Building a sales team from the ground up is riddled with mistakes to be made, especially if you haven’t put the time and effort into developing hiring processes.
You can minimize these mistakes with a little bit of research, and luckily for you, we’ve done a lot of research and summarized it in this handy guide.
This article will go over the importance of sales teams, how to hire, onboarding, compensation structures, and developing your sales team post-hire.
What is a sales team?
Sales teams are groups of individuals who sell a company’s products or services to prospects and customers. This group is responsible for meeting the organization’s goals for growth and revenue.
Sales management is vital in maintaining a company’s cash flow and ensuring that other departments have the resources for long-term plans and projects.
The Importance of Sales Teams
Sales teams are absolutely critical to the success of an organization.
High-performance sales teams have many benefits; here are a few key ones:
- Identifying and nurturing qualified leads
- Improving conversion rates across the board
- Gaining valuable feedback and insight from customers
- Relationship building with prospects for long-term success
Investing resources in a team that knows how to close a sale from front to back is an invaluable asset that any company can justify.
Hiring Your Sales Team
Without proper processes for hiring, sales organizations fall apart quickly and experience high turnover rates.
While sales leadership is often proficient at hiring the right people for their team, getting HR involved is a more vital play. HR professionals have the knowledge and skills to weed out less than suitable recruits, improve employee retention, and speed up hiring.
Sales Team Roles
Team composition will vary depending on your organization's size, goals, and needs.
However, there’s no reason to overcomplicate things: most sales teams follow a very similar structure that consists of the following 3 sales positions:
- Sales Development Representative (SDR): SDRs are entry-level positions that obtain and contact leads before handing them off to account executives for the deal to be negotiated and closed.
- Account Executive: Account executives, also known as sales representatives, are the lifeblood of any organization. They work with leads to close deals and bring in new revenue.
- Sales Manager: Sales managers are responsible for the overall performance of the sales team, developing sales strategy, setting individual and team goals, and motivating sales representatives to perform at their best.
Hiring Platforms You Should Consider
Hiring platforms are websites or applications where employers can post job openings and build a talent pool to choose from when hiring. For those in the job hunt, hiring platforms provide a streamlined process that’s often faster than manually applying to companies that may or may not be hiring.
While there are dozens of hiring platforms available online, 5 stand out for sales position openings.
- LinkedIn: LinkedIn is possibly the most prominent job posting platform online, as it’s the most popular social network for professionals. Recruiters can easily filter potential candidates to find the perfect hire for their sales team.
- Glassdoor: Glassdoor started as merely a website for employees to review employers, but it has evolved into a sophisticated job board for finding sales hires.
- Indeed: Indeed offers advanced search capabilities and a handy employer dashboard, making hiring easy and straightforward.
- Repvue: Unlike the platforms listed above, Repvue specializes in sales organizations and is a great place to find the right people for your team.
- Builtin: Builtin is one of the best hiring platforms for tech and startup companies. If you fit the bill, this should be your top priority place to build your sales team.
No matter which hiring platform catches your eye, remember that using multiple platforms can help you build a larger talent pool of candidates.
Make sure to build processes to track the quality of applications on a per-platform basis, and you’ll be able to fine-tune your hiring process over time. For example, you may notice that applicants from LinkedIn are more prepared for job interviews than those from Indeed. In this case, HR might consider not using Indeed going forward in future hiring rounds.
Sample Questions for Interviewing Sales Reps
Sales positions require an in-depth understanding of the company, its position in the market, and the industry as a whole. They also hinge on multifaceted sales representatives who use a wide range of skills, from identifying customer needs to handling objections.
Because of this nuance, interviewing should cover many different angles to get an overview of the candidate’s knowledge and skills.
Here are a few questions you can use in your sales position interviews:
- What do you know about our company?
- What are your short-term and long-term goals in sales?
- How would you describe our products or services to a potential customer?
- What was your most successful sale as an inside sales representative?
- What software are you familiar using in sales positions?
- How comfortable are you taking cold calls?
- How do you keep up with industry trends and news?
Onboarding Your Sales Team
Even though you’ve successfully hired your sales team members, the HR journey is far from over. After hiring, it’s time to focus on onboarding—showing new hires how your organization operates and getting them acclimated to their new work environment.
Sales Training
Sales training is the process of helping your sales reps learn, develop skills, and improve their performance over time. This is typically done through a mixture of hosting meetings and formal teaching of skills like cold email strategy, handling objections, and relationship-building.
According to Retorio, sales training generates an average of 353% ROI for companies. In other words, every dollar spent on training brings in up to $4.53 in new revenue!
While you might think of training as a dull classroom environment, it can be so much more than lectures and presentations. Here are a few components of a dynamic sales training program:
- Mentorship: Pairing managers and experienced reps with the ones who need help the most is possibly one of the most effective ways to level up your team as a whole. Teaching skills build confidence, and learning skills build competence.
- Real-World Sales Experience: The best way to learn is by doing, so sales training programs should have activities built-in so that reps can learn from real-world experience. Taking sales calls is one example of an easy way to get your feet wet.
- Specific Skill Development: Correcting deficiencies and embracing strengths are the core of any good skill development program.
- Collaboration: They say that no one succeeds alone, and this is especially true for sales teams. Even your top performers can’t walk alone—collaborative efforts lighten the workload while providing new insights that can close new deals.
- Self-Directed Learning: At some point, the training wheels must come off. The best sales training programs provide plenty of opportunities for sales staff to build autonomy in their learning journey.
Compensation Structure
While compensation isn’t the only way to motivate your sales team, it’s important that incentives align with their motivations.
At the end of the day, everyone wants to get paid for their time and efforts. After all, it’s one of the first things people will look at when browsing job openings.
Does the compensation fulfill their needs? Is there room for growth? Candidates will ask these questions when considering new sales opportunities.
No matter how you slice it, your compensation structure will be a combination of these 2 elements:
- Salary: You can pay this on an hourly rate or an annual salary, paid out bi-weekly or monthly.
- Commissions: Commissions can greatly vary in % per deal closed depending on a number of factors. This puts sales representatives’ skin in the game, where their earnings are tied to how much profit they can bring the organization.
The salary breakdown vs. commission you pay each team member will depend on their job title and experience. One common approach is to pay everyone the same salary while commissions are paid out at different rates based on their position.
Striking a balance between improving your bottom line and paying your team well enough to motivate them to strive for more is critical for overall success.
Implementing Sales Software
Sales teams need to be cutting-edge in all they do to get a leg up on competing agencies.
This is especially true when it comes to choosing the right tools to succeed.
Sales software helps your team members collaborate more effectively and better predict sales trends by monitoring past and current efforts.
At the very least, you should consider using a sales CRM (customer relationship manager) to better organize leads in your pipeline and track deal status.
Or you could consider using an all-in-one sales software platform like Instantly. You’ll be able to find new leads, send out sales emails, and monitor campaign performance. You can sign up for a free trial here today.
Developing Your Sales Team
Once you’ve onboarded your new hires, it’s time to get granular and work on developing their individual skills. This is typically done by hosting intimate meetings with sales reps to identify their needs, motivations, strengths, and weaknesses.
From here, sales leadership’s role is to provide sufficient coaching, set realistic goals, collect feedback, and build company culture.
Sales Coaching
Sales coaching is where sales managers have conversations with sellers to improve their performance over time. It usually involves goal setting and giving constructive feedback so that sellers can reach their potential.
The first step in sales coaching is to create a plan for each sales team member. This plan should be regularly revisited, adjusting as necessary to meet individual goals.
A typical sales coaching plan will include the following:
- Focus Areas of Development
- Hard and Soft Skills to Work On
- Knowledge To be Taught or Gained from Sales Experience
- Action Plan for Developing Skills
- Testing Methodology for Monitoring Proficiency Development
Goal Setting
Setting straightforward, realistic sales quotas is essential to running a successful sales team.
While sales management traditionally sets goals, goals set in collaboration between leadership and sales representatives are much more effective.
Getting Feedback from New Hires
Constructive feedback helps guide process building.
Getting feedback from your new hires is just as important as getting feedback from your proven veterans. This is especially true regarding feedback on your hiring and onboarding processes.
There are 2 proven approaches to collecting feedback from your staff:
- One-on-one meetings where you request feedback
- Establishing methods of gathering anonymous feedback
To get feedback from your sales team, you have to nurture an environment where people not only feel safe but are empowered to offer feedback that is actually used to guide company culture. Even if you develop a culture of feedback sharing, new hires won’t always be as receptive to giving feedback as ones engrained in the company. It’s your job as a sales leader to foster a space where everyone is comfortable. The future of your sales organization depends on it!
The most straightforward way to receive feedback is to host meetings with individuals who will share their thoughts on specific aspects of the company you want to improve.
You could also consider running surveys regularly to check in with your team. This could be done anonymously on a quarterly schedule so that you can align sales strategy with feedback.
Building Buyer-Centric Company Culture
The first and most important step in building a buyer-centric company culture is understanding customer needs and the reasoning behind those needs.
The only way to achieve this is by hiring the right people and sufficiently training them. You’ll need salespeople who embody buyer-centric values and care about the customer.
Use your job postings to cultivate a talent pool of buyer-centric candidates and your interviews to determine just how buyer-centric they are.
Effective company culture is the byproduct of the methods of developing your sales team we already covered: coaching, goal setting, and collecting feedback. If you can nail these 3 components down, you’re in a great position for buyer-centric company culture.
Key Takeaways
There are 3 key stages of building a sales team that can meet and surpass their targets: hiring, onboarding, and development.
Hiring the best starts with determining your team composition. From here, you’ll need to build a talent pool from popular hiring platforms, and finally, you need to interview candidates to find the right people for your specific organization.
Onboarding integrates new hires into your existing team and sets a fair compensation structure to adequately motivate.
Sales team development involves creating a coaching program to retain training, clearly define goals, and monitor performance. Finally, you’ll want to create systems to collect feedback from new hires so that you can improve your processes.
While this may sound like a lot of work, it can be streamlined by implementing sales software platforms like Instantly. Sign up for a free trial today!
