Last week, I connected with an entrepreneur and we dove into a common scenario that occurs when a startup is doing well. The founder, skilled at selling, had signed up dozens of customers over the years. The business was thriving, so the founder decided to hire an outside head of sales to help grow the business. However, this new hire, who came from a large company, failed at the startup. At his previous company, the sales leader had an existing process, team, and brand. Despite having significant industry and sales experience, transitioning to a startup resulted in a failure.
Hire a Process-Oriented Sales Assistant and Document the Current Sales Process
My recommendation is to hire a process-oriented sales assistant as a first step. This assistant would help the founder make founder-led sales more efficient and productive, and most importantly, codify what works and what doesn’t. Essentially, the sales assistant would act like a product manager for the sales motion, helping the founder alleviate some of the manual work he was performing. This person would also document the sales process and start building the framework of a sales playbook, translating what the founder has been doing for years into written form. As a precursor to hiring a dedicated sales team, much of what already works in founder-led selling would be translated and documented.
Hire a Sales Leader to Build a Team
After the sales assistant has shadowed the entrepreneur for some time and codified the sales playbook, it’s time to bring on a sales leader. The sales leader should focus on building a repeatable, scalable process, whereby the different milestones in a sales process are defined, and the inputs, like cold calls, emails, trade shows, and marketing qualified leads, turn into scheduled demos that then progress into proof of concepts or proposals, and so on. The sales leader is part sales coach and part process manager. Often, entrepreneurs seek to hire a unicorn that not only does the process but also sells and is a product expert. It’s much easier and more successful to find a sales leader that’s focused on building and running a process, not being able to do everything.
Conclusion
Transitioning from founder-led sales to a hired sales team is often a difficult process. Failure rates are high with new sales hires, and many of the lessons have to be learned over and over again. Once product-market fit is achieved and the business is working, the next step is to hire a process-oriented sales assistant to take all the lessons learned, document them, and start mapping out the sales process. With this in place, then it’s time to hire a sales leader to build a team focused on running a scalable process and delivering results.
Entrepreneur
via https://www.aiupnow.com
David Cummings, Khareem Sudlow
