Everything You Have to Do as a New VP of Sales

So you’re a new VP of Sales. You’re a Stretch VP. And you’ve got a ton on your plate.

As a Stretch VP, you probably don’t have the luxury of walking in with a bunch of assistants or specific departments helping you with every single task.

Often, you’ll be overwhelmed (I am) with everything you need to do as you focus on driving ARR. The never ending to-do list can be daunting sometimes. The faster you grow, the faster you can hire more people to help you with each task below. But in order to grow, you’re going to be swamped at first. Here’s a brief, and yet non-exclusive list.

What would you add? Where would you prioritize How do you accomplish it all?

• Close Deals (either by carrying your own bag, or assisting reps in this process). Alongside the next bullet, this is one of tasks I enjoy the most. I still love the thrill of the hunt, the building of relationship and closing the sale.
• Recruit/organize/scale sales team. If you’re lucky, you started with an open headcount. This is where you really earn your pay. You’re going to need to sell over any weaknesses or perceived imperfections you or your product has. This becomes even harder as you scale and optimize your structure and build for SDRs, AEs, Inbound/Outbound, Territories etc.
• Implement/optimize sales process. What’s the process you want your sales team to follow? Can you build repeatable scale into your process?
• Sales Tactics and Trainings. Who’s doing this? Are you preparing for this or just showing up each week and winging it? Reps will see right through this. As a rep, I definitely did.
• Create and implement the sales compensation plan. Monthly/Quarterly/Annual quotas? What about renewal commission? Up-sells? Accelerators? Also…do you calculate these yourself or do you have a SaaS for that?
• Implement and manage the sales stack. This is either adding to or revising your existing sales stack. This also means your day is full of demos, budgeting (if you have one), and evenings on the laptop as you stand these up (unless you have a solid resource to take this off your plate). How does each system work with the others? Does it make your sales reps job easier or add menial tasks to their daily routine?
• Implementation/Tech meetings. You’ve sold some deals. Now you have to make sure you deliver. That often means selling internally if the product is young enough.
• Meetings and conversations with Marketing to optimize Lead Funnels, define MQL and SQL criteria with appropriate mapping to CRM.
• Pricing. Depends on your situation, but no better person to help fine-tune pricing than the head of those pitching on a daily basis. I’ve been a part of multiple pricing adjustments as VP of Sales
• Reporting to CEO/C Level (see sales stack. Is this part of that? Let’s hope so)
• Pitch Decks, Sales Collateral, Case Studies. Hopefully you have someone in marketing to help with this, but you’ll still be running point to make sure your team has enough ammo to get the job done.
• Investment/Funding Pitches. Depends on if your CEO trusts you, but if you’re a VP of Sales — especially a Stretch VP, you probably have a decent equity stake in the company and you’ll be asked to help pitch OR prepare for the pitch.

I’m sure there’s more here and each company will be different. But comment below and add your $.02.

-Stretch VP

Originally published at stretchvp.com.