Sales Team Assemble! Key Hires

Building any team from scratch is a difficult task, but there’s a lot riding on your sales team, so if you make a misstep it can be costly.

Even if you are only hiring one sales person initially, having a clear plan from the get-go will be worth its weight in gold. If things go well, you will be expanding and growing your team, so think carefully before you make your first sales hire.

However, before we dive into the specific roles you should be thinking about, let’s first think about what skills a salesperson should have.

Good listeners

Entrepreneurs have passion and product knowledge in spades, but this doesn't necessarily make them a good salesperson.

There are certain skills that every good salesperson has, and the ability to listen is a key skill in sales.

Customers have specific needs - problems that need to be solved - and a great salesperson will pick up on these and address them.

Salespeople also need to be focused and disciplined, as let’s be honest, you don’t want to end up having to micromanage your sales team. And of course, they need to have thick skin. It’s a tough business and your team needs to be up to the challenges of knock backs and tricky customers.

Always look out for these key skills when you’re hiring for your sales team.

Think about structure

When you’re building your team, you need first to decide whether your team will have a vertical or horizontal structure.

If you go for a vertical structure, it will mean that each member of your sales team will be a bit of a sales generalist. In a vertical structure, one salesperson will handle a particular sale from the very beginning to the very end - including generating leads, nurturing leads, and closing the sale.

While this is a perfectly fine way to structure a team, it requires each salesperson to hold a complete set of sales skills. Often people who can juggle all these things are highly specialised and sought after, and so you may find it harder to fill the roles successfully.

The other option is to find people with some of these skills and train them up. The effectiveness of this could be hit and miss, and you also need internal training skills to succeed.

In comparison, in a horizontal structure, one person will deal with (and specialise in) each stage of the sales process. This means each person your customer will meet will be highly proficient at what they do, which in turn means your sales funnel and customer journey will be optimised and streamlined, as every person knows exactly what they are doing at any one point.

Not every business will have a single person for every stage, and not every business’ structure will be 100% horizontal and 100% vertical. For a bootstrapped scaleup, hiring a whole host of salespeople right off the bat might not be an option, but it’s useful to know your options and what the makeup of your future sales team could be.

If you do decide on a horizontal structure, here are the key roles you should look to fill:

Sales manager

The leader of the pack - the sales manager is the bedrock of your sales team.

This person, while being an experienced and passionate salesperson themselves, will be the person to guide and motivate the rest of your sales team, and liaise and report to the rest of the company.

This will include interacting with other teams on how the sales team works within the wider organisation, and corresponding with the C-suite on progress and targets. It’s a big responsibility, so make sure you choose wisely.

Marketer

While your mind might not instantly think of a marketing person when you look to build your sales team, sales and marketing actually go hand-in-hand. Marketing creates quality leads, and works in harmony with sales - complementing and enhancing what your salespeople can do.

However, sales marketing is different to content marketing, so you will need a specific sales marketer - someone who knows about paid advertising, landing pages, social media and other such customer-facing parts of your business.

Lead generator

This is the person who transforms potential leads (like a list of email addresses) into warm leads (an engaged audience). They do things like verify contact information, locate the decision makers in each business, reach out to potential customers, and maybe even do some cold calling.

There is often a fair amount of overlap with marketing here, so if yours is a smaller team, you might want to combine these roles. It’s not for the faint of heart, and it’s absolutely key to any sales department.

Lead nurturer

Nurturers are the people who inform the potential customer, resolving any questions or queries they might have. They are the ones who encourage the prospects to get curious, and find out what their pain points are - and figure out how your product can solve them.

This role can also overlap with lead generation or closing. When building your team and interviewing candidates, you can always be flexible depending on the talent you find and where their skills lie.

The closer

Often considered to be the ‘star’ of the sales team, the closer is the person who gets the customer to sign on the dotted line.

They need to be personable, persuasive, and their attention to detail needs to be excellent. They help customers come to conclusions and encourage them to action a solution. They need to be able to perform under pressure - a lot of the team's efforts lie with their abilities to get the deal done.

Customer support

This is a crucial part of the whole process. If you sell something the customer doesn’t know how to use, they are likely to want a refund and all of this was for nothing. In fact, customer support is also vital to any sort of subscription model.

And of course, keeping the customer happy and engaged can also lead to them spending more money on additional features and products. All cross selling or upselling lies with the customer support.

Account manager

Often here there is a lot of overlap with customer support, but an account manager oversees everything happening with a particular client. They can keep track of past dealings, their particular situation, any previous issues, requests, anything that might crop up once the deal has been closed.

These are the basic 6 roles that you should consider when building your sales team. Remember, the members of your sales team are the ones out on the ground meeting customers and potential customers. They are often the face of your business, so make sure they are on board with your vision and mission.