The benefits of the Sales Growth Team model
As the founder of a growing business, you might be ready to scale up your sales function. If you’re looking to hire a sales person or team, there are many factors to consider. Let’s explore the benefits of using our Sales Growth Team model.[/vc_column_text]
You’re #Hiring
New Position: Sales Director – growth mindset, C-level sales experience, start-up mentality, attractive salary, pre-IPO stock/equity, excellent benefits package.
If you are a business founder, equity partner or CEO of a growing start-up, you are probably looking to rapidly scale-up your business to the next level of sales and revenue growth. You may, therefore, be thinking about posting something similar to this job advert to a popular global professional networking site. We would encourage you, however, to think again.
A start-up business with a great idea, unique IP (having perhaps already invested considerably in R&D), huge market potential and clear competitive differentiation, would naturally have high growth potential. But what can hold that company back from capitalizing on those exceptional assets?
In our experiences with start-up and scale-up businesses, we often see the founder or CEO acting as both the Head of Business Development and the Head of Sales, while also overseeing every other aspect of the company. We call this ‘executive plate-spinning’. There will inevitably come a point where this approach becomes a barrier to sales growth. It simply does not scale effectively, and also hinders the innovation and creativity of the founder or CEO.
As a result, the founder or CEO looks to the professional and recruitment networks for the obvious antidote to the problem and the next ‘big hire’ – the experienced Sales Director and the inevitable team of Sales Development Reps that will follow closely behind.
This is the accepted norm. But – buyer beware – this does come with a number of potential issues:
Issue #1 – Cost
The incremental monthly payroll cost of hiring that Sales Director and sales team can be a significant drain on the company’s resources – and cash flow, in particular. Additionally, if an executive search firm or sales recruitment agency is employed to hire that team, you can expect to pay some significant fees based on the ‘attractive on-target-earnings’ figures that you quoted in your job advert! Those fees will also have a limited or rapidly reducing guarantee of refund over time, should the new hires not work out as planned.
Issue #2 – Risk
Hiring sales people, in general, is risky, while hiring the ‘right’ sales people can be difficult and time-consuming. It requires patience and a lot of trust in your own decision-making. It can also be very difficult, and potentially costly, to undo a recruitment decision. This in itself piles yet more pressure onto the founder or CEO and the due diligence needed during the selection process.
There is a popular belief that we subconsciously make decisions about people we meet in about seven seconds. If you put that into the context of a 60-minute interview, the remaining 59 minutes and 53 seconds will be spent justifying that subconscious decision, regardless of whether you are right or wrong. And it could, of course, be some time before you realise how right or wrong you were!
Issue #3 – Time
As a founder or CEO, you will generally be under numerous time pressures. Thinking specifically about the sales growth challenge, how long are you prepared to wait for your chosen Sales Director to:
- Start working (following the selection, offer, negotiation, acceptance, background checks, references and notice period)?
- Complete their onboarding (understand the business, culture, strategy, delivery model, unique value of your offering, sales process and the positive difference you make to your customers)?
- Start hiring the rest of the sales team? (see Issue #1 & #2)
Issue #4 – Return on investment (ROI)
This is essentially issue #1 multiplied by issue #3, or as Jerry Maguire might put it – ‘Show me the money!’ Once the founder or CEO has the Sales Director in place there will be some wait-time to get the sales team hired, working, onboarded and fully briefed on the company expense policy. You’ll endure some more wait-time for sales pipeline development, opportunity qualification and deal pursuit, assuming that you have the necessary CRM systems in place at this point.
All the while, your order performance will probably be flatlining, in stark contrast to your cash flow. How long are you prepared to wait for your first orders, the expected (and now essential) revenue growth, and the full in-year return on investment (ROI)? In our experience, the wait for reasonable returns will be a minimum of six months, maybe more, maybe never – depending on how hard issue #2 impacts you.
Issue #5 – The seven second impact
This is where issue #2 is not sufficiently mitigated and despite your seven seconds of detailed analysis, you may find in 6–12 months’ time – having gone through that rigorous recruitment process – that you actually haven’t hired the right Sales Director after all. Now you face going through the entire process all over again, with a potentially painful ‘exiting’ process on top.
Should the Sales Director turn out to be the key hire that you hoped for, there is a reasonable risk that one or more of the new sales team will underperform against their target or budget. The rest of the sales team will now need to overperform to meet your revenue targets, and for that you will have to pay in additional sales compensation, potentially impacting the ROI model further.
But is there another way?
In short, yes. At Sales Growth Team, we deliver an alternative model that gives the founder or CEO immediate access to a fully experienced Sales Director and equally experienced sales development team. These salespeople will be fully equipped with the latest sales prospecting software and coaching tools, without any recruitment process or fees – ready to go, ready to learn and ready to earn!
Your new sales team will very quickly get to understand the detail of your unique offering, your target customer personas, and your value to those customers and their customers’ customers. Sales prospecting will begin in your target markets, developing a high-quality sales funnel as a result. Fully qualified sales opportunity management then takes place – rapidly, and at scale – with a high degree of professionalism, all the while fully representing your brand and your culture.
Our model can deliver tangible results in a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost, and with a fraction of the risk. The sales team stands shoulder to shoulder with the founder or CEO, delivers on the promise of sales growth, and takes a shared risk or reward approach in terms of outcome.
The founders and CEOs that we talk to see the immediate benefits of this model. They quickly realise that this type of approach is viable for their business too; they see how it overcomes the issues of cost, risk and time when faced with acquiring an entirely new sales team in the ‘traditional manner’. If it feels like a lock-in, be assured that it is not. You have options and you have control – you can continue reaping the benefits and keep the model going and growing, scaling up and down with campaign demands. Alternatively, you may wish to transition the sales team into your business on a permanent basis, once the value has been proven beyond any doubt.
Sales Growth Team are an experienced team of Sales, Marketing and Operations specialists. We bring a different perspective to delivering repeatable sales and revenue outcomes to founders, equity partners and CEOs looking to take their business to the next level of revenue growth.
What are your thoughts? Let us know – you may find that you’re not #Hiring after all.
