And what we found is that most CEO's have experienced bringing in a salesperson too early. And that person then wastes a lot of time, does not succeed, and then there's a tough discussion that ends up happening. Most founders have had that experience before they get it right. And so how do you go about it? Well, any founder who is going to grow a sales process first has to create it. They really have to get people outside of their immediate network to be able to see the value in the product that they've built or the service that they offer. And they can really benefit by paying attention to what they're saying and what they're doing during that period. So by recording their calls, by using emails regularly, so using templates, producing other sorts of basic sales materials like a proposal that you don't change massively. And so you begin to build the assets that you actually need to give a salesperson when they start with this new enthusiasm at your business, to be able to apply their skills to the process that you already have.

Confusion stops progress

Can you give me a price? I've got to go and talk to people and I'll come back to you in two weeks. It just doesn't work. And the founder quite often does not recognize how much they innovate when they're selling themselves. So they know what they can afford to sell this for. They know what they're prepared to sell this for. And they can make that decision on the call live. You bring in a salesperson who is not yet empowered to make those sorts of decisions and does not know all of the tolerances and they stalled. And so confusion stops progress. And so anything that the founder can do, that the founding team can do to remove confusion and try and maintain momentum is key.

Founders hire the experience they don't have

If you look at the trends in business growth, there's increasing market complexity, there's increasing demand for content as part of the sales process. Even before you speak to a salesperson, now people are doing so much more research. They already know a lot about the service or the product that they're going to be buying before they talk to a salesperson, which also means that it's increasingly difficult to actually gain those meetings with your prospect. And so when you start growing the business, you recognize that it's actually harder than ever to get those things right. And then you bring in sales talent. And if you haven't enabled those people with those things, the content and the guidelines, and even a pricing sheet - it can sound so simple, but we see it all the time that founders try to hire the experience they don't have. And they don't close that gap of just putting in the building blocks first. So the second set really is to develop any missing collateral that is required. And a good one is a description of the customer that you serve best. So you might call that a persona. You might call that an ideal customer profile to really just document what are the characteristics of what makes an ideal client.

So you hired a new salesperson... What now?

So you start a new sales person in their role. They're enthusiastic, they're excited. They believe in the business. They believe that they can make money there, which is very important when you're trying to hire sales talent. And then you say, okay, GO! Well, where do they start? So you've got to make that decision and you've got to give them some guidance. And ideally, before you bring in a salesperson, you should be generating leads already. So we've seen that the most successful businesses make the founders really busy first with marketing or outreach support to fill their calendar. They then document the process that they go through. And then once they've closed a couple of deals, they can actually start building confidence that somebody else can do this process for them. Right? If you think about training somebody to do a process that you don't know how to do, they're not going to get it right. And anyone who's ever hired a virtual assistant, and under-trained them or anyone who's ever hired a team member and realized they didn't give them a good brief will really feel that pain because it just doesn't work well. And you end up having to do the work alongside them. And if you can document, as you're doing the work, then you've got your training resources ready to go. And you'll minimize the amount of questions that that person needs to ask. And with salespeople, if you can start generating leads through whatever works for your business - content marketing, it could be ads, it could be outreach, it could be partnerships, start generating those leads, give your sales person a head start. You're on a much better path for that person being successful, adding a lot of value to your business and really wanting to be part of the business in the longterm.

Well-meaning founders hire overconfident salespeople

Well-meaning founders hire overconfident salespeople who have never launched a product to market before, but just had a really good experience or a business before and closed a lot of deals. They did not recognize how much support they actually had, how much that business they previously worked for had momentum, how many resources they had available, all of the documentation and content they had available and the practice that they had selling it. And then they moved to a new startup, and the founder buys their confidence, but does not prepare them to succeed in the same way. And it happens all the time.

Prepare to enable your salesperson

And the lack of experience on both sides - there is the challenge. Because the founder might be very technical. For example: often technical founders don't align themselves with the sales skillset. You know they don't necessarily believe that they are great salespeople and they need to hire a salesperson to fill the gap. And they're not wrong, but there is that learning and building piece in order that they can be successful and a salesperson who's coming into a brand new business, who's had some success before may just believe that they've got the knack for selling but that they don't recognize they need to build those building blocks as well. And so the next tip really is to be prepared to enable your salesperson. As you're working the leads and you're closing your next couple of deals, pay attention - again, the pricing that you use, the way that you bundle services, the contract terms that you're using, maybe you can make a template or a worksheet that makes it really easy to price. What is negotiable? Can you give them a list? Do you realize how much you're using your founders, CEO, credibility to say, we will get this done for you. Well, they're not going to buy that same message from a salesperson as they would from the founder. And so, you know, you've gotta really be paying attention to how you can give that salesperson permission to construct a deal that makes that deal get over the line. How can you empower them to make those sorts of decisions while building sensible deals for the business sticking within margin guidelines and so on?

Produce a realistic role description

And so the final one is to produce a realistic role description. And there's a big difference there. What 2020 especially showed us that remote working is here to stay. And those people, who've still got a job description that says on it, fully stocked office refrigerator, snacks, couverts and beer have to reevaluate the way they're trying to attract people to the business because they may not be working from an office a lot of the time. Who knows in some markets when they will be going back to an office at all? And so if those three things are high on the reasons why you should go and work for this business, you need to really reassess that and understand that this person is giving you their time and their career. How can you realistically manage their expectations of what you think they can do?

It's really got to be about cultural fit

When you're bringing in early salespeople and again - most of the work that we do is with early stage businesses where the founders have recognized that they need to bring in help, they need to bring in a skillset that they don't necessarily have and then even to try and accelerate - when they're bringing in salespeople, they're not bringing in salespeople to an established large team that's already hitting goals all the time. It's much easier than to establish that that person's going to be able to do it as well. But when you're at the early stage of your first or second salesperson, it's really got to be about cultural fit. Are they minded like you to try and help the people that you want to serve? Have they closed deals that are in that sort of value that you're shooting for in the industry that you've recognized you're a best fit for before? Are they going to be able to find it easy to pick up your language and are you going to be able to work remotely with them effectively? And if they're the case and they're feeling good about the investment and they know that you've got this repeatable process built out, as far as it can be at least a repeatable negotiation set of tools and pricing supporting collateral, and that the CEO has recorded a load of calls that they can listen to - that gives them a really strong baseline to know "Okay, well, I know this is an early stage business. It's a big opportunity. And I know that I've got these resources available". And that means that you're going to be able to bring in somebody who can leverage those things to really get the job done.

Give new salespeople a reasonable ramp up time

If you look at the stats today, think about SAS businesses, it's taking longer than ever for salespeople to ramp up to full productivity. And when, when I say longer than ever, I'm talking about in the SMB space, your account exec could take six to nine months to get up to speed in terms of being fully out there, quota, you know. In the enterprise space it's 12 months plus because there's so much complexity to these products. And you've really got to learn all the ins and outs of exactly what they do and who they do it for and how it works, how to use the resources around you within the business to get things done. And that often assumes that somebody else is doing lead generation for them. You know, so if you're in a smaller business that has less complexity, but you're expecting your salespeople to spend a lot of time on lead generation as well. You've got to know that you've got to give them a reasonable ramp up time to actually get to productivity, not bring them in and the first quarter with no inbound leads, give them a huge number and expect that to be motivating. The opposite is often true.

TOP 5 TIPS FOR HIRING GREAT SALESPEOPLE IN YOUR STARTUP

The top five are: Document your sales process, develop any missing collateral, start generating leads that you can work and develop a process that they can then follow, then prepare to enable your salesperson - set up the deals that you've done on paper so they can see the way that you put them together and let them know that they're authorized to repeat or not repeat without your approval. And then produce a realistic role description. Let them know how early stage this is and the opportunity to work directly with the CEO to develop this. That can be a really great opportunity. As long as you're aligned with the fact you're going to help them get up to speed because otherwise you'll see longer ramp up times after hiring the salesperson, which means more cash spent before the contract is signed. The sales person may never reach productivity unless you really help develop that momentum and the worst thing that can happen for a founder that highers a salesperson is that person does not make it. And that then means that the founder has to jump back into contributing to sales of themselves for much longer, which means the business is restricted in its growth. And I'm sure a lot of your listeners, a lot of business owners will really identify with that because it happens all the time. This guide will make it available for your listeners so they can work through that and hopefully save themselves a whole lot of time and create some additional momentum.