Have you heard all of the horror stories from other founders about hiring the wrong sales rep? The potential sales churn is real for a startup but knowing what qualities to look forward what to ask in an interview can help you avoid spinning wheels on the wrong hire. By the way, the expense with churning an Account Executive can be as much as 18 months of their salary. In tech startups that could be as much as $150k+ which can be detrimental to an early stage. Read these tips on how to find the best match for your org:

Indicators That Your Startup Is Ready For A Sales Rep

• Do not hire anyone for sales until you have product-market fit and have sold at least 10 deals yourself as a founder. You must prove the sales process yourself. As the founder, you’re the only one that can bring the original passion to your product/service that will initially sell it. Once you validate product-market fit then you can teach your value prop, sales process, etc to a new sales hire to execute.
• Is your customer lifetime value (CLTV) over $5k? If it is, then you’re more than likely ready for a sales hire.
• If your CLTV is over $5k then you more than likely have a complex sales process that a rep can provide value in navigating. Great sales reps live and breathe problem-solving for their clients and will add the most value to your organization in this way.

Qualities To Look For In Your First Sales Hire

Startups need to scale and grow revenue so it makes sense to hire a sales team at some point. Here are some key qualities you need to really focus on feeling during the interview process to ensure they are a great fit for your stage in growth. There are great reps but not everyone is ready for the constant change and uncertainty that a startup environment can have.

Leadership Qualities: Coachable and desire for constant learning, inspirational, shows passion to make a big impact on the world vs. immediate large paycheck (outward focus vs. inward focus). Accountable for results. Can voice their career vision so you can evaluate their fit into the growth plan of your company.

Communication Qualities: Detailed communicator. Extroverts however introspective as they’ll need to be very flexible with customer personality styles. Your ideal customer may change while you continue to grow and pivot as a company. Empathetic, active listeners perform well.

Sales Style: To really understand a rep’s style, ask for examples of how they exceeded sales goals and delighted customers. Ask them about times when they lost a deal and how they handled it. This will tell you about their resilience and ability to handle the emotional sales rollercoaster. What does the sales rep do when they are handed leads? You want to hire someone that understands the importance of outbound prospecting vs. waiting for leads.

Consultative selling skills are required for startups. Being able to enroll your customers and solve their problems with your company’s solution will be critical. Ask your candidate to give you an example of when they were able to break into a new account, build a relationship that perhaps was looking at the competitor and convert them to a sale.

Culture Is King: This is so important as they will be holding the flag for your company, selling not just your widget but the story behind the widget. If they don’t feel comfortable or supported by your team and they are a high performer, they will leave prematurely on you so set them up for success by hiring for a good culture fit.

Check Their Network: Check with former colleagues and clients before you hire them. You want to hire someone that is delighting their customers, collaborating with colleagues, and making a positive impact in their work environment. Checking a person’s network can be done easily through LinkedIn if you aren’t already connected with them. See where they worked previously and make some cold outreach prior to checking the reference contacts the candidate gives you. Provides some additional context for your hiring decision.

I hope you find these tips helpful when looking to hire one of the first reps. It is a big step and if you’re reading this article, you must take it seriously. My mission as the founder of Relativity Sells is to help tech founders accelerate their revenue by translating their secret sauce to their first sales team and maximize rep performance through enablement. For more weekly sales tips or information please visit Relativity Sells or follow Amy Looper, Founder.

We see this problem among tech companies of all sizes. Clients demoing but not converting.
Clients raising their hand to test the latest technology, you implement a POC and it sits on
the shelf. Why would any of this happen? The client owes you better attention and respect
than that right? WRONG….

Follow These 6 Steps To Strengthen Your Discovery Process:

1. Set the agenda for your initial discovery call with intention. Ensure that you include the meeting agenda in your calendar invite for easy reference by your client. Most importantly, ensure your agenda brings value.

Example: “The purpose of this call is to learn more about your company’s recent shift into healthcare after the pandemic hit and how you’re adjusting to the influx of business to support. Gaining your feedback on your recent experience growing in this marketplace is helpful so we can best support you in return. If at the end of our call you find our new healthcare management tools of value, a typical next step would be setting up a demo of our solution. Does that sound good to you? Please let me know if there are any other items you’d like to cover during this time.”

2. Show Up Prepared. Press releases, annual reports, online sources such as Crunchbase, Pitchbook, LinkedIn, Twitter are all great ways to understand more about your prospective
clients within the technology industry. The more research you do prior to a call with a
decision-maker the better you’ll have a chance to build rapport, ask questions that they find
insightful instead of the generic sales pitch. Your ultimate goal is to position yourself as an
advisor. Whatever you do, don’t just hop on an in-depth demo without understanding the
client’s business issues which takes me to point #3.

3. Don’t Make Assumptions. You wouldn’t want anyone to assume anything about your business so don’t make an assumption that you understand your potential client’s business.
DO ask them about their vision, their strategic initiatives, confirm info that you may have
seen in a press release but never assume you know their pain because they are similar to another one of your clients. Each client is unique!

4. Focus & Lead With Authentic Questions. Great discovery comes down to the questions
you ask. You’re going to ask more authentic questions if you’re truly dialed into the
conversation and interested in the potential buyer. If the customer mentions that they are
struggling to keep up with the workload in cybersecurity after 2020, you have an
opportunity to empathize and ask them how you can help them. You may be surprised at the
new ways you find to partner with your clients to support them. Need help with empathetic questioning, refer to this list here.

5. Read The Customer & Stay Flexible Without Losing Authority. As noted in
Challenger Selling, there are well over 7 stakeholder personalities involved in every major
technology purchase. Knowing whom you’re talking to, their motives, and reading their
personality is key to keeping the discovery meeting on track. If they are very technical and
are someone who needs to “see it before believing it” then you may just need to give them a
high-level demo while you’re running additional discovery. You may see some buyers not
want to build rapport and just get down to the facts. That’s ok, not everyone is going to be
your happy hour buddy. Staying flexible in working with each personality is critical.

6. Record Discovery Calls. It can be difficult to get all of your discovery questions
answered within the first discovery call. Depending on your sales process, you may have
more than one discovery call with multiple stakeholders. Recording these enables you to
refer back to them for sales detail, use them for market research and practice to improve
future performance. Easy to install apps such as Owler.ai, Fireflies.ai can transcribe your
Zoom call. Enterprise software like Gong and Chorus gives you the ability to record, make
comments on call recordings for future reference and coaching.

Relativity Sells coaches and provides sales enablement to technology companies around the globe. Relativity’s founder, Amy Looper took her passion for helping technically trained business owners and reps connect with their buyers in a more meaningful way during the sales process. Her coaching and sales enablement services are designed to help vendors understand their competitive positioning, customer’s buyer journey to create meaningful impact, driving long-term revenue and increasing win rates within the sales team. Prior to Relativity Sells, Amy spent 17 years in sales leadership, corporate enterprise sales roles (Fortune 500 cybersecurity, healthcare IT SAAS) where she was awarded 4 President’s Club awards and top sales awards from leading equity firm, Vista Equity. For more information please visit www.relativitysells.com

Did you know that over 80% of Series A companies fail?  

Think about all of the sweat equity you’ve put into building your company through pre-seed, not to mention the countless hours spent pitching to investors to achieve Seed or Series A funding.  You’re now faced with tripling revenue growth this next year because your investors want to see results and the overall odds of success are stacked against you. 

Do you hurry to hire 15 reps and see which ones make it through to the final round of Hunger Games?  Do you have the sales leadership, training, and revenue operations in place to support that level of hiring?  How much recruitment effort will it take to hire the best rep for your company?

Before you scale your sales team you need to ensure that the following areas are proven within your organization: 

Product Market Fit:  Founders that have proven out their go-to-market strategy, acquired customers themselves have the best chance at being successful when handing the reigns over to their first sales team.  Sales and marketing do have a component of experimentation to it but you shouldn’t rely on your first sales hire to proven market fit for you.  That’s setting them up to fail and for you to spend $100k+ on rep churn and additional priceless go-to-market resources.

How do I know if I have a product-market fit?  Which indicators tell me that we have a winner?

While lagging indicators point to metrics such as revenue, profit, and retention rates, as a software company you should look at the current speedometer. 

Systematic Growth Leading Indicators

Measuring lagging indicators is helpful when reviewing last year’s results not setting the future state of your business.  Technology markets and buyers are evolving at light speed so how do you know that your customers are currently finding value in your product?  

I recommend that my clients look at the following leading indicators  (Note these should be adjusted based on your overall goals): 

• Meeting Conversion Rates
• Number of Meetings – 14 Day Lookback 
• Number of product upgrades recommended 
• Net Promoter Score
• Product Adoption Rate

Organizing your sales using as much data modeling as possible is so important so you can prioritize your investment of time and money into the right buckets between increasing the marketing funnel, recruiting for the right sales team, and support ongoing revenue performance.  

At Relativity Sells, I partner with tech startup founders to grow their revenue through this  3-step process which builds the level of sales readiness and ongoing sales leadership a company needs when transitioning from founder-based sales.

I believe that when setting up your startup to support a sales rep or team it takes a systematic approach to ensure that you’re setting your business and new hire up for success.

Growing revenue in an early-stage company takes relentless grit, determination, and trust in the sales process. As we start the climb to new goals in the New Year, review your sales engine in the following areas to ensure you’re aligned to crush your goals this year:

1. Is your Ideal Buyer Persona building your pipeline? Early-stage companies go through many iterations of the ideal buyer persona as they identify their best path to success within an industry. You can’t solve problems for customers that aren’t a good fit for your solution or service so it may take two or three revisions before settling into serving the right client that can 10x your growth. Need to refine your buyer persona in 2021? Hubspot provides a great template for this here.
2. Forecasting Is A Mix of Mostly Reality With A Bit of Stretch. How was your forecast attainment in 2020? Did you consistently hit or miss your goals? Setting a big, hairy audacious goal can be fun but can also very ineffective and deflating to your revenue team if you’re not forecasting revenue with reality. Imagine ending last year with $400k in revenue and then making a goal in 2021 for your team to hit $4M. No resources to significantly ramp marketing, sales coverage, or operations to fulfill client delivery. WISH is also a four-letter word. Revenue forecasts can be met repeatedly when you have 3x the amount of pipeline to support your sales goal and a strategy around your top accounts and new business acquisition to reach your growth goal. You may want to keep your high revenue forecast for the year but take bets on achieving a smaller number in Q1 to allow your team time to build a supporting, qualified pipeline.
3. So Many Sales Tools, Free Trials, So Little Time! There are many sales tools on the market today promising to cut your prospecting time in half through their sales intelligence offering, tools for sales leaders when coaching, various flavors of CRMs (customer relationship management), etc. How do you choose the right toolset for your early-stage company? The first step is to identify your ideal customer fit and the experience you want them to have with your company. What are the touchpoints? Work those touchpoints into your overall sales process. Your sales process should be more than “let’s qualify for (BANT) budget, authority, need, time”. The sales process should manage both internal and external needs around the buying cycle for your company’s product/service. Once you have that, you’re ready to build the process into a CRM, like Hubspot, and consistently use it as a guiding star along your sales prospecting journey to the finish line. Sales intelligence tools like Lead IQ, Seamless AI, and LinkedIn Sales Navigator are great tools to utilize when you have a sales team heavily focused on prospecting new business. I recommend that my clients use these tools from the beginning as a Founder. Prospect with accuracy and build your winning playbook as you build.
4. Prove your own model before hiring a sales rep. If you haven’t hired your first salesperson yet, you need to ensure as the Founder/ CEO that you have proved the sales model yourself. Document your processes, playbook to win deals, and ensure that it is repeatable. Too often organizations hire sales reps thinking that they will bring their Rolodex and magically make sales happen when the Founder/ CEO hasn’t proved out their own business. Your success and enthusiasm around proving out your own success in your business will be infectious when the time is right to expand your sales team.
5. Do I Hire Hunters Or Farmers This Year? Sales roles are dramatically changing. For early-stage tech and SAAS companies, I recommend hiring based on personality for a startup vs. focus on hunter and farmer roles. In a startup, your sales reps will need to be nimble as you grow the company and wear many hats. Your ideal sales rep may be someone that understands marketing and has the skillset to farm an existing account while hunting for new business. You should clearly set guidelines for their job as you can’t expect them to run the company for you but hiring someone that has both the ability and fire to hunt for new business, test new markets while also taking care of long-term customer relationships could be a great fit. Hiring for a Rolodex rarely ever works as quickly as you want it to so hiring for a multi-faceted skillset in early-stage is important. Hiring for sales development reps, sales enablement teams won’t come into play until you move closer to Series C and beyond.
6. Moving From Founder Sales To Hiring Your First Sales Leader. Did you prove the model and hire a couple of sales reps in 2020, now to find yourself ready to hire your first sales leader? Many early-stage Founders have grown revenue to $2M+ million finding their niche market and now need to move from working in the business to on the business. You’re ready to hire once you have reps to manage or hire a leader. If you’re not ready to hire a full-time sales leader which most Seed, Series A & B companies are not then you may consider a fractional sales leader. This is a growing trend that quite popular on the East Coast, making its way West. Early-stage companies are able to partner with fractional sales leaders that bring deep expertise in growing revenue, leading sales teams, and acting as that cross-functional translator between sales, marketing, and the product team to provide sales enablement. They may support your team 10, 20+ hours per week depending on your needs and are flexible to grow with your organization as you collectively grow the business.

Subscribe to Relativity Consulting’s Blog in January as we take a more in-depth look at growth tactics per startup stage.

Amy Looper, Founder of Relativity Consulting works with innovative technology startups nationwide by providing fractional sales leadership and sales enablement services. She consistently produces award-winning results in highly competitive markets bringing past leadership experience working from a Vista Equity company, working with Fortune 500 companies with global cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks. At Relativity, we are passionate about creating long-term revenue for our clients and operate under a customer-first mentality that elevates sales performance.

 It was the night before Christmas when all through the house not a creature was stirring except for me, a frustrated new sales leader pouring through ambiguous sales forecasts. The first year of sales management in 2013 felt like Santa gave me the games of Chance, Yahtzee and Clue to forecast with. I was building a new region with 2 out of 6 reps hired and running with my pants on fire that year playing both rep and leader as we built the team. That is until I discovered a better way to trust opportunities in the pipeline through Completion Metric Forecasting. What’s the point of sales forecasting without accuracy anyway?

“Completion Metric Forecasting gave me freedom to trust the process and focus on enabling my sales reps to reach their highest levels of performance vs. task management.”

If you’re feeling the same roller coaster in your business that I was, watch this video to learn how I implemented  Completion Metric Forecasting within the Hubspot CRM. There is a tested, methodical approach that generates more consistent revenue vs. leaving the forecast to a chance percentage!