Alex Newmann (Founder & CEO of Newmann Consulting Group) is an expert at helping founders of B2B companies (either bootstrapped or Series A funded) transition out of founder-led sales, make their first sales hires and build a scalable, repeatable sales process. In this episode, he sits down with Alan Zhao to help change the way you think about making your first sales hires and bring some light to a few strategic mistakes that lead to unsuccessful sales handoffs.
When taking the leap out of founder-led sales, you don’t really need to reinvent the wheel. Alex says that no matter your GTM model - PLG, Enterprise or inbound-led - the playbook already exists and you should use it to structure 80% of your strategy. The rest revolves around your ideal client profile, sales cycle, niche and messaging.
Your first hire is pretty much the most important decision you’ll make when transitioning. Hiring too early will cause a lot of inefficiency and burn out even the brightest sales hire, that’s why you need to achieve product-market fit prior to that. Same goes for hiring a sales leader before you have a sales team assembled, as their expertise won’t be super useful and you’ll be burning money. The founder should start by producing some sales wins alone, then documenting the process, establishing their ICP and dialing in their messaging. After you’ve built your preliminary sales process, make your first hire and scale further by hiring in small groups - that way they’ll have some internal competition to keep things exciting, as well as a peer group that can learn and develop together.
Finding the right fit during the interview process is another strong indicator of a successful, long-term hire. Before hiring, Alex recommends first identifying the technical level of your target buyer and evaluating whether it’s possible to teach someone the ins and outs of the market within a reasonable amount of time. Then, consider your “ideal sales profile” - their industry experience, their stage fit and their personality traits.
Tune into the full episode to learn how to transition out of founder-led sales!
KEY INSIGHTS:
02:21 Picking the right sales playbook
03:15 When do you start delegating sales?
06:46 Don’t bring sales leaders on too early
08:11 Evaluating your first sales candidates
12:19 What answers to look out for
15:16 Fixing the leaky bucket of churn
17:20 The optimal way to acquire sales leaders
Connect with Alex - https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexnewmann/
Connect with Alan - https://www.linkedin.com/in/alan-j-zhao/
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