Rethinking Growth: Your Sales Problems Cannot Be Solved by Hiring Alone

Your sales team can make or break your company's success. 

They are the company's face to the market and their work brings in the revenue that sustains everybody's salaries in the long-term.

Especially in startups and growth-stage companies, the effectiveness of the sales team and the sales pipeline directly impact the company valuation.

Hiring the right people and building the right team can be a make-or-break project for a company.

Yet, many founders and executives are still stuck in outdated hiring and management practices that are costing them dearly. 

1. Ditch the Traditional Interview

Charm and charisma do not necessarily translate to consistent performance.

Forget polished resumes and rehearsed answers. Salespeople are masters of self-presentation. They know exactly what to say to impress. Interviews fail to simulate the high-pressure, dynamic environments that they must navigate daily on the job.

I decided to skip interviews entirely and schedule only role-playing scenarios with candidates. The results? Eye-opening, to say the least.

Role-playing reveals more about a candidate's potential in 30 minutes than hours of traditional interviews. Candidates who look awesome on paper crumble under pressure, revealing critical weaknesses that would have gone unnoticed in a standard interview.

Try this: Create a simulated sales scenario where you play a tough prospect. Test the candidate for real-world capabilities: 

• Do they think on their feet?
• Do they maintain control of the conversation?
• Are they genuinely interested in the prospect's needs?
• How do they handle rejections, desinterest and objections?
• Can they close the deal or do they leave the interaction open-ended?

These insights are worth their weight in gold. You would rather uncover these truths now, before ending up with a team of expensive underperformers.

2. Tailor Your Hiring to Specific Sales Roles

One size doesn't fit all in sales. A rockstar B2C rep might crash and burn in enterprise sales. Just as you have an ideal customer profile, you need to have an ideal sales employee profile for your specific use case. 

Are you hiring for B2C, B2B, Enterprise, or Hunter/Farmer roles? Are you hiring for the top, middle, or end of the sales funnel? Does your product require a lot of explaining, systematic mass outreach, or complex legal negotiations? 

Each of the contexts requires a unique skillset and personality type:

• B2C: Disciplined, high-energy individuals who think on their feet
• B2B: Strategic thinkers with robust relationship-building skills
• Enterprise: Seasoned reps that can navigate complex org structures
• Hunter: Ambitious self-starters comfortable with frequent rejection
• Farmer: Nurturing personalities focused on long-term relationships

Defining these profiles upfront, to the level of granularity you need, will save you countless headaches down the road. It will protect you and your sales leaders from lengthy hiring processes that might waste a lot time and lead nowhere.

3. Turbocharge Your Onboarding

The onboarding phase is critical in transforming raw talent into productive team members, no matter how senior they are.

Your new hire's first few weeks will set the tone for their entire career at your company. Too often, the new potential sales superstar is twiddling their thumbs, trying to figure out the product, the processes and the tools for weeks on end, by themselves. Meanwhile, you're burning through salary costs with any meaningful return on investment.

Effective onboarding is not a luxury – it is a necessity. 

Here is a quick breakdown of best practices:

1. Multi-day boot camp covering company history, culture, and values
2. Deep dive into product features, benefits, and unique selling propositions
3. Bring in product managers and engineers for technical deep dives
4. Train on effective discovery techniques to uncover customer needs
5. Train on effective use of CRM and other sales enablement tools
6. Engage experienced team members to play challenging prospect roles
7. Simulate various situations: cold calls, needs analysis, demos, negotiations, objections
8. Live call shadowing with structured note-taking for all onboardees
9. Set clear expectations and goals for the first 30, 60, and 90 days
10. Assign each new hire a seasoned mentor for ongoing support

Every day of unproductive ramp time is money down the drain. Invest in your new hires upfront in a structured manner, and they will pay dividends sooner than you think.

4. Embrace Proactive Performance Management

The Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) is a standard tool in many sales organizations. But by the time a PIP is implemented, the ship has often sailed already.

Sales leaders are well advised to be proactive about performance management by constantly monitoring KPIs, coaching regularly, and intervening quickly, if any performance issues come up.

Some of the early warning signs are:

• Low activity levels
• Consistently missing targets
• Poor attitude or lack of team spirit
• Poor CRM usage or data quality
• Frequent customer complaints

Often, potential failures can turn into success stories.

But sometimes, things just don't work out anyway.

While parting ways with team members is never easy, it is necessary for the health of the organization. 

Terminations can potentially impact team morale negatively, but often removing underperforming or toxic elements has a net positive effect on team dynamics.

Handling these situations well demonstrates to the team that there is a commitment to performance standards and organizational culture.

5. Rethink Your Scaling Strategy

The reflexive response to increased market demand is often to expand the sales force. However, this approach can be counterproductive. 

Why? 

Because it often fails to address underlying systemic issues.

More is not always better when it comes to sales teams. Before you rush to expand your sales force, ask yourself this: Do you really need more salespeople, or do you need to solve process issues?

I used to work with a startup that scaled from 20 to 800 B2C sales reps across 20+ countries in less than two years. While superficially impressive, this rapid scaling can mask significant operational inefficiencies. 

Consider these alternatives to hiring sprees:

• Implement advanced lead qualification and prioritization systems
• Refine marketing strategies, targeting, and positioning to improve lead quality
• Invest in sales enablement technologies to boost individual sales rep productivity

The key lies in addressing root causes rather than symptoms. Additional reps are often "needed" to fill the performance gaps that are caused by inefficient administrative work, spending hours on unqualified leads that should have never been in the pipeline in the first place, and lack of a structured methodology, which makes each sales call feel like a gamble.

But there is one foundational piece that is non-negotiable:

6. Be Obsessed with Product-Market Fit 

No amount of sales skills can compensate for a lack of product-market fit. 

If your product is a solution desperately searching for a problem, and you berate your sales team for not meeting targets, you might open the doors to unethical selling. 

A company cannot be living complacently in an ivory tower and be building products "it likes to build" at the expense of solving for real customer needs and problems. The only reason someone is willing to pull out their credit card and make a purchase, is if they perceive that they are getting an equal or greater value in exchange for their money.

If the product or service does not create value for customers, then hiring sales reps becomes the equivalent of hiring "spokespeople" who will be at great pain twisting the truth, misrepresenting the product, and deceiving customers. 

Not a recipe for long-term success...

The Takeaway

Before you hire, ask yourself if you really need more people or just smarter processes.

"We need more reps" is not always the right answer. Building a high-performing sales team is definitely not about amassing an army of smooth talkers.

It is about finding the right people, equipping them with the right tools, and creating an environment where they can thrive. 

In the process of that, you might find that your existing team has a lot more potential than you realized.