Hiring a 6-Strong Sales Team

I was pinching myself this morning because it’s weird as hell to have a sales team consisting of….6 people?

INBOUND TEAM

Lydia (temporarily involved in sales for 3-months to learn more about this side of the business so she can eventually become sales support)
Daniel (USA university student - around for at least the next 2-years - learning every day)
Marc (South African family man based in Kent - just started with us) - getting 1-3 leads per day from cold email / LinkedIn / google leads
Jay (American sales veteran) - getting 1-2 leads a day from LinkedIn / cold email
Ion (Greek sales veteran) - based in Spain getting 5-8 leads per day from google leads - the original member of the team

OUTBOUND TEAM

Jude - (Irishman based in London) - the newest member of the team who comes from an event sales background - will be building his own pipeline

It’s weird how far we’ve come given it still feels like yesterday I was just getting started - but equally, it’s nice to see that we have enough leads to be able to support having a 6-person sales team. Still, it feels surreal probably because I’m sat in a local cafe at the moment from where I’m working with my Decaf mocha finished and my bottle of sparkling water half-drunk next to me.

Just sent this email out in fact. One of the ways in which I’ll try and improve things operationally - is to ask the team for their feedback and to work to build upon it as much as I can. For a while it’s been Ion and I working together and he’s been a lone wolf because of the volume of inbound leads we get:

Here’s his calendar right now - he’s on 3 (new) calls today and then has various ongoing deals he works upon. Here you have the overall inflow of leads (although this was extremely unusual to get so many in one day):

The day after we saw 11 leads come in. So as you can see - there truly is enough to support several salespeople - notwithstanding the outbound activities we engage in alongside any outbound activity the guys do themselves. And our inbound is a moving target as we’re working to improve this further still Anyway - It’s interesting trying to juggle working with multiple salespeople at the same time and I’m excited to see how it all plays out. Thankfully - all of the work I’ve done over the last couple of years to build the Pearl Lemon brand is really paying off it seems. As our brand strength grows - the caliber of the people that approach us goes up, and everything seems to get that little bit easier from a relationship-building standpoint as well. Max Newton runs a sales consultancy himself and I’ve just hired him for 4 sessions to learn more about how he manages and works with salespeople - and in general to learn more about his business. What I enjoy a lot about all of this is the education that comes with doing everything. Right now I’ve got my sales team teaching me things through all of the mistakes I’ve made and I’m making and one of them (Jay) offering me sales consulting. Ha, I probably need it :P ____________ In respect of things I still need to do is:

Setup Salesflare for Jude (our new CRM we’ll be using)
Setting up Crazy Call so that
Setup proposals for every product line we have using our proposal template tool Nusii
Develop slide-decks for every product line
Establish pricing for folks cross selling/upselling
Work out longer outreach funnels for all out of the outreach and inbound we have
Put together a guide to doing your own SEO to capture emails on our homepage

___________ This is just the stuff that’s top of mind at the moment for building a more robust sales process for our sales team. Definitely still needs to put in a lot of work to take it to where it needs to be. I was talking to Max yesterday about growing a sales team and there were a couple of things that really resonated with me when we were discussing it:

A sales guy and their ego is critical - it needs to be as high as it possibly can be as you want them to feel great about selling for you
When they ask for things - do everything they can to make their lives easier - and focus heavily upon this to ensure you get the best from them

The success of the sales team will be pivotal to the success of Pearl Lemon in general and it’s why I’m perhaps writing this blog (for myself ha) to ensure I put the work in necessary to take my organization to the next level. _____________ What’s helpful is that I started out selling myself for Pearl Lemon - the first two years was just me and me alone making sales. So when the sales team has come in - they’ve been able to hear my 20-40 odd sales calls that exist on Soundcloud as well as YouTube. Selling is something I’m still doing today probably 2-3x a week from the leads that come in via Upwork - and it’s enjoyable and helpful for the sales team. [convertful id="197358"] When they close a deal and then I come in - there’s something of a consistency of experience which is very helpful. ___________ Jude was asking about weekly sales meetings and how it works - and I told him that there aren’t any weekly meetings that we keep as such and that rather all dialogue happens over WhatsApp. That’s something I’m still debating - whether to have weekly meetings or not with the team to check in on them and to offer them some kind of support and dig deeper into understanding more of their problems Come to think of it - I believe I will for the coming month set up meetings to ensure I learn everything I can from the sales team (just signing up to ‘Doodle’ right now) I was just checking how many words I’ve written - around 1,000. And with this in mind here’s perhaps the final thing I think that’s critical to building and leading (I hope) a successful sales team: I have:

Hired Max Newton for sales consulting over 4-sessions

Here’s what we’ll be working upon -

Setting up Doodle so I can organise a weekly meeting with all the sales team
Deciding to put $500 a month into Bark leads to see what results they can drive:

Being open to being pitched by Jay about improving our own sales processes:

Downloading 2 books by the ‘mentor’ that Max Newton recommend I listen to more of:

Overall the point is: Being fluid and open to change quickly and aggressively is critical. I spend a lot of money trying to find out what’s the ‘one thing’ that will help improve everything else - Sometimes that education might cost me £5,000 and going through multiple things to discover what that ‘one thing is’. Sometimes it might be free and cost me £6 from audible Regardless of where and how you do it - I recommend starting doing the same.