Establishing a Framework for Building an Inside Sales Team

This post was originally shared on Saleshacker.com. Check it out here!

Early in 1927, it began to rain in the Midwest. It kept raining all spring, and the Mississippi Riverbecame the collection point for this rainfall and the previous winter’s snowpack. As early as February, levees strained and started to give way. Over the course of the next three months, 145 levees would fail and 27,000 square miles across ten states were put underwater.

The following year, Congress took the first important step in regulating the Mississippi River and its tributaries by passing the Flood Control Act of 1928. This empowered the Army Corps of Engineers to study and alter the nation’s river systems—the Mississippi especially. The Army Corps would build infrastructure to corral and maneuver the river in order to control it.

This was a task of enormous scale —much bigger than anything the Corps had undertaken before— so they wanted a way to test out their building projects to make sure that they would work. The Army Corps began constructing crude models, mere ditches cut in the dirt with water flowing through them. These showed promise in their ability to predict flooding, and they showed the effects of proposed dams.

In 1943, the Corps began construction on a model that could test all 1.25 million square miles of the Mississippi River. It would be a three-dimensional map of nearly half of the continental United States rendered to a 1/2000 horizontal scale spanning more than 200 acres. It was so big that the only way to see all of it at once was from a four-story observation tower.

You should approach building your inside sales team in a similar fashion when beginning to scale your organization. You should map out your grand vision and build it on a smaller scale in order to provide the framework to achieve the grand vision of the sales organization.

The specialized sales model has become ever more popular amongst sales organizations in the past five years. Many organizations have moved away from generalist models and are moving towards specializing or some sort of hybrid. And rightfully so. Ken Krouge & Trish Bertuzzi did an ebook together and found in their studies that “the average generalist is getting a twelve percent close ratio, a specialist model in the same space is getting a nineteen percent close ratio.” That’s a massive difference! These are decisions that you need to make early on while establishing the framework of your sales organization, or your levees will begin to fail quickly.

Here are a few tips to building the framework early on in your sales organization.

1. Hire Management Early

Direct managers will have the greatest impact on a team. The mistake that organizations often make is hiring a great sales rep & promoting them into a management role. There are a millionarticles out there about hiring a manager and losing your greatest sales rep in the same promotion. Don’t do it. I’ll save that rant for another day. You need a hacker… someone who knows how to build a process. You need someone who understands Salesforce and the capabilities of it… someone who understands the full sales cycle & has been on both sides of the specialized model.

2. Build a Scalable Recruitment Process

If you haven’t read Mark Roberges’ book, The Sales Acceleration Formula, then go buy a copy and read it before you do anything else. He lays out the framework of a recruitment process that is second to none. Approach your recruitment process similar to your sales process. You want it to be data-driven. Build it in a way that will let you determine the quality of your hiring and how successful those reps turn out to be. Then you can adjust your recruitment strategy based on the success of the hires you are making. This will give you framework to determine where you need to focus your efforts.

At Lucid Software we have built a strict recruitment strategy and interviewing process that every candidate goes through. It encompasses interviews with role plays and an individual scoring that is given from each interviewer. We then compile all this data to look through the quality of candidates that we are putting through the process and hiring. After we make hires, we can build a repeatable process to continue to hire tops reps or adjust our screening process based on the pre-hire assessments.

Lastly, find local schools and establish relationships with the sales departments to recruit from. You will spend more time training these recruits, but if the right hires are made and they are put through the correct training, they can be molded into the your ideal sales reps.

3. Establish a Sales Process

Establishing a sales process is crucial in rolling out a sales organization. A good sales process will give you the ability to track data and have insight into any point in the sales cycle from marketing to SDRs to AEs and so on. Determine what metrics are important in your sales cycle and build steps in your sales cycle to give you visibility into these stages. This emphasizes the importance of having direct managers that understand Salesforce and the process well enough to determine these.

A good sales process is will make life easy for reps to stay organized. A weak process will leave reps confused, frustrated, and apathetic. This will often lead to reps documenting important information in other locations other than your CRM.

Remember how the Army corps approached the enormous feat of building an infrastructure to maneuver and corral the Mississippi river in order to control it. They built a giant model, studied it, tested it, changed it and continuously repeated this process. The most difficult part in a sales organization is building this same framework. Map it out, visualize it, test it and perfect it as you scale. This will give you complete control over the direction of the sales organization.