Setting up your first sales team

When a start-up reaches the point where its product is ready for commercial validation, the founding team quickly realises that its next priority is to get the right people in place to manage this delicate phase.

 Amidst the excitement and turbulence of this phase, the founders are aware they navigate uncharted waters. They know their sales model will require multiple iterations before maturing and reaching a stage of validation. They wonder how to get started and establish a robust and repeatable sales model.

 In this article, we explore some best practices for building a scalable sales team. One that is able to accelerate product market fit, and grow revenue in a consistent manner. This starts by hand-picking individual sales people, training them to specific standards, and equipping with the right sales and marketing tools.

Hiring your first sales people

The ideal sales hire will really depend on the type of sales model a start-up is trying to build. Some sales processes are transactional, while others are complex, and much more relationship-dependent. Some products are sold in well understood markets with well-established value propositions, while others, new and more disruptive, don’t have an obvious value proposition yet and need a more evangelistic approach. Approaching small, medium and Enterprise customers will also be very different requiring a very different set of skills.

One of the things that make hiring for a start-up unique is that the first sales hires are instrumental in accelerating product-market fit. When pitching to customers and failing, they should be able to adapt, take initiative, and try to re-address the customer’s biggest challenges without necessarily receiving directions. Their ability to iterate on the target customer and on the value proposition, will lead to valuable improvements. They also help shape the product by digging in in their conversations with their team, and advocating the changes and improvements needed by their key customers.

In addition to that it is nearly certain that there will be some churn in the team. Hence, any effective hiring process needs to take that into account, and be set up in such a way that selection criteria are well identified and correlated with subsequent performance.  Establishing that strong feedback loop will enable corrections and improvements over time. The first few hires set the standard for future hires. In other words, great contributors attract similar profiles to join and so on.

I have summarised below my top five personal selection criteria; they cover skills specific to the role, as well as attributes that maximise compatibility with a start-up culture.  They are not exclusive but I have found them useful to get started and create a team culture that helps winning:

1. Top performers and great sales track record. We are typically looking for candidates ranking in the top 10%. Their experience should also be a good fit with the sales model the start-up is trying to build.

2. Look for candidates who are already operating at the level that we want to reach or operate at. So if for example you start-up is current doing 1M$ ARR, and you want to scale to 50M$ then you need to target sales people and sales managers who already have the experience of operating at this level of revenue.

3. A passion for the industry and great curiosity: Their Interest can be determined through either education, previous work or projects in related areas. What is even more important is the candidate’s curiosity. Is he/she a fast learner, always thinking, reading and exploring, asking questions and looking for opportunities to improve? Great sales people will have that innate ability to understand a customer’s context through effective questioning and listening, which is driven by genuine curiosity.

4. Entrepreneurship with focus on results and agility: We are looking for open minded candidates, able to spot opportunities others cannot see, take calculated risk to make things happen, and focus on results. The candidate should be agile, adaptable to change, comfortable in a past paced environment, and able to assist his team in dealing with change. He/she can refocus objectives quickly and can work with limited resources, and with limited or incomplete information. Is the candidate able to deal with changes to his/her role and job description easily? Can he/she get their hands dirty and can do every kind of work as and when it’s required?  

5. High level of collaboration and humility, and great work ethics: We look for drive, a deep sense of urgency, resilience, and the ability to be unfazed by setbacks, and able to pick oneself up. Does the candidate show interest in others, is he/she able to provide constructive feedback, to listen before judging, and can he/she manage different personalities and styles? Does the candidate takes ownership of his projects, is he accountable for his results?

Sales leadership and training

Sales leadership and training are as important as the hiring process to make sure the team is up and running in no time. A common mistake is to “hire and forget” new candidates, and its unfortunately common given how stretched founding teams are.

Since the start-up may not have fully reached product-market fit yet, by this stage, this process will also be iterative. The sales team should be able to test the content of the sales training and, through regular feedback, improve on it. Having a structured training program even in the early stages of the commercialisation process is essential to benefit from this feedback loop. Start-ups that wait too long often miss out on useful input, and their sales teams become frustrated by their inability to influence a system that is far from perfect.

In this context, a key role of the founding team is to use sales training to set up a culture of innovation rather than generate all the big ideas themselves. Great teams have a culture of continual improvement.

To create an adequate training curriculum, the first priority the management team must attend to is crafting their value proposition. They need to create the narrative and the storyline describing what is the product they are offering and how they engage and inspire customers. They will find it useful to address the following key questions:

• What problem is the team trying to solve?
• Why is it important?
• How is the team going about it, and what sets it apart?
• What are the vision, mission, goal statements?
• What are the key benefits to the customers?
• How do they create value for the customer: do they help customers save money, time, make a process more convenient or do something transformational and that was previously impossible)
• How is the solution priced, and is the team using a value based pricing model that leverages fully the value created to the customer?

This narrative can be drafted into the first sales materials (presentation, sales guides, Ten reasons why, data sheets). The sales team will appreciate having such knowledge documented and codified to support their work, and this will also facilitate the training process while reinforcing key messages.

Next, the founding team will need to develop an understanding of these three foundational areas which make up their sales methodology[1], and the basis of the sales training. This is very well explained by Mark Roberge in his “The sales acceleration formula”.

• The buyer journey
• The Sales process
• The qualifying matrix

The buyer journey describes the stages through which a company goes when purchasing a product, and which roles or personas are involved in the decision making process. Great sales people are those who fully understand these profiles and

stages, and are able to map their sales activities accordingly. A typical journey might start with a buyer discovering a problem and attempting to research potential solutions, then shortlisting and evaluating options, doing a pilot or a test, followed by an ROI analysis before making a final decision.

The sales process is the list of sales activities executed by the sales team to help the customer through the buying journey. It includes things such as prospecting, doing a first connect call for an introduction, then a more detailed discovery call to understand the buyer context, followed by a full presentation and demo, and then perhaps making a proposal and negotiating closure.

Finally, the qualifying matrix, is the list of relevant information needed from a potential buyer in order to understand his/her context and whether there is a business pain the start-up can solve (including whether there is a fit with the chosen segmentation). The information is gathered in various stages of the sales process. A very common matrix Is BANT (Budget, Authority, Needs, Timelines), but there are also others, and each company can customise its own set of questions to suit their business.

A typical sales training agenda

Once the sales methodology is defined, creating a training program is relatively easy. A typical sales training agenda can include a session on each of the following topic:

1. Product sessions
   • Complete product training
   • Practicing customer facing demos

2. Marketing sessions
   • Customer segmentation and personas
   • Demand and lead generation (inbound, outbound, referrals)
   • Testimonials: a day in the life of the customer
   • Understanding and using customer references

3. Sales sessions
   • Prospecting
   • Connect calls
   • Discovery calls
   • The qualifying matrix
   • Review of sales tools and assets
   • Customer presentations
   • Creating and managing a sales funnel in Salesforce
   • Forecasting and targets
   • Value based pricing and deal desk

Building a sales team from the ground up is one of the most daunting tasks awaiting an entrepreneur, but also one of the most rewarding. Hiring the right profiles from the start, and creating strong induction and training programs for them will shape the culture and performance of the start-up for a very long time.

[1] The sales acceleration formula, by Mark Roberge