Manage These Roles and Responsibilities to Build a Killer Sales Team

Meta: As your business grows, your sales team grows with you. In this post, we explore who does what when planning to grow a sales team

Planning to grow a sales team? Here’s Proven Advice to Scale Like a Pro

When you’re a start-up, you keep your team small to allow you to focus your money on building your product. Everyone helps out with a little bit of everything. Including sales. As you grow, though, you need to start planning to grow your sales team (and dealing with the challenges that come with that).

Having a smaller sales team means you’ve got a few people who are taking care of all the tasks that need to be done, qualifying leads, conducting sales calls, managing accounts, looking after customer renewals. 

But, as your company grows (regardless of whether it’s upmarket or downmarket), your sales teams need to grow along with your company. That means adding members of your team to take some of the pressure off your sales by taking over tasks that distract them from reaching their sales goals.

The transition period when you go from a tiny team to a dedicated sales team needs to be carefully managed to help ensure everybody is productive and happy. And that they’re excited to be a part of a growing team.

Hiring and training successful sales professionals

A big consideration when you’re planning to grow your sales team is making sure that you not only hire people who are a good fit for your company, but also that you provide the proper training to help them reach growth goals. 

Hiring is a time-consuming process. Anyone who does it will confirm. You want to try to reduce employee churn to the point where you don’t have to hire unless you’re experiencing growth. The best way to do that is with a solid hiring process. Ask questions that reveal a candidate’s adaptability, work ethic, prior success, and how they deal with failure. These characteristics can tell you a lot about how someone will fit into your team, and will help you figure out where they fit into the ecosystem of your company. 

When it comes to training your growing sales team, don’t just rely on job shadowing. Create a repeatable, measurable process based on past successes. If you run assessments of your sales team, you can use those assessments to figure out what areas new staff might need the most help with. You ultimately want to be sure that everyone comes away from their training with the same information and goals. 

You’ll probably go through a few different iterations of what the ideal training (and hiring) process looks like for your company, so don’t lose heart if it takes a while to really nail it down (this is something that we can help with, as well). 

Defining roles and responsibilities for your growing sales team(s)

At the start of the transition period, get everybody to work together. This means keeping the all hands on deck approach that happened during the lean start-up phase. 

Part of the reason for this is that you need to see what everybody’s strengths are. Identifying everyone’s strengths will help you assign people roles within the sales team that they’re going to own. If you notice someone is great at closing, put them in a role that lets them focus on closing. If they’re great at qualifying leads, let them spend time on that process.

You can then observe your team working like this and keep in close communication with them as the team begins to increase efficiency and grow, so that you can make decisions based on what’s working and what needs to be reviewed.

The roles that exist within your sales team depend on what growth is looking like in your business. A mid-size company, for example, is going to be able to add more people to work in more closely focused roles than a smaller business where its too soon to afford the headcount.

You may find that you actually have a skilled marketer hiding in your sales team, or vice versa, and as your company grows you can support that person in moving to the role that suits them and your company productivity best.

What sales compensation looks like as you grow

One challenge as roles change within the sales team is making sure that compensation remains fair. What this means is that if you take someone away from a role where they’re making good money through commissions, the communication and expectation setting on earnings in any new role is vital.

An example: If you need to move a rep from a transactional closing position to a role where they are compensated on retention and upsell to your largest clients. The weighting of salary to commission may change.

The goal is to keep rewarding your sales team for their efforts while helping them understand that both your business and their role within that business needs to evolve. It may take a while to find the balance, but it’s attainable. 

When you’re thinking about how to compensate your team, you need to consider the kinds of customers that everyone is going to be working with. 

• Smaller customers need a lot of handholding. 

• Mid-level customers tend to have more influencers than smaller ones in any decision.

• Larger customers often have a long sales cycle because there can be many stages to their procurement process, which adds levels of complexity to everything. 

At each level, compensation is going to be different. Easier sales often earn a smaller commission for each one but can be lucrative because you can close them faster and they are more responsive to energy such as heroic end of month efforts to get the numbers up. 

Complex sales cycles or sales that take a lot of nurturing and patience often require a heavier weighting toward base salary to keep compensation interesting, and can be very lucrative for the rep and the company when they sign. 

As to what compensation looks like, you may choose to pay a salary with flat commission on every sale, or you may have a commission only salesperson, or you may be moving towards an on-target earnings model (OTE). On-target earnings are a mix of salary and commission. It represents the target salary someone would earn if they meet all their quotas. Many other models for compensation do exist - and the use of accelerators and bonuses are common to incentivize the right performance.

Understanding your growing sales team

Communication is the key during these transitory stages as your team grows. The more you keep your team in the loop, the more understanding everyone has of why decisions are being made the way they are. It can be a lot of work, but it’s worth the effort.

If you need help to define the roles and responsibilities within your growing team, or are scratching your head trying to figure out how to grow your sales team as you evolve from where you are to where you need to be a year from now, we can help. We have experience navigating the challenges that come with growth and can create a system that works, or even run your sales team for you.

Ready to learn more? Contact us today.