Should you recruit an experienced Sales Manager from your sector?
Or recruit six sales professionals and let a natural leader emerge?
Two Strategies for Successfully Building a High-Performing Sales Team.
There are two clear choices. Which one is best?
Recruit a Team Leader(s) who already has sales experience in your sector.
Or recruit 6 experienced sales people and let a natural leader emerge.
Pros and Cons of 1.
Advantages are:
1. Can "hit the floor running” securing early sales.
2. Delegate Sales Manager responsibility and allow you time to work on the business itself.
3. They can recruit and train the new team.
4. Their experience looks good and convincing on company materials.
Problems are:
1. They are in short supply.
2. They are hard to convince to join. Startups are high risk. No branding, testimonials. Customers wary of a company less than a year old delivering. 95% of new companies go bankrupt in year one.
3. Doubt of their skill. If doing well, why would they give up their current high income and pipeline of prospects, status and known environment.
4. Doubt of their ambition and self-confidence/belief. If they are strong, why are they not setting up their own business?
5. Doubts on why are they not being made Team Leader in their own company?
6. They will want a retainer or basic salary to cover their risk.
7. Come with old employer way of doing things.
8. Demotivated by lack of established processes, support.
9. 90% chance of dropping out.
10. When they join you are entirely dependent on them.
Pros and Cons of 2.
What will happen is the following.
Three of them will not make the grade and go.
Of the remaining three a natural leader will emerge that the other two clearly follow their lead. Make them the Manager. They will not drop out and the team is already proven. You need to prepare materials, probably an online portal with key selling facts about your product and selling it.
Advantages are:
1.Much bigger talent pool to recruit from.
2. More people making sales calls daily to launch the business.
3.Keep making deals yourself and tell the new team to listen in to get the hang of it.
4. Competition and collaboration increasing productivity.
5. Diverse skill sets,
6. Can focus on Money hunger, ambition, attitude.
7. Even if half drop out the other three still selling.
9. Scalability: Building a team of salespeople allows for scalability as the business grows, rather than being reliant on a single Sales Manager.
10. New people to your industry tend to stay longer at first employment.
Problems are:
1.If they join at different times repeating training and onboarding.
2.More office facility may be needed.
3.You must be the Sales Manager initially.
The sell, in both cases, is that you can join at the top of the pyramid and build a team underneath you. Rather than in an established company at the bottom and fight the ones ahead of you for promotion. Best leads etc.
Business owners usually greatly exaggerate how much a sales professional needs to know product wise to get going. If they are good, they are getting the prospect to do most of talking.
I have seen many companies try both above. Option 2 makes more profit quicker