Making Your First Strategic Sales Leader Hire
Part 2 of my enterprise sales series, crystallizing the lessons learnt from scaling to IPO
Click here for Part 1 of my B2B enterprise sales series outlining the main areas to consider to achieve REVENUE success when scaling.
Making your first major strategic sales hire as your company is on the cusp of scaling, often to focus on larger, enterprise type of clients is very difficult. Some of the questions that you may be thinking about could be:
What if I put in all this effort and this person doesn't work out? How will it affect the rest of my organisation and my clients?
Which areas of experience do I need to weight more than others when deciding who to pick?
Can this person actually be an effective leader in the wider context of the overall organization?
…And many many more! The point is that instead of focusing on these fears, consider the opportunity cost of NOT making that hire and control the outcomes.
These are the primary considerations that I personally have when assessing candidates:
Firstly, I tend to focus on behaviour characteristics. After many painful experiences, I have realised that you cannot fundamentally change someone’s inherent character. So what do I look out for?
The first characteristic is being highly structured in terms of thinking style. There is no substitute for a sales leader to be good analyst - for example, the ability to consider every facet of the situation with a large prospect, or critically analyze the specific issues that their sales report have, or come up with an effective compensation plan.
A strong and innate desire to research and learn about all different types of business models. A fundamentally critical aspect of B2B enterprise sales is the ability to thoroughly understand the key drivers and sensitivities embedded within a prospect or client’s own business, to figure out where any given solution can fit and how much value it can drive.
Discpline. Discipline comes in many forms when it relates to sales. The discipline of effective research before meeting any prospect, the discipline of writing structured call notes, the discipline of maintaining a healthy pipeline, the discipline of following up effectively… and many more.
Having both a hunter and a coaching mentality. At the beginning of the scaling journey, there is usually a strong need for both someone who will lead from the front, originating the most meaningful commercial contracts but at the same time, is capable of transititioning to an effective coach to help guide, nurture and level-up their sales people.
Strong evidence of these behaviour patterns tends to be a great leading indicator of go-to-market success.
If you are interested in collaborating directly with me to help your company grow REVENUES, including effective leadership hiring with a template of the right questions to ask during interviews, please…:
Secondly, in terms of prior professional experiences, it goes without saying that if someone has gone through the experience of having scaled an organization in a similar position to yours, that person is a diamond in the rough. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they can fit into the culture or into the specific leadership dynamics inherent in your organization. That needs to be properly tested.
However, I have found that the following professional experiences also tend to be good leading indicators of success for such a hire:
Having overseen the build out of a ringfenced P&L centre from scratch as part of a larger corporate structure. The critical word here is ringfenced - this person needs to have had real control over business planning and resource deployment. This is also often good because of the level of negotiation that person will have had to do with critical stakeholders in the wider organization to further their agenda.
Revenue based role in a boutique professional services firm such as management consulting or investment banking. Once again, the operative word is boutique. This has to be case - their firm cannot have been a big brand name. A boutique firm needs to fight for business in a way that an established professional services firm does not. Furthermore, originating and structuring professional services contracts is a highly complex endeavour.
Making your first strategic sales leader hire is fraught with difficulty but is ultimately necessary and rewarding. Once onboard, they do need to be integrated and managed carefully (which will be the topic of a future post on organizational design for effective sales!).
If you are interested in collaborating directly with me to help your company grow REVENUES, including effective leadership hiring with a template of the right questions to ask during interviews, please…:
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