Sales 101: from lawyer to sales director
TL;DR For any founder with a technical or traditional background, managing a sales team can be a real challenge, but it’s key to the success of the business. Read on for some of the lessons I learned when I moved out of law and into sales.
I started my career as a lawyer. Law firms are dry, predictable places inhabited by smart, driven people. You are trained to be responsive to clients and senior people in the firm, and do what you are told. Every 6 minutes of your day is neatly recorded so that the client can be billed for the time you worked.
In this environment, people deliver 99.9% of the time and you rarely consider the possibility that they may not. The management skills you develop are, as a result, rather limited — you learn how to coordinate a team of people and pull together their work, but you generally don’t concern yourself with the more difficult aspects of managing and motivating people or developing a culture.
Lawyer -> Sales Director
In 2014, after 9 years practice, I left the law and crossed the Irish Sea to join a telecoms start-up, plan.com. My first role was to build out the sales team.
I had a little bit of experience from running my own telecoms business at university, but the ambition and scale here was far greater.
I needed to scale the team from just a few people to around 15 FTEs and hit challenging sales targets very quickly.
Learning how to build, run and motivate a sales team was really tough — it required a complete change in mindset to get the best out of everybody. And despite the success we achieved, ultimately beating sales targets month-on-month and being recognised with an industry award for the best sales team, I made plenty of mistakes along the way and had tough days in the office.
In the rest of this post, I’m going to try and distil some of the lessons learned, which I hope will be of benefit not just to the small number of people who move from law to manage a sales team, but to any founder from a more technical or traditional background who has to take on this challenge:
Hiring
Finding dependable, high performing sales people is a challenge most businesses face. I found it particularly difficult because:
- There are no barriers to entry for sales people leading to a very large candidate pool
- Most sales people are extremely good at selling themselves — a good performance at interview is almost a given
- Every sales person I have ever met has ‘smashed their targets’ or ‘overachieved on their OTE’ or some similar formulation
Although we couldn’t solve for all these issues, a few of the processes I put in place drove up our success rate finding the right talent:
- having one of the most experienced, existing sales people do a first round interview. This acted as a useful screen, saving me time, and over the months and years we built up a fantastic relationship and understanding of what talent we needed (cheers Sid!)
- requesting 3–6 months of payslips so that we could verify the basic salary and commission elements of their compensation. We did this towards the end of the process once the candidate was committed to join. I’m confident we dodged a few bullets!
- a mandatory interview with one of our co-founders — he’d been in the telecoms industry for 30+ years and was a veteran sales person. It is incredibly valuable having an additional data point from someone at this level, whether within your own company or in your wider network
I also made sure that we set firm, but fair, targets for new joiners, which were communicated at interview so that everybody understood what was required. This meant that we had an objective measure to determine performance and whether the person would be retained at the end of their probation period.
Commission
Sales people want to earn commission — not only does it significantly increase their take home pay, but it also validates how well they are performing.
A well thought-out commission plan aligns the interests of the sales team with the objectives of the company. Any plan will be specific to your company, but here are some of the key things to think about when pulling it together:
- Choose the right metric(s) — are you measuring units (or in telecoms, connections), revenue, profit or something else
- Ensure you can readily measure the metric(s) you choose — sales teams like to track their performance throughout the month so they should be able to see in near real-time how they are doing (if they can’t, they may lose motivation)
- Keep it simple — accelerators, decelerators, kickers, bonuses, etc. tend to complicate matters and create unintended incentives (the most obvious of which is sandbagging i.e. holding back business to the next month to optimise the individual’s commission in the current/next month)
- Communicate the plan thoroughly — everybody needs to fully understand and be bought into the plan. If people don’t understand how much they can earn, they will disengage
- Build trust and minimise changes — targets that are constantly being increased or metrics that are being swapped in and out create the impression that the company is trying to minimise the amount of commission it pays out (whether that it is true or not). If the plan isn’t working, sit down with the team, explain why and then explain the new scheme in detail
It’s also worth considering how you incentivise the sales team to bring in good quality business (rather than anything they can find to hit their targets).
Unique culture
Hiring the right people and building a compelling commission plan won’t achieve much unless you understand your team and build the right culture.
I started running the sales team much like I would have run a deals team at my old law firm. I set the targets, communicated them and then checked in with the team to see how they were tracking as the month progressed.
It didn’t work particularly well and the team couldn’t get out of 2nd gear.
I quickly realised that it was me. I was a boring boss — all facts, no emotion.
It was tempting to try and emulate some of the other big characters in the company and overnight become a ‘fun boss’ taking bets with everybody that I’d lose and end up running around the office in a mankini, but this wasn’t me. I had to unlock the potential of the team, but I had to be an authentic leader.
I made some immediate changes — things that are common place in start-ups now — like beer and pizza Fridays, early finishes if you hit the day’s cold call counts, etc.
I also spent a lot of time getting to know each member of the team on a personal level. I needed to understand what motivated them, what their aspirations were and how I could help them achieve their goals.
The next time we hit target, it wasn’t just about commission and an email from me, it was about having a drink or two with the team, sharing in the high of the achievement and rewarding the best performers with something meaningful to them (we set up a photo session for a team member who’d just had a baby and sent another one to Paris for a Michelin Star dinner she’d always wanted).
Ultimately, investing time to build strong working relationships with your team pays enormous dividends. I learned to ditch the email and the messages and actually have a conversation.
Final observations
Once you have a robust hiring process, commission plan and culture there are a few other elements to consider:
- Sales people don’t work well alone, especially if they are doing outbound work— it can be pretty soul crushing work when you don’t get a bite and a team member in the trenches with you can help get through tough times
- Encourage competition— leaderboards and other internal leagues (i.e. most outbound calls in a day) create a fun atmosphere that drive people to achieve more. They need to be big, bold and visible to everybody in the office
- Small treats work — as a start-up, paying out more commission may not always be an option. An early finish, a duvet day, a few pints at the pub all buy goodwill in excess of their monetary value. They are particularly powerful when they are personalised
- Working environment matters — the core of most start-ups is tech or tech related so offices tend to be quiet with people focused on their screen all day. Sales environments should be loud, dynamic and fun
- Sales are the engine of your business —there is a tendency amongst some technical and highly qualified people to dismiss sales, but without it the company doesn’t make any money. Skilled sales people are an incredible asset and should be treated as such
- Monitor performance — people have a tendency to overstate how busy they are. Sales is often a volume game so measuring actuals (calls, emails, talk time, etc.) and benchmarking provides a true view of performance. For those in the field, showing up to their booked appointments unannounced from time-to-time can be a revealing exercise
- Invest in training — sales people perform best when they are 100% confident about what they are selling. Ensure they are fully trained on your product before sending them onto the phones/emails or into the field. Ensure they can always ask questions if they don’t understand
At Playfair, we love working with strong technical founders with amazing business ideas to build out their sales strategy. If this sounds like a good fit, you can get in touch via our website: https://playfaircapital.com/
