The Sales Success Formula: What Sets Top Teams Apart

🚀 Unpopular Opinion Alert: Your sales leader is the key to your sales team's success.

Sales management has more of an impact than any sales skills training, technology investment or strategy.

The transition from being founder-led in sales to hiring a Head of Sales is a pivotal moment. The challenge? Often, the chosen leader is highly experienced in strategy and structure but lacks the hands-on experience of selling. In other words, they might be skilled at designing the ideal game plan, but aren't familiar with pulling the levers needed to achieve the desired results. I.e they lack the ability to coach their account executives through their deals.

Drawing from my career in sales and consulting, I've assembled and mentored over 50 sales teams. The most common mistake I witness is founders hiring their first Head of Sales without a sales background. It's akin to appointing a head of engineering with no engineering expertise—an unlikely move.

This article serves as a guide to identify the essential components of sales leadership, helping founders navigate that crucial initial hire. Each point I outline is integral, and neglecting any element could hinder your path to success.

What do top sales leaders know how to do?

1. Sales Leaders know which sales activities influences which sales objectives.Ultimately, the sales leader needs to know what levers to pull which affect the results. If they don’t know, they will not be able to coach and guide the team to the finish line. Some people call this the Sales Playbook, others just call it experience.To understand this concept in more detail, Jason Jordan explains it in detail in Cracking the Sales Management Code.As a frontline sales manager you are the coach. The coach knows what plays to give their team to yield certain results. As your strategy changes, you will direct them to do a different set of activities which will achieve the new desired result. This is the number one way managers can improve a sales team and influence results.
2. Sales Leaders develop the Sales Structure for their team.Sales Structure is the way your team is set up. Are you an island structure, with each sales person in charge of their own leads, sales and account management? Are you big enough to move to an assembly line structure with each stage of the sales process have a designated person who specialises?Your structure can and will change over time, but the direction comes from sales management, so it is important to understand the options and choose the one which best suits the stage you are in. Startups often struggle because they grow so quickly and don’t always change the structure to reflect their growth. This can cause unnecessary bottlenecks and slow growth.
3. Sales Leaders develop and manage ‘Sales Enablement’ aids for their team.Sales Enablement is the collection of support offered to ensure the sales team can sell the most effectively. It includes training given, coaching, tools and how they are reviewed.Training: A sales team requires regular training on all aspects of the business. Especially in a fast moving company like a startup. Developing a process for consistent training is vital and instrumental to the success of your team.Coaching: It is the most effective way to improve their skills and knowledge. Training instills common knowledge, coaching builds up the skills of the individual salesperson.Tools: Equip your sales team with tools and job aids that support their selling activities. The level of tools given has a tremendous impact on how consistent your team is in their selling activities. A sales team needs a certain level of support from the rest of the company to move their prospects through the sales stages. Performance Management: The only way to know if what you are doing is working is by assessing it, reflecting and making adjustments. If you only assess the team based on the results, it is too late. You can no longer change the process, because you already have the results. Assessing your team’s performance requires assessing both leading and lagging key performance indicators. A great sales leader will see the team's conversion rate from prospect to proposal is dropping, which means the leads are less qualified than before and this will impact the results of this quarter. The sales leader will know to coach qualification questions and work with the SDRs to bring in more qualified leads.
4. Sales Leaders develop and implement ‘Sales Engineering’ for their sales team.The collective processes the sales team follow are the foundation of your growth. We call the set of processes, sales engineering. Without following a process, achieving your targets will be left to chance.It is proven that companies who have rigorous sales processes outperform those with ad hoc ones. The processes which need to be developed are:a) Client Contact Management - how do the SDRs reach out, what do they say, who do they target?b) Opportunity Management - how to the sales team sell and handle the opportunity, what is the sales process? c) Account Management - how are the accounts grown?d) Strategy - What is the strategy each process leads up to?e) Sales Enablement management - how can we help the team?
5. Sales Leaders know how to identify the best sales people and managers for their teamSales leaders are required to be the ‘specialist’ within the recruitment process. They need to know how to identify if the candidates have the skill sets they need. As they are mostly likely going to be the ones managing them, they need to feel a connection and have faith in them. It is important to stay away from recruitment biases and try to find someone who ticks all the criteria boxes and isn’t just someone who went to a good school or ‘looks the part’.A sales person isn't a sales person, isn't a sales person. There are many different types of sales people and the hard part is that often they are very good at selling themselves in an interview. The sales leader needs to understand what skills they need for the stage the business is at today. What type of sales person will help get them to the next stage?
6. Sales Leaders set the targets, KPIs and development the incentive structure to achieve those targets.Targets: Startups have a hard time setting targets when they have nothing to base it on. It is difficult to balance ambition with reality. Sales teams need targets, but the risk of having an unrealistic target can be more damaging to a team than not having any targets at all. That is why I created a method to setting targets for ambitious, growing startups which helps increase and reduce targets where necessary. Incentives: In order to achieve a target your team needs to be incentivised. Don't start with 'this is their job'. You want sales, pay commission. The power of incentives are strong. Just look at how many people lose all that weight for their wedding day, but haven’t been able to do it otherwise 🙂. When there is a powerful enough incentive, you will find a way to achieve your goal.

At For Startups - GTM & Sales Coach we acknowledge that evaluating the strength of a sales leader can be daunting, especially for founders without a sales background. Our approach involves guiding founders through these six crucial points, helping establish a solid foundation and enabling you to identify the specific type of sales leader your startup needs.

It often happens that a startup's sales process mirrors the background of the sales leader, even if a different setup might be more effective. With experience collaborating with over 50 startups across various industries, we have a comprehensive understanding of the diverse ways to build a high-performing sales team.

If you're interested in learning more about best practices in sales leadership or how we can assist you in building your sales team, please don't hesitate to reach out. We're here to support your journey to sales success.

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