Did Your Hire The Wrong Sales Person To Sell Your SaaS?

Are you banging your head up against the wall because the “sales expert” you hired hasn’t created the activity or the demos you expected from them? Your company is growing and you needed to take sales out of your hands and you expected that you could hire someone to come in an take over where you left off?

Even better you wanted someone to come in and get cranking right away doing activities you haven’t implemented before. You also may have wanted to impress your investors that you have taken a more proactive approach to selling.

Instead you have someone that is giving you a headache on a daily basis. There has been no system implemented, no strategy presented, and no new sales to show for it. Not to mention you are paying this person a healthy salary and maybe even giving them stock. You might of even had them hire some lower level prospectors and now they are doing just as little as your sales expert.

Does any of this sound like you? Yes it’s frustrating but it can be easily remedied. First let’s discuss where you may have went wrong.

First challenge is always the system or lack there of it. You may have built your business up to this point on referrals and inbound you are getting from relationships and some press. Now you want to hire someone to magnify this approach and get proactive in outreach to get more leads in the funnel, more demos per week, and more revenue per month.

The challenge is you feel pressured to increase activity so you probably went out and found a sales person with a good track record from a larger company or mature startup. You probably hired a sales technician. They are great at executing on a system but the challenge is YOU HAVE NO SYSTEM and you didn’t hire someone that knows how to build one.

If you haven’t created an outbound selling strategy before, you now have a highly paid sales employee with nothing to do. This is no good, and no positive ROI for your investment. I apologize if I just gave you more anxiety but the only way you are going to make a positive step forward is to know exactly what you need to do and to do it quick.

So you went a little out of order in building your sales team. You skipped an important step in building your sales system. You may have hired someone that has great sales talent but you are not going to be able to maximize that talent unless you give them a system to implement on.

Also, if you had a system in place your first sales hire almost always should not be a VP of Sales, Director of Sales, or comparable level. It should be a lower level technician that works all day just to get you demos. This lower level technician is low salary plus commission and highly compensated by booking demos.

They have only one main purpose, to drive massive awareness to you. Without a system, a higher level sales person is just going to create a monster of ideas with no little activity.

With respect to this challenge, you are not alone by along shot. We hear from almost a dozen companies per month around that world that are having similar challenges. Often the solution is starting over again.

So how do you solve your challenge? Easy! Build a system or get someone else to build one for you. Someone that has experience in not only building one but in hiring lower level technicians to implement the system.

What happens when you have a system in place?

• You have an EXACT roadmap to give to your new sales hires to implement immediately
• You can hire less expensive sales technicians with a very straight forward job description
• You can easily replicate this system and hire other technicians to turn up the volume even more
• You can see the most immediate increase in sales activity and demos
• You can happily report the news to your investors while showing them EXACT daily activity, calls, demos, conversions, etc.
• You can stop worrying about sales activity and start focusing on what you are suppose to be doing

If you expect your current sales employee to eventually get around to building a system you’re going to be highly disappointed. You need to either help them by giving them a system or let them go and find someone who has experience building systems for outbound SaaS sales. There are people out there that have this experience but they are very sought after because they are the key to automating your sales process.

The other option is working with a company like us. We built two SaaS startups from the ground up and got them both to $5MM/year by implementing a simple outbound sales system. We have now helped 28 other startups build their outbound sales systems, implement it, and hire the right sales technicians to execute on it.

If this is a pressing challenge for you, book a time to speak with us here and we will see if we can assist. If not, we will point you in the direction of someone or something that can help.