From “Founding Sales: Sales for founders (and others) in first-time sales roles” by Pete Kazanjy founder of Atrium Sales Analytics. Follow Pete on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Consider checking out How to Use This Book and Who This Book Is For sections to start.
Conclusion
At the beginning of this book, I told you that your go to market would have two stages: figuring out how to sell your offering (the approaches for which were discussed in the first two-thirds of the book), and then the beginnings of scaling that up (which is what the last third of the book is about.).
If you are now, successfully scaling up, then congratulations! You’ve moved beyond the province of this book. You are now a bona-fide sales professional, and if you have a set of sellers reporting to you—successfully closing business—then guess what? You are now a “Sales Leader.” Way to go!
Am I Ready to Hire a Sales Manager?
However, it’s key that before you progress to “professionalizing” your sales organization—by bringing in dedicated sales management—that you’re ready to do so, and that you’ve met the “exit criteria” for moving to the next stage of your company. Remember how the “exit criteria” for knowing that it was time to hire dedicated sales staff (to prove that someone other than you could sell your solution) was that you had successfully sold to a statistically significant number of customers? Well, the exit criteria for knowing that you’re ready to hand the reins off to a dedicated sales leader, is that you have a set of sellers who they themselves are successfully selling your solution at least as well as you were.
This isn’t to say everything will be humming like a fine-tuned machine, because startups are chaos and that will likely never be the case. However you will want to know that you have successfully gotten one, two, or three sellers to the point of “repeatability.” If you have, you should definitely congratulate yourself, in that this is a very powerful thing. SaaS sales organizations “scale up via scale out,” which is to say that revenue growth comes from more sellers selling more deals—not by a small number of sellers magically selling bigger and bigger deals more quickly. So proving that you can bring new salespeople into your organization, and that they can generate $30k, $50k, $100k, and up in revenue a month is a momentous occasion in the development of your company, and something that investors will likely be very excited by. Why would investors be excited? Because you’ve now proven that you can take the money an investor gives you and turn it into sales people who a few months out will start bringing cash into
the organization.
If you haven’t proven this quite yet, well then you’re probably not ready to move on to professionalized sales management just yet. While it’s tempting to make it someone else’s responsibility to own the management and enablement of your small band of “experimental sellers,” it’s a rather dangerous exercise to engage in. Namely, having proven the ability to sell this repeatedly yourself, you are now the most expert person in the world at selling your solution. You’re the one who cracked the code on the repeated sale, with you as the seller, so you are also the best positioned person to teach others how to sell your solution. Having someone else teach others to sell would be engaging in a high risk game of telephone—with you teaching the new leader, and then them teaching the new reps—and that’s a situation that your company likely doesn’t have time for. So this is your warning that prematurely adding a sales leader before you’ve systematized your sales process enough for a handful of reps to be repeatedly successful is likely a losing proposition in all but the rarest of cases.
Who Should I Hire?
If you have indeed met the exit criteria to professionalizing your sales leadership, the next question of course is, what type of person should you be looking for?
Similar to how when you were converging on your hiring profile for your reps, it’s important to understand the difference between varying candidate characteristics, and what is stage-appropriate for your organization. People throw around the term “VP of Sales” quite a bit (and boy, people LOVE to spill it all over LinkedIn profiles…), but please be clear about what you’re actually hiring for.
For the most part, assuming that you’re hiring a sales leader to slide in on top of a handful of existing AEs and SDRs to stabilize that team, and then likely doubling it in the short-term, and then potentially doubling it again shortly thereafter, what you’re looking for is a hands-on “tactical sales leader.” Someone who is currently probably running a single sales team (i.e., 6 AEs), or perhaps a director who sits on top of a handful of teams (i.e., an 8 person SMB AE team, a 4 person Mid-Market AE team, and a 6 person SDR team). And this tactical sales leader is probably working at a similar organization to the ones we used to target our AE candidate profile—a scaled startup that’s in your space, or a tangential space, with a similar sales motion and Average Selling Price, that’s scaled up to dozens or maybe low hundreds of sellers, but isn’t a doddering dinosaur. If you’re a new Business Intelligence (BI) company, then hiring a sales manager or director from Looker, Mode, Domo, etc., is the better bet than hiring one from Tableau, SAP, or Oracle. If you’re a new recruiting solution, it’s the better bet to hire from Greenhouse, Lever, Workable, etc., than from say Oracle, Taleo, SAP, or SuccessFactors. Whatever your space, you should be able to figure out the set of companies to consider.
I won’t get much more into this as this is something that I haven’t done enough times to speak authoritatively on (whereas the stuff earlier in the book I’ve done the hell out of). Suffice it to say, that this is an extremely critical hire, and the key is to reference, and back channel reference, the heck out of any candidates who get down to the finish line. And then once onboard, much like your job when bringing on your first set of AEs was to get out of the business of selling, and into the business of getting those reps to be successful, your job is to help this new sales leader ingest your now well-documented sales process, and quickly get up to speed successfully managing the team. Congratulations! You are now no longer the Sales Manager. You are now the Manager of the Sales Manager.
Further Reading
Founding Sales was written because there wasn’t yet a tactical textbook for early stage sales, written specifically for founders and other non-sellers. But there’s a whole constellation of high quality sales books for sales professionals, of which my favorites are listed below. I highly recommend you check them out to help further your sales education.
Startup Sales
David Skok’s writing on his blog forEntrepreneurs.com is also quite good when it comes to a very clear, tactical early stage go-to-market education.