Bigdealdan

Director of Business Development

Startup forming Sales Department: Biggest Do's and Don'ts

This is my first roll not purely as an individual producer. We are in the Fintech Space and thus far I am the only sales hire.

The CEO is hands on, we are at 42 staff and the boards objective is to produce all lead flow through marketing.

We have a limited small closed universe of maybe 150k potential prospects.. My push is to hire 2-3 more producers, but leave the management for later. Has anyone worked in a sales org with just a small group of top tier producers without a top manager, perhaps there is a team lead?

Any advice on this process is helpful, need to make the pitch to the CEO in the next 2 weeks.

Have also thought of brining in 1-2 SDRs to help lead flow, but harder to pitch that when board just approved huge marketing budget.

✌️ Growing Pains

🧢 Sales Management

19 comments

Sort by:

SalesPharaoh

Big Shot

Senior Account Executive

Oh that is interesting i wanna follow this post!!! Upvote

Bigdealdan

Fire Starter

Director of Business Development

Appreciate that, hoping the War Room can fill in some gaps for me.

Don_Ready

Politicker

I was hired onto a team like this a few years ago. The team had no direct manager (reported to the CEO) but was comprised of self starters. Reps were young but experienced. Our SDR's were actually former SMB AE's who understood what it took to build out a team and were also responsible for closing some business. Went pretty smoothly during the initial stages until we got too big to not have leadership. Biggest take away is to find good people who can manage themselves and want to be successful.

SalesPharaoh

Big Shot

Senior Account Executive

How to keep them loyal though? Offer them shares??

Don_Ready

Politicker

I wouldn't ever say loyalty should be the way it's framed. Happy reps who earn what they're worth don't look for new jobs.

SalesPharaoh

Big Shot

Senior Account Executive

Wouldn't disagree here

Bigdealdan

Fire Starter

Director of Business Development

Yeah this is a good point and something we have all seen not happen too many times.

Bigdealdan

Fire Starter

Director of Business Development

This is my thought as well. I think it would work successfully to give us a solid base of revenue. With 3-4 of us working together, all of whom are self-starters, we could build out a client base. Your experience is what I am trying to plan for and document of when is it time to bring management in.Do you remember what the warning signs/ data points for when management was needed?

Don_Ready

Politicker

Great question. I remember when we started getting into more sophisticated deals we requested a sales leader with more experience who could help us close more as opposed to someone who needed to manage us.

Bigdealdan

Fire Starter

Director of Business Development

Makes sense, what was the industry?

Don_Ready

Politicker

SaaS selling Sales Enablement tools

LordBusiness

Politicker

Chief Revenue Officer

I would recommend having your marketing team employ a few "lead development" reps. Given the marketing driven model and as you mention "huge marketing budget" you are likely going to have more leads than your small team of AE's can really handle, all of which have varying degrees of quality. Your biggest challenge is likely going to be prioritizing your teams time on the opportunities that have the highest propensity to turn into sales/revenue. Marketing lead development reps are trained to convert and qualify marketing generated leads, helping to score and prioritize opportunities for your small group of sellers.

Bigdealdan

Fire Starter

Director of Business Development

I just discussed this concept with the team and was well received. you point about prioritizing the correct items to spend time is spot on. Demos for demos sake is not revenue.

Happy_Grillmore

Director

Biggest lesson I learned on a small startup team like this was to jam in a regular deal review, but peer to peer. Without the sales leader in, this is normally missing but it's even more important in a small team selling a newer product when you might still be finding your market fit.

Focus on:
- deals to prioritise and which ones you get out of early (limited time if there'sonly a few of you - spend it wisely)
- buying committee, who have you got, who's missing and who are the swing votes. How to fix that - other perspectives can help you speed up good deals

Oh, and hot tip for that marketing led growth model, get a product team style standup happening with sales and marketing together every morning. 10 minutes to rip through yesterday, today and blockers. Also run a fortnightly deal review (sales and marketing together) on all Opps won and lost the fortnight prior - you have to drive home what's working and what's not to the whole marketing team if they're running all the lead gen, until you can get a solid outbound model in place to spread your risk. At that size, you dont have time for sales and marketing leaders to strategise that stuff, a fornightly stand up gets it all in the open, regularly.

Bigdealdan

Fire Starter

Director of Business Development

Appreciate this. Lots of points to look at but the action item i took is meeting with product team and that is now a reoccurring meeting on my calendar. Excited to see the fruits come from that.

Happy_Grillmore

Director

Nice, once you get the hang of the agile standups, they're really powerful to leverage in the smaller startup teams for both sales and marketing. Give it a crack and I guarantee it'll make a big difference

RaymundoFlex

Opinionated

Identify your ICP as soon as possible. Hire hustlers and people who will build and sell. If you miss hire, cut your loss ASAP.

RaymundoFlex

Opinionated

Institutionalizing knowledge so you all learn from one learning is the biggest challenge and absolutely crucial to success. I typically look for someone who can help in this respect since it’s not my strong suit.

DollarBill

Executive

Director of Sales - Financial Services

I am currently at one of these orgs. I started on the team as one of two AEs reporting into the CRO. Things were smooth as we hired a few more AEs. You need management when selling internally becomes more challenging and laborious. Having a manager in place to help bulldoze the internal politics to get deals done is a necessity so AEs can continue focusing on clients.

Bravado is a community of trusted sales professionals endorsed by their customers.

Products

The War Room Jobs Salary Guide Tech Sales U

Company

About Us How It Works Blog Bug Bounty

Contact

Press Careers

If you are hired as a contract sales rep by a Bravado customer, we may ask you to prove access to the employee email account provided to you by that customer. This data will be shared with customers to track your sales productivity; customers can use this data to confirm you meet the minimum activity requirements to pay out your ramp stipend and commission.

Bigdealdan

Startup forming Sales Department: Biggest Do's and Don'ts

19 comments

Related posts

How many have you/your company made? "10+ Of The Most Common Mistakes in Early SaaS Sales" article from Jason Lemkin

Building the first sales playbook for a seed startup. What kind of info is a must?

Does your org believe in Sales enablement or L&D?