How to Effectively Hire and Onboard Your Sales Team

Let’s start with the obvious. The point of investing in a new salesperson or team is to increase your revenue by growing your business.

Here’s another seemingly obvious statement: good hires in a well-structured machine lead to revenue growth. It’s a simple, effective equation. However, it’s one that relies heavily on a few modifiers:

• A “good” hire isn’t just a salesperson with a good selling history. It’s a quality salesperson who specializes in filling in the gaps your team needs filled.
• A well-structured machine doesn’t just refer to the services or products you offer, but the entire selling machine, from your sales funnel (yes, including how the leads come in, aka marketing) to your processes and beyond.

A great hunter may be a “good” salesperson, but they won’t be a good hire if your team needs somebody to farm existing accounts. And even the perfect salesperson to fill the needs of your team will struggle to be successful if there is no process in place to teach, no designated onboarding plan, and unclear expectations.

So how can you make sure that you’re looking for the right additions to your team and have the right processes in place to set them, and you, up for success? Keep reading to find out.

Set the Intention.

You don’t build a bookshelf by opening up a box and slapping pieces together while hoping for the best. You read the instructions, follow the steps, and piece-by-piece, the furniture is assembled.

Just like when you’re building IKEA furniture, you need a plan (and patience). A well-defined sales process needs to be created before you can build the team to run it. A good process doesn’t just tick imaginary boxes and move leads through a funnel. It should be scalable to plan for future growth, stable, and easily replicable.

Once your process is defined, note what the different parts of the process are and what or who you’ll need to run each step. More likely than not, you’ll need:

• People to move customers through different points of the funnel to get them closer to the point of sale.
• People to create new opportunities.
• People to manage and grow relationships with existing customers.
• A person who manages the entire team.

As you create this plan, keep in mind that no part of your funnel or process should be entirely reliant on one single person. When one (or several) steps of the process become the sole responsibility of one person, you end up with three things: a bottle neck, when the person inevitably falls behind, stalling the rest of the team; burn out as the one person tries to stay on top of their role; and a lot of liability. If that one person unexpectedly leaves, your entire process will be in jeopardy and your entire team will be in a very tight spot.

One way to determine if any tasks rely too heavily on one person is to think about your current team. If any of those salespeople left today, how bad of a hit would it be? Would your business be able to recover, and how much time would it take? The right sales structure protects your team from unexpected departures, in addition to helping you find the right hires.

Once you’ve set the intention for how your sales processes should run, you’ll understand how your existing team fits into it and where you have gaps. The best part? As you continue to grow, you’ll already have a roadmap to continue expanding the team.

What Kind of Salesperson Do You Need?

Your funnel is outlined, you know where your current personnel slot in, and you’ve identified your gaps. By now, you should have a pretty good idea of what selling personalities your team needs.

Ask yourself:

• Do we have a process in place to generate leads? Is this process generating enough leads, and do the leads generated represent our target customer base?
• Can we identify businesses in our marketplace that we’d like somebody to start meeting with?
• How long is our team’s typical sales cycle?
• What are the touch points in our sales cycle and what timelines do these touch points usually take place over?
• How quickly do we need the new hires to onboard? Are we looking for a self-starter or somebody who we can really mold to our processes?
• Is this a defined and possibly specialized role?

The answers to these questions will help you craft your job description, or several job descriptions if you’re trying to fill several different kinds of gaps. Even better, there will already be a clearly defined set of responsibilities for each salesperson you do hire.

Set Your Sales Team Up for Success.

This may not need to be said, but just in case: even a good salesperson can’t be parked in front of a phone, told to sell, and be expected to achieve supreme success. It may be a common model in d-list telemarketing operations, but for most businesses, a chair, phone, and script won’t magically give you customers. Especially not long-term ones.

Your sales team needs to be provided with a few things. Namely, resources, tools, and clear objectives.

Before you start interviewing candidates, make sure you define a few important things internally. Think about what the hire will be doing on a day-to-day basis. Will they be finding new leads, building connections, or working with existing customers to grow their accounts?

Next, determine what part of the funnel they will be responsible for. Do you expect the new hire to be the first point of contact for a new prospective customer, help reactivate stale leads, or be the one who closes the sale?

Consider what resources are available to support their primary functions. Are they using tools, like a CRM to track progress and share information with the broader team? Is there somebody they can go to with questions? It’s also important to define who their manager will be. You’ll also want to make sure there is a clear roadmap for onboarding and training them, as well as who will be responsible each step of the way.

Make sure you have a clearly defined compensation structure, including any factors that their compensation may be tied to. Note that most of the factors that influence their compensation should be within their control, rather than ones determined by external circumstances.

Finally, make sure you, and they, know how their performance will be evaluated.

“I already have a great process in place. I don’t need to come up with answers to all of these questions!” It’s an easy trap to fall into. Of course, if your process is as good as you think it is and all of the details are already in place, answering these questions will be a very quick exercise.

An equally easy (and possibly more dangerous) trap is thinking you’ll figure it out as you go. You might, but it’ll take a lot of trial and error that doesn’t set any part of your team up for success in the short-term, which will make it even harder to identify what hires will be most beneficial for your team and how you’ll be able to evaluate if they’re the right fit.

Get Guidance.

If you’re first starting to build a dedicated sales organization or approaching the first big expansion, you may not be familiar with the ins and outs of sales and marketing organizations, how they run, or how they need to work together to be successful. You may have gotten by just fine “winging it”. Many groups do when their sales team consists of one or two people.

But now that you’re building a larger team, you need structure. What you don’t need is to go about creating it blindly.

Reading books, attending webinars, listening to podcasts featuring sales professionals, talking to experts, and working with a sales consultant are all great ways to assess what your team really needs to reach your growth goals and set yourself up for long-term success.

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A healthy relationship between sales and marketing is vital to an organization’s success. Dive deep into this effective strategy in our book  Sales & Marketing Alignment. If you'd like more insights on how you can improve your sales leadership, contact us.