{"id":7897,"date":"2013-02-06T13:44:17","date_gmt":"2013-02-06T13:44:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/?p=7897"},"modified":"2014-10-06T01:17:52","modified_gmt":"2014-10-06T01:17:52","slug":"the-luxury-of-being-a-ceo-without-a-sales-team-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/?p=7897","title":{"rendered":"The Luxury of Being a CEO Without a Sales Team"},"content":{"rendered":"

We are working with a company that is in a unique, and we\u2019d say enviable, position \u2013 they have no sales organization!<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0 They are a fast growing firm with a powerful array of products and services they are introducing to the market and have gotten this far largely by relationships and market savvy.\u00a0 To get to the next revenue level however they have realized a formalized selling model is necessary.<\/p>\n

No sales team at all is frankly a better situation than what faces many companies we see.\u00a0 More often the problem is weak sales leadership, struggling sales teams and absent sales process.\u00a0 Unwinding that kind of mess is harder in many respects than starting from scratch.\u00a0 Instead of dealing with the personal and programmatic issues of a bad sales team, this company has the luxury of starting from a blank slate.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re a CEO at a company without a sales team what would you do in this situation?\u00a0 Here are three suggestions to consider:<\/p>\n

Create Leads First<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Sales people need leads to have something productive to do.\u00a0 Most sales reps are also terrible at creating their own leads.\u00a0 Rather than hiring reps and assuming they will start to fill the funnel (the traditional approach<\/em>), invest in best-practice demand generation and get the lead flow started.\u00a0 That gives the reps immediate opportunities to tackle once they do come on board (and it also strengthens the recruiting message while you\u2019re recruiting and interviewing<\/em>).<\/p>\n

Rethink The Sales Team<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The roles and responsibilities of the traditional sales team don\u2019t cut the mustard in today\u2019s world.\u00a0 Sales managers today must be highly technology conversant in areas such as SEO, marketing automation, social media and disruptive strategies.\u00a0 For their part, reps stuck in the \u201880\u2019s relationship selling<\/strong>paradigm are falling further and further behind.\u00a0 (See more on this by reading up on the Challenger Sale<\/a>).\u00a0 If you have the luxury of starting your sales team from scratch, redefine the roles and responsibilities for today\u2019s selling model, only then worry about hiring the people to fill those roles.<\/p>\n

Sales as a Service<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Why hire if you can source?\u00a0 Processes far more complex than sales are outsourced to great degrees of success by companies around the world, big and small.\u00a0 Rather than go through the headaches and expense of hiring a sales leader and a selling team, consider an outsourced sales model.\u00a0 B2B Sales has become a highly technical process and the talent that can execute it well is hard to find.\u00a0\u00a0 What you want are revenues, not a Sales function, so take some time and investigate the options of this approach.<\/p>\n

Have you had the opportunity to start Sales from scratch? We’d love to hear your thoughts on it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We are working with a company that is in a unique, and we\u2019d say enviable, position \u2013 they have no […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7897"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7897"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7897\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8154,"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7897\/revisions\/8154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}