Building To build a sales organisation you need to understand the difference between artisanal and industrial sales, basic sales roles, staffing ratios, and the idea of a sales model.
Topics in building a sales organisation Copy link
- Selling in the early days
- Establishing product-market fit
- Core sales roles
- Throwing spaghetti at walls
- Sales model = roles, goals, and ratios
- Territories, compensation, and quotas
- Additional sales roles
Selling in the early days Copy link
In the early days, selling is artisanal, not industrial, and is often founder-led. Copy link
You are searching for the right model, which you can industrialise later.
You want smart, creative sellers – a small handful to begin with, including:
- People who don’t need or want a lot of support
- People who are prepared to execute with only a telephone
What's the most common mistake? Hiring big-company people who want to execute or scale an existing model.
The purpose of this phase is discovery – not the industrialisation of the model.
Think: if we call on people with <title> at companies of <size> in this <industry> around this <problem>, we find that we can often sell them a deal of <ARR> dollars in <timeframe>.
Establishing product-market fit Copy link
Early selling is also about establishing product-market fit Copy link
The Sean Ellis test is one popular way to quantify product-market fit (PMF):
- Survey your customers and ask: “How would you feel if you could no longer use our product?”
- If 40%+ are very disappointed, then PMF has been attained.
The Ellis test sets a high bar and may not be as useful in less end-user-driven markets. While it's a fun test of PMF, the real essence is about identifying the answers to three questions:
- Sell what?
- To whom?
- To solve what problem?
Sometimes you will have several different sets of answers to those questions. In that case, your job is to identify the most strategically promising set to focus on in your early selling.
Beware of hiring big-company sellers who are used to working at market leaders and winning big deals based on company status, relationships, and “safe choice” logic.
- Unless they have previous startup experience, they are unlikely to adapt well to your environment despite potentially deep domain expertise
Former customers often make great solution consultants (SCs) but be careful not to damage customer relationships by hiring them.
SCs can become great sellers, but when successful, that transformation usually happens fairly early (e.g. 3-5 years) into their SC career.
- If SCs complain about seller compensation, remind them that “quotas are available” if they want to try their hand at sales
SDR is often an entry-level position where you filter for aggressiveness, ambition, and innate sales skills
- Those who succeed often go on to become great sellers
- In hiring, try to differentiate between those who truly want a career in sales and the "lost" – who default to sales because they don’t know what else to do
[quote name="Sales management adage"]"There is a difference between a seller who has five years of sales experience and a seller who has one year of sales experience five times."[/quote]
Throwing spaghetti at the wall Copy link
If you've built a specific application for a specific buyer to solve a specific problem, then it’s easy to focus your early selling efforts at that target.
However, if you have a general-purpose platform that you are selling to several different buyers to solve many different problems, you should: Copy link
- Make sure your early sales efforts are horizontal and exploratory. This process is often known as “throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks”
- Beware of the risks of identifying spurious patterns caused by buyers who are friends of friends, technology enthusiasts, indecisive (‘tire kickers’) and/or poorly informed
- Look to identify a “money” problem – one that people will spend material amounts of money to solve
- Look for smart buyers who had a good understanding of their alternatives, had no external influences, and who chose to use your product to solve their problem
- See Crossing the Chasm for more on this topic
Once you’ve found this target you are ready to start building your sales organisation Copy link
Sample on-target earnings Copy link
Territories, quotas and comp plans Copy link
Key compensation elements Copy link
- Base/variable weighting: percentage of on-target earnings (OTE) that is base salary vs. bonus
- Typically 50/50 for sales, 66/33 for SDRs, and 70/30 for SCs (although it does vary, particularly for SCs)
Quota/OTE ratio Copy link
- Sellers typically have a ratio of quota to OTE of 4:1
- For example, a position with a $1M ARR quota has $250K OTE
Quota vs. territory is a philosophical issue Copy link
- Equal quotas: assign equal quotas and try to carve territories with equal opportunity
- Variable quotas: assign variable quotas as a function of the opportunity within them
Small deals to a large audience suggests equal quotas while targeted vertical or account-based sales suggests variable quotas.
Additional sales roles Copy link
The traditional unit of quota is the individual sellers. Sellers then rely on the organisation to staff and allocate supporting resources to ensure their success
Shared supporting resources invariably create conflict as:
- Two sellers want the same SC at the same time
- Sellers disagree on SDR time split inbound vs. outbound
In a pod model, quota is given to, and only to, pod leaders who manage all the resources of the pod.
- A pod might consist of one field seller (leader), one inside seller, an SC, two SDRs, and a CSM
- Their success is singularly and jointly measured by the success of the pod
Pods theoretically maximise collaboration, localise conflict resolution, and lead to improved alignment.
- In essence, a pod is a matrix structure that empowers pod over function – the same kind of structure companies often use with geographic regions as they scale
However, pods can have several disadvantages, particularly in the early stages of a business. For example, they can:
- Inhibit functional leadership and best practices
- Impede the recruitment of certain candidates
- Under-leverage the individualistic nature of sellers
- Reduce accountability beyond the pod leader
- Eliminate checks and balances provided by functional leadership
Nevertheless, pods are fairly popular these days and worth considering.
To learn more about building Copy link
- The Sales Learning Curve by Mark Leslie
- The Top 5 Mistakes in Scale-ups by Dave Kellogg
- Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross
- A Very Simple Compensation Plan For Your First Sales Reps by Jason Lemkin
- Simple Math to Set Up a Sales Team by David Sachs
- The Ultimate Guide to Sales Compensation by Hubspot
- The Startup Owner’s Manual by Steve Blank