INDEED, WHO'S THE RIGHT VP SALES FOR YOUR STAGE?
Your sales process isn’t going to remain the same as it is today. You may need to scale your outreach program, sales approach, modes of communication, as well as your sales team.
As you are scaling up the entire sales department and their operations according to your growth, don’t you think you need the right VP of Sales at every step? In this blog, we will take a look at the different types of VP of Sales and how each one will help you to move from one stage to another.
The 4 types of VP of Sales
1. The Evangelist
Purpose: Taking you from nothing to $1-$2 million
The Evangelist is passionate about the work as well as the product. These kinds of people are ready to go out of day two and start selling your product because they believe so much in it. They are bubbling with passion, which is why Evangelists will look like the best candidate for the VP of Sales if you’ve never hired one before.
The problem: While they are fun to worth with and are creative, Evangelists never had the experience of building systemized sales or for the matter, scaling sales. Often, it’s a waste to hire someone like that because the Founder/CEO can do the same work with the help of one or two salespersons.
Mr. Make-It-Repeatable
Purpose: Taking you from $1 million to $10 million
After reaching $1 million in sales, you will be at a stage where you have some good customers. It may not be a lot but still decent enough. You may have one to four salespeople working. But at this point, you probably won’t have any idea about how to make the sales predictable.
This is when the VP of Sales should make a difference and make it happen. The VP can’t hide behind PowerPoint presentations or pipeline dashboards. This person has to do the groundwork to recruit, hire and coach new salespeople and build the necessary process for creating predictable revenue.
But many VP of Sales struggle at this point. Most of them would have grown into this stage from something that was already working systematically and not by being the one who systematized it.
A company is lucky to come across Mr. Make-It-Repeatable, who will make the entire sales process clearer and simpler. The VP of Sales should get the business off the ground and create something repeatable.
The problem: At this crucial phase, none of the VP of Sales from the big companies can fill these earlier roles and they most probably will fail. Why so?
Even when someone has joined such a huge organization at $1 billion in sales, it’s not comparable to this early stage. They have the unfair advantage of easier meetings with top executives, easier hiring and better budget. They have a marketing team, admin support, many inbound leads, lots of people to write sales collateral and proposals.
It would be difficult for such a person to understand and rise against the tide with a smaller company. It doesn’t mean they can’t do it. But one has to exercise high caution in hiring them.
Ms. Go Big
Purpose: Taking you from $10 million to $40 million
This is the time when you have a decently-funded company with a good amount in annual revenue. The sales process is already working smoothly.
At this juncture, the responsibility of the VP of Sales is to hire the right salespeople, specialize in various sales processes, develop a big talent pool, grow outbound prospecting and get the lead generation engine cranking.
The problem: It’s hard to find such a right candidate for the VP of Sales. You can look at companies that just went through this phase successfully for the right choice. But, Ms. Go Big kind of Sales VP mostly wouldn’t be suitable for the before stage if they didn’t have any experience working in that phase.
Mr. Dashboards
Purpose: Taking you from $40 million to beyond
You get Mr. Dashboards most of the time when you recruit from big organizations. Mr. Dashboard knows how to sell it and woe people with his presentation. This person knows how to dress right and the daily duty includes meeting with the managers and looking at the dashboards.
Mr. Dashboards will think about:
- The changes needed to get the dashboards to the team
- How to bring more resources and budget
- Who can be hired and fired
- How to get rid of the bottom 10%
- Where the sales kickoff for the year should be
- What events to host for the best prospects
It’s okay to get Mr. Dashboard at this point because you need someone like that.
The problem: You should never hire a Mr.Dashboard before this stage unless they have worked in the earlier stages. They wouldn’t know how to get your company from $5 million to $10 million, and from $10 million to more than that. They only know to run the business smoothly when your business is at the stage of ‘unstoppable.’
Weigh our candidates for the position of the VP of the Sales against these four types. Hire the right person who is equipped and knowledgeable enough to take you from one stage to another. And make sure to provide the best resources for the Sales VP to work with too.
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This blog is excerpted from: 'From Impossible to Inevitable: how hyper-growth companies create predictable revenue' co-authored by Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin.
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