The Vital Essentials of Building a Sales Team

There are many vital factors that go into building a business. But the careful building of a sales teamis probably the most important task any business owner or sales manager will undertake. It may seem rather easy: you hire salespeople who, at least by prior recommendation, have proven they can sell. You hire an experienced sales manager. You start selling.

Take it from one who knows: it’s nowhere near that easy. In fact, as I repeat several times throughout this ebook, it is probably the most difficult task that can be undertaken personnel-wise. You have to make sure your reps’ training and experience aligns with your market and the size of company you’re selling to. You have to hire reps that can be self-sufficient, not always relying on inbound leads. Your reps should be focusing on customers and their issues, not simply the product or service being sold. Then, after all that, you have to properly manage them.

While this ebook won’t give you everything there is to know about building a sales team, it will give you the vital essentials which you cannot do without. Start with them, and the rest will fall into place.

When you first start a company, you have immediate priorities. If you don’t make building a sales team one of the first of those priorities, you won’t make it very far at all as there will be no revenue. When you first start up, how can you ensure you’re building a sales team that will truly fuel the company as it grows?

As you’re growing and your sales reps are having to do all of these extra functions, they certainly need to spend as little time as possible on data entry and administration with CRM. Pipeliner, with its totally visual, intuitive interfaces, makes it possible to rapidly manage and control opportunities, making sure all needed tasks are done and that no opportunities go off the rails or are lost.

So in the beginning, make sure you build a sales team of entrepreneurs—and that you have Pipeliner backing you up the whole while.

When you first start a company, you have immediate priorities. If you don’t make building a sales team one of the first of those priorities, you won’t make it very far at all as there will be no revenue. When you first start up, how can you ensure you’re building a sales team that will truly fuel the company as it grows?

Commonly a salesperson learns, in the main, about the products or services they are selling. If a sales team is really going to succeed, it must go well beyond this approach.

The next step is to ensure that a sales team is precisely focused on the industry they are in. The primary reason for this is that buyers in each industry will have completely different actions. The seller’s actions must be customer-centric for those specific buyers and tailored for that industry.

The sales process and all sales activities must have a precise industry-specific focus. It goes a bit deeper than that, however—for the personality profile of the reps you are hiring must also align with your target industry and even size of business you are selling to.

It used to be that salespeople, by necessity, had to drum up their own leads. Today it’s not the same. The majority of salespeople are dependent on inbound leads—those leads which come in off a web site, through advertising or from social media. What might be the more successful approach?

Overall I believe sales management is certainly one of the hardest jobs there is. You have a multiple burden: finding the right people, putting them in place, developing the right sales process, utilizing the right technology, evolving sound lead generation strategies both inbound and outbound, working with Marketing, working with the Board, and much more. In addition, it all must tie together.