6 Steps to Hiring Your First Sales Team

(By Guest Blogger Dean Burgess) – You’ve built your company from the ground up, and now, you’re ready to grow by hiring your first sales team members. You can find the guidance you need to establish your team from the North American Association of Sales Engineers! Bringing on new team members and training them takes time, and these tips will help you get the process started.

Create a DBA :

Before you start expanding your company with an entirely new sales team, it’s important to take care of any key logistical or legal tasks on your to-do list. For example, if you already run a business under your given name, and you want to offer a new line of products or an entirely different service, you’ll need to choose a “Doing Business As” name. This is often known as a DBA name. If you register your DBA name, you can market and sell your services under a new name!

Set Your Sales Goals :

Next, it’s time to think about what you want your sales team to achieve. Once you know where you want your team to go, you can determine which roles you’ll need to hire for in order to get there! Think about what your team could realistically accomplish and which metrics you need to hit in order to keep your company moving forward.

Define the Roles :

Now, you’ve got a vision for your company’s sales goals – and it’s time to figure out who you’ll have to bring on board in order to execute these goals. Look into popular sales job titles to help define each role. Bidsketch states that you’ll probably need an account executive, a sales manager, a sales development representative, and a customer service representative. If you have bigger goals, you might also want to hire a sales engineer! You can create a job listing around each of these titles and share the listings on popular job platforms.

Schedule Interviews :

You’ve started to get responses to your job listings, and you’re interested in learning more about several candidates who look promising. It’s time to prepare for interviews! But which questions should you ask to find the best person for each role? Sales Assembly recommends asking them about their current sales process, how they would pitch your product, and their proudest sales accomplishments.

Training Your Team :

After going through rounds of interviews, you hired candidates who really stood out. You know that they have the aptitude and experience to succeed at your company, but you also want to make sure they’re truly ready to represent your product. When it comes to training your sales team, you can use helpful tools like e-learning programs to get everyone up to speed on new techniques or product details. You’ll also want to give detailed feedback to help each team member improve.

Determine Incentives :

How can you motivate your team to keep improving and reaching bigger sales goals? By incentivizing them! With sales incentives, you can encourage your team to keep achieving. What kind of incentives can you offer your team that will actually prove effective? Close recommends setting up a monetary rewards program for your sales team, giving out new tech products as prizes, or offering special sales training from a personal coach. Think about your team’s personal interests and get creative when it comes to offerings – make sure that they match your team!

Finding the best candidates for your sales team – and helping them become the best sales representatives they can be – doesn’t happen overnight. That’s why you need to kick off the process with a roadmap outlining your next steps. With these tips, you’ll be able to start recruiting your new sales team!

Want to learn from other sales professionals? Join the North American Association of Sales Engineers! Register on our website today.