How To Build a Sales Team As A New Sales Leader?

As a new sales leader, you probably have a lot to do, one of which is obviously to hire more sales reps, so I wanted to provide a quick snapshot of the ingredients that go into this building process.

Most firms commonly use SDRs to schedule qualified outbound appointments for AEs, and some don't. Assuming you're the former, you might also want to have a dedicated supporting function for the rest of the sales department. And therefore, in addition to hiring AEs and SDRs, hiring a sales operations manager who will provide the department with the tools and processes it requires to sell would be inevitable. Depending on how complex your product(s) is or the type of buyers you normally work with, it may become necessary for you to hire a sales engineer, solution architect, etc. In the early days of a company where you don't have all the resources yet, assuming they have help from the Sales Ops manager, a sales leader can typically handle roughly a couple of more direct reports than they can normally do. Most first-time sales leads I've spoken with have gone from managing about 5, 6 to 8, 10 AEs and SDRs with the help of a Sales Ops.

Some companies want to simultaneously hire different management functions (within sales) or promote from within, which are good options if you have the assets. Another way to go about it is to figure out whom to hire (or promote) to become the SDR manager and fill out the rest of the management positions as the department grows. Obviously, a lot more will go into this process, but let's move on to some of the aspects you need to be looking at when it comes to hiring sales reps.

Now, the first thing you need to think about sales or hiring new sales reps is your infrastructure, meaning how robust a system, process, and culture you have to help them with the training, getting them up to speed to get the ball rolling. If you are at a really, really early stage and you've been doing all the sales, you might not have the capacity to provide robust training, which ultimately leads to an unsuccessful sales outcome. Even if you do have the capacity, I would recommend if you have the personality and enough knowledge to coach people. Not all great players can be great coaches. Hiring a proper sales trainer or hiring experienced salespeople because you lack the infrastructure and culture to train people with no relevant expertise are all good alternatives. Here are a couple of more suggestions:

If you did not click with the person throughout the entire process, you likely don't have the right environment for them, and they don't possess what it takes to be able to contribute further to enrich your ecosystem either.

We all had this, someone with a great background and strong experience, everything we needed, ON PAPER. But when we met in person, we felt different. That is your gut telling you, especially for folks in sales who have been doing this for a while. We've been meeting many more people than people in other functions, so TRUST your gut when that happens.

If your resources allow, try hiring more than one salesperson at one time. Because when you're new to a sales leadership or the company is still at an early stage, it is very likely that you don't have all the information you need to measure success and assess the performance of the folks you hire. If you decide to hire only one sales rep, you better hope they don't fail because it is difficult to figure out why they fail in that case. Was it simply because of their ability or skill? Or was it because of the pricing, product, or the process? Hiring multiple sales reps at the same time enables you to compare input, results, and how effective they are so you can analyze altogether to understand what works and what doesn't.

Now, when it comes to culture, did you know you need two different cultures? One of the whole corp, one for the sales team. As salespeople, the nature of our jobs determines the very culture we can or can't thrive on. So your company culture is more about a fundamental belief system for people to pass judgment on whether or not they can see themselves working there. And let's be honest, it's also for folks to check out when they are preparing for their interview, so their experiences and stories sound highly aligned with whatever your culture is.

But based on the type of sales team you want to build, the kind of energy you want people to experience on a day-to-day work requires you to think really hard about the culture, specifically about your sales team(s). Think about the ONE thing you want to build your sales team on, competition, transparency, structure, accountability, collaboration, or something else.  You need to know this to ask the right questions and design the proper selecting process, and your coaching and plan will all be reflective of what your sales team's culture believes.

Lastly, a few words about the recruiting process, it may sound unnecessary when you're at an early stage, but you need a repeatable recruiting process you can build on as you grow. So put together something on the type of standard questions you ask, situational questions you ask, ingredients that go into the scoring, etc. A good rule of thumb when it comes to hiring sales: Don't hire someone your prospects won't buy from, so design your interview based on that. If you are in a hurry or in a desperate situation, do not make any hiring decision. You will either end up hiring a low performer who will screw up your deals and morale or end up with someone who's not a cultural fit, which creates more significant damage to a functioning sales team.