Building your sales team - hiring your first sales rep

At some point, you, the Technical Founder, must decide to hire your first sales rep to continue the growth of your business.

The key questions you and your advisory board need to ask are:

1. Is now the right time to hire our first sales rep?
2. What type of sales rep do we hire?
3. Where do we find good sales reps?
4. How do we interview sales reps?
5. How do we onboard sales reps?
6. How do we manage sales reps?

Get these right and you are on your way to building and managing a high-performance sales team.

Is now the right time to hire our first sales rep?

Firstly there is the investment you are making. The new sales rep is unlikely to break the record for the fastest deal ever done in your business. If you generally take 6 months from lead to close, then the new sales rep is likely to take just as long. So make sure you are paying yourself correctly, and that you can afford the base salary on a new rep for at least as long as your average deal time.

Then you need to consider the status of your solution. Are you still building the product as you sell? Or is it ready to go to market. If each sale still needs you to do product design as you sell, then you are not ready. The idea is to have the new rep standalone and increase sales without you being in every deal. Your product needs to be ready.

You also need to have reference customers. The new rep cannot tell the same story as you, the technical founder with a vision. They need customer stories to tell in the sales cycle. Make sure there are stories for them to convey to would be clients.

Tick, tick, tick…three out of three ticked off. Ok, next question.

What type of sales rep do we hire?

Yes, there are different types of sales reps and the one you want depends on the state of your pipeline. If you have a strong pipeline with good lead flow, you want a closer, typically a senior rep with experience in progressing and closing deals. Look for a good BDM. The BDM will do some lead generation by attending networking events but the good, senior ones, are wasted on cold calling.

If you have no pipe or no lead flow, why hire a closer when you need a door opener. These are different breeds. The sales development rep (SDR) is the door opener you want. They hit the phones and generate leads. As you build a team, consider one SDR to feed 3 BDMs.

If you have a strong customer base, with lots of upsell and cross sell opportunities, you need a good farmer, or Account Manager. The more senior level that buys from you, the more senior your Account Manager needs to be. Don’t hire a kid with no life experience to sell to the C-Suite.

Once you know what you need, and you have a good job description, salary package and commission plan, let’s go hire one.

Where do we find good sales reps?

It’s not where most Technical Founders look. Step back and think about it: Where are the poor reps looking for a job? Answer – on LinkedIn and on job sites. Where are the best reps looking for a job? Answer – they are not looking for a job. You need a professional recruiter to source the right reps for your shortlist.

It is a false economy to avoid the expense of a recruiter. What does a poor sales hire cost you? Given 6 months hindsight with that poor rep, would you have been better off investing in a professional recruiter? The rep you want is at a competitor or successfully making their target at a company that is not too dissimilar to yours.

You should also consider if an existing employee might be able, with mentoring and guidance, to make the leap from a technical to a sales role. Most successful sales reps in the tech world have made that leap, so it’s a path well travelled.

How do we interview sales reps?

Most Technical Founders have seen at least one movie about sales and make the leap that the best sales reps are the ones who talk the most: the gift of the gab. The facts are the exact opposite. The best reps ask the best questions, are the best active listeners and take the best notes.

Culture is the most important aspect when it comes to hiring your first sales rep. You set the culture and you must lead the interview process to attract the rep (remember they are successful somewhere else at the moment), and to make sure there is a culture match.

Then assessing their sales capability requires expertise in this area. Get help if you’ve not done this before. FYI, poor reps interview really well because they can talk and they get plenty of practice doing in interviews.

How do we onboard sales reps?

Establish a sales framework that includes clear expectations for the new hire and how they operate in the sales team (a sales rep will make their own framework if there is not one in your business, and their one will be best for them, but probably not best for you).

Empower them with your stories and your clients’ stories of success with your product. Ensure value is clearly understood with current clients and prioritised in the sales process.

Don’t hire and leave them to fail. They are not a knight in shining armour. They need support. Would you buy a racehorse and then send it out to race without any support, training, preparation etc? Don’t overemphasise product feature and functions. The client is buying a result, not a feature function list. This is why stories are so important.

How do we manage sales reps?

Managing a sales rep is very different from managing technical and consulting employees. They are motivated from the inside a different way. Go to any gathering of technical and consulting people, and if they are talking, it’s about how much they know. A gathering of sales reps is driven by conversations on deals they’ve done.

On the surface, for the uninitiated, it appears the gathering of reps is bragging about the size of their deals. Listen carefully to the conversation. The best reps are talking about the value they have delivered, the people they have helped, the problems they have solved. Some consultants and technical people talk about the same things and they are the ones who make good sales reps.

Whilst Technical Founders have a clear framework for product development, product installation, and even finance and contracts, they overlook a framework in sales because of the view that sales is more art than science. Yes, there is some art to a good sales rep, but a great sales team always has a strong sales framework in place. A sales framework is not just about a deal, it’s about the way the sales team, the sales function in the business, operates and delivers predictable, sustainable revenue.

If you are considering hiring your first sales rep, and you need help with any of these questions, reach out to Sales Director Central via a meeting with one of our Founders.