How To Build A High Performing Sales Team

 

Based on Stephanie Friedman's 20 years of sales experience, her new book, Built to Grow: A Handbook For High-Performance Sales Teams, is the perfect step-by-step, go-to-market field guide for startup founders.
 
Friedman offers readers a structured and repeatable methodology for building a high-performing sales function from a company’s earliest days. The book is divided into three phases of startup growth—Experiment, Build, and Scale.
 
Within each of the three phases, Friedman covers:

• Sales Playbook
• Hiring
• Revenue Management
• Customer Success
• Compensations
• Culture
• Internal Collaboration 

Some of my favorite takeaway tips from the book include:
 
No matter how experienced your salespeople are, any high-performing sales organization should follow one simple but important rule: No call without an agenda. This helps reinforce the necessary discipline around call preparation and ensures your customers have the best possible experience when talking to your sales team.
 
It’s so important that your sales team stays calm in the face of challenges. If they can’t solve a problem themselves, they need to feel comfortable bringing it to you or your sales leader as quickly as possible, without fearing you’ll be angry or will chastise them.
 
Never bring up a competitor first. Understand your competition inside and out.
 
As a CEO, lead by example, celebrating successes and offering praise for great work, while also taking responsibility for failure and explaining how you intend to change course when necessary.
 
A good salesperson will be able to tell a succinct and compelling story. They’ll read the audience and tailor their message to that audience. The more naturally this comes to them, or the more time they’ve spent honing this skill, the better. The best salespeople tend to be natural storytellers who have also spent time sharpening their storytelling abilities.
 

Stephanie Friedman

 
Friedman shares these additional insights with us:
 
Question: Of the three phases, Experiment, Build, and Scale, which do startup founders and CEOs struggle with most, and why?
 
Friedman: The reality is that every phase of a startup is incredibly challenging and intense. There are different challenges at each stage, but I think the hardest part for founders is that building out your go-to-market has traditionally been a “black box”: filled with trials and errors without clear metrics or milestones that signal if you are on the right track, or concretely if you are ready to hire more salespeople, for example. This is exactly why I wrote this book as opposed to publishing a series of blog posts - to give founders a framework to hold on to while they build out their sales organization, and to give founders, investors and startup executives a joint vocabulary to talk about and strategize about a startups go-to-market process and maturity together. 
 
But to answer your question more specifically: The answer will depend on the background and personalities of the founders as well as the trajectory of the startup. So, I wouldn't necessarily say that one phase is easier for startup founders and CEOs than the others. That being said, a big theme of my book is that there is one thing you need to figure out early in your startup’s journey: Who will buy your product, who won’t, why or why not, and how best to sell to them – and become very clear and intentional around that. 
 
This means that in the early days of a startup–I call this phase Experiment– founders need to work on experimenting with, identifying and documenting their repeatable sales motion. They need to figure out who their ideal customer is, how they best find them and communicate with them, and how they best close a sale with customers of that profile. Very concretely this means that– once the founders have successfully sold the product to a series of paying customers–they need to bring their first couple of trailblazer sales hires on board: a special profile of early-stage startup salespeople who will team up with the founders on a mission to figure out and document their repeatable sales motion. This will produce a startup's first version of a written sales playbook - which is the foundation of a scalable business: knowing who to sell to, why, and how. 
 
Now, are the early days – the Experiment phase – the hardest? Well, it’s easy to underestimate how time-consuming and difficult that first phase can be. And it’s hard to figure out if your early sales success is just a series of relatively easy to fulfill, pent-up demand from early adopters, or if you have discovered a market that will have sustained and continued demand for your product. All of this is especially hard to do when – as a founder in the early days of your company-- you've got a million other things to do. 
 
But is getting the basics right really harder than Build - the phase where you pressure test your repeatable sales motion, prove that non-trailblazer salespeople can sell your product using your playbook, and create a foundation of excellence for your revenue management? Or is it harder than scaling from, say, $10m to $100m in sales, as in the Scale phase? I wouldn’t say so, as the latter two phases often involve a painful overhaul of leadership, management style, and capacity.
 
In the Scale phase – the phase where you hit the gas pedal and heavily invest in the growth of your business –comes with plenty of its own challenges and struggles. I sometimes say, if you don’t grow fast, you have problems. And if you do grow fast, you also have problems, just different ones. 

So as a startup founder you really are the problem-solver-in chief, and during the Scale phase it really matters to bring the right executive team on board - additional problem-solvers so to speak – so you can build out each function with capable leadership and a well-run team. That phase of building out the right executive team to complement the founders’ strength is also incredibly challenging for two reasons. 

To start with, most executives interview well, and it can be very difficult for founders to figure out if, for example, a candidate for a VP Sales or CRO role is actually great, or just good, or maybe not even that good. And secondly and maybe even more importantly is that it’s not just about finding a great executive, it’s about finding the right executive for the right type of company for the right stage.
 
But of course, a lot of businesses never make it to the scaling phase–so it does seem to me that ‘Experiment’ is especially important. If you can emerge from your experimentation phase with a clear vision of your first market, the first ideal customer profile you want to target, and a good idea how to win those customers – then anything that comes after will be much easier and much less stressful than it could be. 
 
Question: How can a leader of an existing business, rather than a startup founder, best apply the teachings in Built to Grow?
 
Friedman: I wrote this book with startup founders, investors, and executives in mind. In fact, I was thinking specifically of enterprise software companies, since that is the area, I know best and spent most of my time working in.

But you know, I've been passionate about sales since I started working in a flower shop at the age of 11. And it’s as much about psychology, motivation, leadership, and team management as it is about business. So, I think there is a lot in my book that can be a huge help to different kinds of businesses at different stages in their lifecycle.
 
Really the key thing for any sale – B2B or B2C– is arriving at a genuine understanding of who exactly your ideal customer is, what their needs are and how you can meet those needs. And from there, you can figure out how to sell to them systematically, which means turning your sales process from something intuitive and improvisational–and therefore risky – into something that is operationalized and repeatable.

My GTM methodology starts with that, then you add frameworks for managing a sales pipeline, accurately forecasting revenue, and ensuring customer success. At that point, so long as you hire the right salespeople – something I recommend taking very seriously and spending a lot of time on – and build a culture of excellence and winning, you have the building blocks of success, whatever kind of business you're in.
 
Selling is fundamental for any and every business; so even if you're an established business – and even if you're not an enterprise software company – many of the learnings are universal.  
__
 
Friedman is an angel investor, advisor, and startup executive with over 20 years of go-to-market operations experience, with a focus on enterprise software. Previously, she helped build three successful startups as an operator and revenue leader, and after one acquisition stayed on for two years to manage sales operations for a 380-million-dollar business as part of a public company. 

She joined her last startup, Xamarin, in 2012 as their first non-engineering hire and built the customer-facing organization from zero to 100 sales and customer success people and from zero to almost 50 million dollars in run rate sales in less than four years. Xamarin was acquired by Microsoft in 2016. 
 
Thank you to the book’s publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book.