Building your Pro-Start-Up Sales Team

The talk is key in sales as they say. But communication goes behind verbal communication and the skill has scope beyond just making sales. Your sales team should be effectively communicating with you or put forth their case in meetings with flexibility and versatility. They should be comfortable and effortless in a face-to-face sales effort or cold calling.

Salespeople are often driven by motivation from incentives. Thus, having a system that combines a base pay to meet the minimum requirements along with sales target achievement-based bonuses can optimize sales made.

The ratio of fixed remuneration to sales-based incentive could vary depending on your company structure and policies, however, a standardized approach as a starting point could be 60% fixed compensation and 40% commissions.

As mentioned earlier, you might get a very talented and experienced salesperson, but they won’t produce the required sales for you if their expertise lies in selling in a different industry with very different purchasing procedures. For example, a person well versed in b2b sales would not be a good fit for B2C or a person with experience of sales in corporate sales may need different sales techniques for SME sales. Thus, look for candidates who have previous experience as per your business’s particular requirements.

If you are a small business or a start-up but require a seasoned salesperson on the team, paying them their market compensation would not be possible, however offering stocks or higher commissions on sales made can be a solution under such circumstances if you see the advantages of having them on-board.

As time passes, it is becoming growingly difficult for us humans to listen more than we speak. This is a major challenge because the benefits that would come out of listening and understanding are missed out on. Active listening facilitates understanding nuances that could otherwise get overlooked, this then helps to understand what the person actually has in mind. When this understanding is obtained, it is easier to cater to the exact requirements of the clients and thus close sales.

Regardless of the years of experience or sales expertise that a salesperson you hire possesses, you need to invest in training them. The goal of this training is not only to sharpen their sales skills to suit your needs but also to get them well acquainted with your company, its value, culture and expectations. Having a well-planned training programme to onboard new sales members would be efficient and this can be arrived at by collaborating with your sales manager.

Once selling has begun, you must timely and systematically review the performance. An overall review can be conducted in collaboration with the sales manager to gain insights into the individual performance of salespersons and also the average sales revenues being generated by the sales team as a whole. If there are remarkable performances by specific sales team members, they could share any tips or learnings that would facilitate better performance by others too and hence increase the sales income overall.

Apart from the salesperson who makes direct sales, when your business grows you can set up specific teams within the sales department to handle sales data, plan sales operations and enable effective sales by the on-field sales team. This can help streamline the process of selling to get better results and increase incomes.

Depending on the stage and size of your business, you can have a single sales representative of an entire sales department with a lot of personnel tackling various tasks. If your firm is small, you may only need a single sales representative, on the other hand if you are a big company with higher requirements or grow to a position where you can maintain a larger team including a sales manager, a customer service executive and multiple sales representatives.

Your sales goal may be different from just selling as much as possible. There’s more to it , for example selling a particular product line over the other might be preferred. Nurturing long-term client relations might be preferred over having multiple one-time clients. Thus, before going ahead with hiring, you need to understand what exactly is your key sales goal and expectations.

Recruiting your sales team is not a breeze particularly if you want to do it right. You should get on with this task only if you have ensured that you have product-market fit ensured. Once you do, you shouldn’t wait for too long before getting your sales team on field to make the best out of the sales opportunities.

As a general guideline, when you’re starting up it is advisable to start off with a small team of talented salespersons may be one to three and then later expand your team as you grow and gain further insights.