Fractional Sales Part 3 – Setting up for your first sales hire
You’re a founder, ready to scale your sales and excited to hire your first salesperson. Before you hire that ‘white knight’ to save your sales pipeline, pause for just a moment.
This is a familiar story. Busy founder carrying sales as well as leadership responsibilities gets overwhelmed by sales, and decides to hire their first salesperson. Everything seems good at the interview, this new person has strong sales and business development capability, both parties are excited.
Just a few months later, a disaster is slowly unfolding. The new sales hire has failed spectacularly and needs to be managed out of the business. This is traumatic for everyone involved. The founder decides that it doesn’t work to hire anyone else to do sales, takes back sales, and revenue remains stuck.
The common thread running through all these failed sales hires is a lack of sales strategy, and a lack of sales process.
So how do you successfully transition from founder-led sales to your first sales hire?
- Go for fractional sales. Get a part-time, outsourced sales / business development contractor to set up your sales function, embed into your business, and do sales for you.
- Or you can do it yourself.
Ready to get started? Good. Here are four critical areas to get right before you hire that new sales rep:
1- Have a Sales and GTM Strategy
A planned sales strategy, with milestones and KPIs is vital to know where you’re going, the steps along the way, and signs that confirm you’re moving in the right direction.
Your Sales and Go-To-Market Strategy can be a detailed document, complete with in-depth analysis. You need to answer these questions:
- Who is my ideal customer?
- What problem am I solving for them?
- Why does this problem matter?
- Why should they buy from you now?
Got a sales strategy? Aim it straight at your revenue goal.
- Set a revenue goal for the next 12 months.
- Now break this down into quarters.
- Now break each quarter down in 12 x monthly revenue goals.
Not every month will have the same revenue goal. Factor in seasonal changes, holiday periods, end of financial year, and any other potential interruptions.
2- Have a proven sales process
Your proven sales process means that you (as a founder) know what ‘good’ looks like for every part of your sales function. This mean you know how to consistently deliver sales – and put money into your business bank account.
How many of each do you need each month?
- Phone calls
- Emails
- Meetings
- Proposals
- Closed Won Sales
What if you’re not sure? Reverse-engineer from the number of Closed Won Sales you need, to figure out those numbers.
Document your sales process, complete with templated sales emails and sales scripts. Make it easy to follow. This speeds up the ramp-up time for your new sales hire – so they know how to be successful.
- You’ll know if they’re progressing well, or if you need to move them on.
3- Use a CRM
Moving from founder-led sales to your first sales hire means getting sales
- Out of your head,
- Out of your excel spreadsheet,
- Out of your google doc,
- And into your CRM
Accurate sales data means better sales forecasting. Know what’s happening in your sales pipeline in real time
Set up your CRM before you hire that first salesperson.
Firstly, it’s tempting to let your new sales hire choose the CRM and leave them to structure your sales data. This creates a huge vulnerability if you lose visibility of your own sales pipeline and customers. Sales knowledge moves out of the founder’s head, and into your sales rep’s head. When your Business Development Manager leaves, all the sales knowledge goes with them, leaving you to start again.
Secondly, no matter how much you love your new BDM, there’s no guarantee they’ll set up your CRM for maximum sales visibility. They may be great at sales, but not so good with documenting sales into your CRM.
- Will you get 100% visibility across your sales pipeline, so you can see how they’re doing?
- Will they set up your CRM so you can easily check activity metrics to see they’re doing everything possible to be successful?
This is not ‘Big Brother’ behaviour. It’s a reality check to set up your new sales hire for success. Good CRM set up means you can relax, especially with remote or field-based sales people.
4- Know the length of your sales cycle
It’s rare to find a SME founder who knows how long it takes to go from their first outbound sales approach, until that person becomes a paying client. Usually, the founder has never done targeted, new business development before. Early sales are often referrals from the founder’s network.
When SME founders are asked ‘How long is your sales cycle?’ their answer is usually based on how long it takes to confirm a sale from the moment they get an inbound enquiry or referral.
So, when they hire that first salesperson, most founders underestimate how long it will take their new sales hire to start delivering sales.
Everyone gets disappointed.
- The new Business Development Manager is disappointed because they’re counting on commission payments, which are taking much longer than anticipated.
- The business owner is disappointed because they expected the new BDM to be successful by now.
So where did they go wrong?
They had the wrong metrics for success, but did not realise.
Get set up for success
Your first external sales hire is there to scale past founder-led sales and level-up your customer base.
Before they start:
- Make sure to iron out any kinks in your sales process.
- Have a realistic idea of how long it takes to win that new customer.
Now you can get back to doing what you love in your business, while your new salesperson has fun growing your sales.
