How to Hire Salespeople and Build an Impactful Sales Org

Understanding how to hire superior salespeople and when to hire sales leadership is critical to achieving new stages of growth.

Expanding a sales team from 0 to 5 or 5 to 15 sounds small but is a significant milestone in business growth and calls for well-defined expectations and a coherent approach to recruiting and onboarding.

Too often, we see growing companies falter during the hiring process because in the hustle to hire new people, they bypass fully defining and outlining roles in the interest of speed.

Related Content: Hiring Superior Salespeople: Defining Sales Roles Worksheet & Sample Job Descriptions

The templates and resources in the Road From $0 to $20 Million (People section) will help you set a great foundation and see how best-in-class companies are defining roles, setting expectations around hiring timelines, and ramping their people faster. 

But sometimes, it’s better to pick the brains of experienced sales leaders and people who have hired 100s of frontline salespeople to dozens of VPs of Sales.

In the two webinar recordings below, Jake Dunlap, joined by Chuck Brottman and Matt Cameron, unearth the bottlenecks that stunt team growth:

• How to implement focused team involvement and collaboration for hiring
• Ideal plans for hiring and onboarding paths to ensure new hires hit the ground running
• What your stage in growth says about the roles you should be hiring for
• Getting new hires up to speed in remote environments
• What growing companies should focus on for hiring sales leadership
• The prerequisites for hiring full-time sales leaders and defining the role
• How interim and part-time sales leaders can have a serious impact on growth without hurting the bottom-line

These insights paint a picture of how to hire salespeople and sales leadership and build a team that rallies around company objectives. 

Scaling to 15 Reps: How to Hire Salespeople

The Challenges of Scaling a Sales Team

Companies often skimp on building and executing a process for hiring salespeople. 

Whether you’re hiring your first AE or scaling to 15 reps, the challenges that postpone growth tend to run along the same lines. But while we spend weeks and weeks prioritizing and structuring the sales process, understanding how to hire salespeople isn’t given its time in the limelight.

The first item on the checklist when defining your new hire’s skills actually ties back to the sales process itself. I.e., identifying your ICP and buyer personas. Companies have to fundamentally understand the market they’re in and then translate that into a profile of skills for someone they need to go out and sell into. 

Making this your first step in the hiring process allows you to idealize the perfect candidate and roll out precise details for recruiters to find the right people. 

For instance, if sellers with social selling skills or building a personal portfolio is important to you, this should be reflected on their LinkedIn page and other digital formats.

The next piece of the puzzle is applying process-focused action items into hiring. 

Process-driven execution is effective in every aspect of sales, but there’s a tendency to lean on chance when it comes to hiring. But without building a rigid process for hiring, you run the risk of letting wrong people into your team. When a process is applied to everything from the job description and candidate search to recruiting and interviews, the operation becomes more efficient and produces excellent results.

“When you build a process, you can move with speed. Having a process doesn’t mean you’re slowing down and losing opportunities. Process should enable speed, but you need to be consistent in how you use it.” – Chuck Brotman, VP of Sales & Co-Founder of Blueprint

The Role of Unconscious Bias in Hiring Salespeople

Jake and Chuck also reiterate the importance of diversity and inclusion as a centerpiece of the hiring process. Unconscious bias can be a serious impediment in the recruitment process, not just in barring candidates but also in building a great team. Through training, documentation, and a qualified, systematic approach, you can be more mindful of bias and eradicate it from your process.

Our Book Recommendations for Hiring:

• “Who: The A Method For Hiring” by Geoff Smart
• “Power Score: Your Formula for Leadership Success” by Geoff Smart
• “Topgrading (How To Hire, Coach and Keep A Players)” by Bradford Smart

The Benefits of Successful Onboarding

The exact adherence to standardized processes for hiring also applies to onboarding. Product training team exposure, expectations, and mentorship programs outline a direct path to employee retention and satisfaction. 

Fun fact: Companies with a standard onboarding process experience 50% higher employee retention than those who don’t. 

Having concise onboarding practices and procedures is an essential part of building superior sales teams and ensuring the success of each rep.“Skaling with Superior Sales People” in The Road from $0 to $20 Million outlines what successful onboarding plans entail and how to execute them. Resources include blueprints for setting goals and expectations, compensation plans, the “how-to” for establishing training programs, in-depth 30-day scheduling, and tools for actively evaluating and reinforcing skills.

Navigating the Murky Waters of Leadership Hiring

The Challenges in Hiring Sales Leadership

When companies are looking to establish themselves in their market, they tend to opt for a full-time sales leader to ignite their next stage of growth. It makes sense, doesn’t it? 

They see the growth potential, they’ve onboarded a significant team, and the next step is a VP of Sales to steer them into the next phase. In theory, it sounds perfect; in practice, it falls well short of expectations. 

As of 2019, the average tenure of a VP of sales is a mere 19 months. They step into the organization hoping to focus on hiring more, high-level strategy, building out go-to-market plans, manage partnerships, and optimize products and packaging models. 

Unfortunately, most VPs get bogged down by day-to-day tactical fires in early-stage companies because there are no functional sales models, undefined sales models, and a lack of structure. 

Hiring for these positions is tricky. You need someone who’s done it many times before, who’s been in the trenches of initial growth and trudged through the challenges. 

Here’s maybe an unpopular and magnificent approach to finding that person:

“What companies really need to do if they want to get a great, perfect candidate is they need to start the conversation from the perspective of ‘let me tell you all the reasons why you wouldn’t take this job. Here are all the things that suck that we need to fix.’ If you found the right candidate, they’re going to be super excited. They’ll say, ‘oh, thank goodness all that’s broken because I’m a builder, I’m a fixer, and that’s what I want.'” – Matt Cameron, CEO & Founder, SaaSy Sales Leadership

Related Content: The Road from $0 to $20 Million: What Breaks Along The Way & What to Do About It

Opportunities for Interim Leadership

When you’re thinking about this “builder” who will accelerate your growth, it can be challenging to find a full-time person who has worked with similar companies in the same stage of growth multiple times.

While it is possible, you’re more likely to find and engage an interim or part-time leader who can inject repeatability and sustainability into your sales model and who has built a career doing exactly what you need for companies exactly like you. 

The interim leads come in all shapes and sizes, and not just as VPs of Sales, and you can skip the ramp period that sucks up so much time and eats away at the mere 19 months of a full-time hire that’s going to churn. 

They can build your foundational processes, playbooks, first go-to-market strategies and bring in your first superstars. 

After that is when you should move from the builder to the innovator.

Hire a Sales Team that Propels Your Growth

Setting the process, internalizing the mission, initiating onboarding, and aligning priorities for sales leadership are central if you’re gearing up to exponentially increase the size of your team. And again, going from 5 to 15 is exponential. 

In the Road From $0 to $20 Million, we’ve compiled a catalog of resources to help growing companies outline their exact path for growth and optimize the hiring process for salespeople and sales leadership. 

Whether your hiring challenges are old or new, this guide will help finally hire a team that propels your growth.

> Access your guide to accelerated growth.