"Where Do I Hire Great Salespeople?"

I’m asked this all the time. Of course it’s always hard to find great people, whether in sales or any other function. The best long-term source of salespeople is to grow and develop your own.

Combine one part veteran with 2-3 parts young, smart and adaptable…and mix in a system that keeps challenging people to learn new things and stretching, step by step. The best salespeople are the ones that have grown up in your company, and know it, the people, and the customers inside and out.

Create A Farm Team System
Think about how you can create a career path for people, to continually develop and grow them. Each group can act as a feeder team to the next. Here’s a startup / small sales team example:

=> Inside Sales (Lead Qualification)
=> Inside Sales Closing
=> Field Sales Closing

An example for a much larger and more specialized sales team:

=> Marketing intern or Sales Operations contractor
=> Inside Sales (Qualify Inbound Leads)
=> Inside Sales (Outbound Prospecting)
=> Inside Sales Closing – Small/Medium Businesses
=> Inside Sales Closing – Small Field Deals
=> Field Sales Closing – Mid-Market
=> Field Sales Closing – Enterprise

And this doesn’t even include account management, sales engineers, customer support, and other customer-related teams that always benefit from moving people in and around them. The more kinds of different experiences your people are exposed to and develop an expertise in, the better equipped they are to become killer problem solvers for customers! And that’s a great thing in ANY role in the company, customer-facing or not.

Timing
Depending on the role, you’ll want to move people up the ladder (or rotate into another group) anywhere from 6-8 months on the very fast side early in the first stages of the system, to 1-3 years in the other stages. Any short-term transaction cost/effort in moving someone into a new role is really outweighed by the benefits of getting a more well-rounded, developed employee who has another learning curve to keep them energized!