INDEED, TOP 10 MISTAKES IN BUILDING SALES TEAMS
Succesful entrepreneurs made them and founders at growing companies make them again, and again, and again. Learn from these 10 common mistakes right away. Take advantage of them and realize your dream of becoming a hyper-growth company soon.
Generally, growing companies' sales teams make these 10 general mistakes.
1. Hiring an account rep before you can prove you can do it yourself.
You have to prove it's sellable first, and the founders need to do the initial sales themselves so that they understand how to make sales work. You can't outsource this.
2. Hiring a VP of Sales before you can prove you can do it yourself.
You have to prove that the process is at least barely repeatable before you hire someone to turn up the volume and spin the wheel faster.
3. Any of your first two to three sales reps are folks you personally wouldn't buy from.
Because then you'll never trust them with your precious handful of leads, and they will fail, no matter how well they did in the last startup.
4. You insist reps #4-400 are folks you personally would buy from.
It takes a village.
5. You underpay.
The best tradespeople want to make money. If you pay under-market, you get the bottom of the barrel. Huge rookie error.
6. Not (intentionally) going upmarket faster to Double Your Deal-size.
- If you can get one enterprise customer, you can get 10.
- If you have one customer in industry-you can get 10.
- Corollary: target bigger deals as soon as you can do. Same work, more dollars.
7. Not firing a bad VP Sales in one trade cycle.
- You should know subjectively in just a few months.
- Numbers should increase in one trade cycle with a keen focus on Revenue Per Lead.
8. You ask your VP Sales to carry a bag for too long.
The job is to recruit a great deal and hit the overall plan, not to sell herself.
9. Hiring a person who worked at a well-known company.
Hire those people who closed at least vaguely similar products at somewhat similar price points.
10. You allow any great reps to leave.
You should strive for 0% voluntary attrition, not to fire the bottom one-third. That's for boiler rooms.
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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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