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Building a Strong Sales Candidate Pipeline: 3 Steps for HR Leaders

Virtual Talent Bench

One of the central challenges for companies attempting to scale their sales teams is the ability for HR leaders and their teams to deliver qualified candidates in a timely manner. The time-to-hire gap is long—estimated at roughly 2 months—and once a rep is on the job it takes them 10 months to onboard. Put in context, in which the average tenure of a B2B sales rep is 24 months, this leaves very little time for a rep to deliver a return on investment.

All told, this leaves sales organizations with eroding revenue and a weak pipeline in times when they should be growing. The typical mad-dash recruiting approach, which tries to fill seats as soon as headcount opens, fails to bring in candidates fast enough and tends to attract low-grade hires that soon voluntarily turn over.

HR leaders and sales leaders must collaborate on a new recruiting strategy designed for top sales talent that uses long-term relationship building to prime them for an interview. This is called the Virtual Talent Bench strategy, which shortens the time-to-hire gap, shortens ramp-up time, and lengthens a salesperson’s tenure.

 

Why a virtual talent bench strategy attracts A-players

Think of A-player sales candidates as “customers” who require time to travel through a buyer’s journey. When you sell a product to a customer, you don’t expect them to purchase the moment they hear about your company. Instead, you might expect an average lead time of weeks, months, or even years where you build mutual trust through check-ins and nurture content, like eBooks, articles, and videos, to educate them about your brand and benefits.

Top talent requires a similar approach. Push candidate leads along a hiring nurture funnel with content and check-ins until you have a pool of talent that knows and trusts your employer brand.

Dr. Geoff Smart calls this the virtual talent bench strategy. He writes, “When the star pitcher pulls a muscle and has to leave the game, the coach gets the number two pitcher off the bench and play resumes immediately. No problem.” Hiring managers should think like a baseball coach: nurture candidates until you can put a rep in the game as quickly as you like.

The virtual bench strategy eliminates last-minute dashes and establishes a recruiting machine that predictably incubates high-quality hires. It decreases time-to-hire and gives A-players the time, relationships, and information they need to join your company.

There are three steps to the virtual bench strategy: Generate leads, put infrastructure in place to track your interactions, and nurture them with personal outreach and content.

 

Step 1: Identify A Players

Start with a workforce planning exercise to anticipate the number of reps you plan to hire in the next year. Then, build a picture of the ideal candidate with the specific attributes and skills needed to do the job. Because you are hiring salespeople, educate your team about the importance of Sales DNA, which are the intangible traits that help top salespeople excel. Sales DNA almost always beats the resume as a form of screening and selecting a candidate that will perform well on the job.

Next, find candidates. They will be more likely to act on a word-of-mouth referral from someone they trust, so mine your company’s extended network, starting with your top salespeople. Conduct an internal brainstorming exercise by asking key sales leaders and reps to make a list of 10 potential candidates in their network. Top performers immerse themselves in successful communities and have deep networks of other talented sales leaders. Ask them to browse their own LinkedIn networks to make sure they haven’t missed anyone.

You can do a similar exercise by identifying people in your network who are “connectors”—advisors, mentors, influencers, and other business partners—who can recommend candidates and make a connection.

Next, look at the competition’s sales force, as well as peripheral competitors and industries. These are companies and industries adjacent to yours that have similar buyers, sales cycles, and deal sizes, but don’t compete head-to-head. You can also participate in professional associations, network at trade shows, and even host events for education, networking, and industry interest presentations.

Consider creating a talent community, which allows top talent to submit their resumes to your company without committing to a certain position. People who are attracted to your brand can simply express interest, share contact information, and upload their resume, separate from any job postings. There are many benefits to this for both you and the candidate:

  • You can attract potential candidates year-round, even if you don’t have a job posting written.
  • You can see where they best fit within your company and have more flexibility to match them with a role.
  • For a top candidate, it’s less time-consuming to join a talent pool than to apply to a position. It’s low-barrier and low-commitment to begin with, and opens the door for a long-term nurture relationship.

Over time, you’ll amass a list of prospective candidates who are already genuinely interested in your brand and you will have the contact information to begin engaging them with nurture content via email, phone, and live events. Lockheed Martin, Santander Bank, and Carvana, an auto tech startup, are examples of companies that use talent communities to recruit.

 

Step 2: Create a tracker

Once you have a list of talent prospects, put them in a candidate CRM, ATS, or manual tracker—you wouldn’t keep lists of customers in your head, and you don’t want to do this for candidates either.

If you don’t have technology in place, a simple spreadsheet can suffice to hold candidate information and track your interactions over time. Share the document with your organization’s leads and any other team members involved in the recruiting process. Then, update it with new leads and set a ritual or reminder to repeat the lead brainstorming exercise from Step 1.

The tracker should at minimum have these fields :

  • Name
  • Priority ranking — To sort your dream leads
  • Current title
  • Source — Where you got the idea for the lead
  • Connectors — Your mutual “connectors” that can provide an introduction or reference
  • Timing of contact — We recommend logging the first outreach and the latest outreach at the very least. You can also log any in-between contacts and content sent to the candidate.
  • Selling Performance — Did the candidate hit quota the past 3 years?
      •  

(See Rob Kelly’s explanation of his candidate tracker for more background.)

 

Step 3: Plan your buyer’s funnel

Once you have a list of leads to reach out to, create a funnel that nudges a candidate through the stages of the buyer’s journey, similar to an inbound marketing funnel. Just as it takes consumers many touchpoints to purchase a product, top candidates typically need high-quality, repeated exposure to your employer brand before accepting an interview invitation. All the more so if they’re comfortably employed and doing well in their current job.

This is why your first outreach to a candidate should simply get your company on their radar, because they likely aren’t familiar with your company yet. The first conversation is a “meet and greet,” and ideally comes through a warm introduction. Do not treat it as an interview or an opportunity to pitch your company. Instead, it should entirely center around the candidate, their career aspirations, and their interests. Get a head start before the conversation: research the candidate to understand their career trajectory, recent increased responsibilities, patterns across jobs, and any associations they’re affiliated with or articles they’ve published.

After that first contact, let the candidate progress through a funnel of regular check-ins over email, phone, or coffee so that they can learn progressively more information about your company and the position. Even if they’re not ready to leave their current job, they’ll become more familiar with you over the long term, increasing the chance they’ll consider you for the next stage in their career.

What does this nurture funnel look like? It’s similar to the way a marketing team uses content like articles, webinars, and testimonials to push a lead forward. In the same way, an employer brand uses candidate nurture to slowly communicate selling points and build trust.

Sales teams can collaborate with marketing to create digital nurture programs using emails, ads, and videos that paint a picture of the career that’s in store for a candidate. They should highlight the benefits of the working environment, spotlight successful employees, and communicate key aspects of your company’s growth story, like new product developments and milestones. It’s a way to cut through to what really matters to millenials in a new job and illustrate opportunities for accomplishment, self-actualization, challenges and recognition.

Emails to candidates might take the form of:

  • Employee profile stories demonstrating their accomplishments, providing a model for career growth and an example of external recognition
  • Newsletters that include industry news and business milestones like new high-visibility partnerships and customers, helping candidates understand the exciting challenges they could experience
  • Stories about culture and sales team events
  • eBooks, blog posts, whitepapers, webinars, and videos about the industry or the specific team a candidate is interested in
  • Glassdoor ratings
  • Invitations to in-person events
  • Job alerts
  • Gentle reminders to finish an application
  • Thank you messages

Consider using personalization to improve candidates’ engagement rates (like any good marketing team would). This starts with collecting clean data about each candidate: use standardized forms fields and email questionnaires to collect their name, contact information, and the type of job they’re interested in, as well information about skill sets and areas of interest.  

Then, dynamically insert this data into emails—or segment your candidate database into major groups or personas that require different types of content. For example, junior candidates are more likely to identify with employee stories that match their experience level and early career goals, while senior candidates may be more interested in strategic content about the market and executive team. Other ways to segment a candidate database include job type, areas of interest, and geography.

Netflix is an example of a company that has invested in their nurture programs and employer brand. They cultivate candidates with content such as videos about their internal culture, podcasts about how they hire, and a Facebook page for their talent community called We Are Netflix. Bain & Company has invested in in-depth content to help candidates explore roles and navigate the interview process, complete with videos demonstrating sample interviews and tips. E-commerce tech giant Shopify also invests in automated email nurture campaigns in which recruiters partner with hiring managers to actively check in with candidates who are in the interview process.

Like these companies, persistent nurture will help you bring candidates through the buyer’s journey—all while they’re not actively searching for a job. When they’re ready to consider a change, your company will be top of mind.

 


A virtual talent funnel is a support structure for building deep human relationships over time. Courting excellent candidates requires a long timeline, but without the disciplined follow-ups of a nurture campaign, they’ll slip through the cracks and go elsewhere. A tracking and outreach system ensures that you’re intentional about building high-quality talent relationships—just as your best reps would for your dream customers.

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Connect:

Eliot Burdett

CEO at Peak Sales Recruiting
Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.

Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.

He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.

Connect:

The 5 Key Players Needed to Successfully Scale Your Sales Team.

Scale Sales Team - Roles

“In the digital age, where anything and everything can be bought from just about anywhere, there is little differentiation between products and services. It means a business’ greatest asset and biggest distinction are its people.”—Marc Havercroft

In Marvel’s universe, The Avengers are a team of Earth’s five mightiest superheroes, who come together to protect the planet from imminent destruction. In business, there may be fewer explosions and costumes, but there are still five key roles that come together to optimize talent and scale a high-performance salesforce:

VP Sales

VP HR

CEO

CFO

The Board of Directors

We’ll examine the responsibilities and special powers of each one—as well as typical pitfalls to watch for when it comes to talent.

Why pay so much attention to the talent-and-development skills of your highest leaders? One of the most important attributes of a modern business is the ability to attract and develop talent, and at Peak Sales, we believe that growing high performing teams is not an event but an ongoing business process.

The digital era has democratized access to resources and enabled copycats, making talent one of the only real competitive advantages left. Talent-driven companies win, meaning that talent informs strategy rather than the other way around.

According to Dominic Barton, talent is more scarce than financial capital, and the returns to employees have gone up dramatically. In the past, the difference in performance between an average and a top-notch production line worker didn’t justify a huge compensation difference. But today’s ROI on top performers justifies new ways of compensating, sourcing, nurturing, and retaining employees—and a “dream team” pull it off.

Sales organizations are no exception, where top performers produce a disproportionate return while below-average and average performers create drag on the team. Designing a talent management program that lets a top-performing sales organization scale up requires a team of Avengers … and each one plays a unique role.

 

VP Sales

A VP of Sales is the head of the sales organization and directly influences a company’s revenue, growth, and culture. And they are directly responsible for the talent acquisition, development, and retention of the company’s sales force.

Key responsibilities of a VP Sales:

    • People management—Create a culture and environment of success through coaching, a sales process, and by holding talent accountable for performance.
    • Talent acquisition—Drive hiring efforts year-round and personally recruit sales talent.
    • Customer management—Set high-level strategy by connecting to the customer’s needs as well as understanding the market and competition.
    • Business management—Align resources in the sales function, invest in technology and data infrastructure, and improve selling processes and channels.

A VP Sales’ typical talent-related mistakes:

Not personally developing a sales candidate pipeline. The VP of Sales should have an extensive network of sales professionals—ideally top performers—and must actively maintain relationships to identify potential talent to bring onto the team. They can identify needed outside talent and help them envision a career path at the company.

Spending too much time selling accounts personally, rather than leveraging their team. While some amount of oversight on high-profile deals is beneficial, a VP of Sales should free up their time to dedicate their time to high-level talent strategy.

Not allocating enough resources to sales support functions. It’s been found that dedicating about 50% of sales employees to support functions optimizes a sales team’s ROI.

Hiring by gut feel or “winging it” as soon as headcount is open. Successful long-term sales teams are built over time by using quantitative tests and rigorous, structured interview processes to evaluate candidates. A VP of Sales should collaborate with HR to design a rigorous program and contribute sales-specific insights to the process, such as interview questions and a list of skillsets, aptitudes, and characteristics that will set up a candidate for success.

 

VP HR

The thought of HR might conjure images from the 1999 movie Office Space, the perfect picture of HR gone wrong, with mind-numbing processes and employees who feel like prisoners.

But today, HR is no longer a sleepy administrative department and Chief HR Officers hold key strategic roles. Coco Brown, CEO of The Athena Alliance, which works to place talented women in corporate boardrooms, says, “Some of the CHRO areas of expertise, once considered ‘the soft stuff,’ have become ‘the strategic stuff.’”

Some even argue that the CHRO should be elevated to the same level as the CEO and CFO, creating an ideal leadership group that prioritizes talent as much as financial capital. “One of the biggest investors in the world is BlackRock,” writes Dominic Barton, “and you go to the seventh floor of BlackRock and the person sitting beside (CEO) Larry Fink’s office is Jeff Smith, who’s the Chief Human Resources Officer. That’s deliberate.”

Key responsibilities of a VP of HR:

    • Talent acquisition—Develop a robust talent acquisition strategy spanning employer branding to recruitment, assessment, and interviewing strategies.
    • Compensation strategy—Design compensation and equity structures that incentivize and align behaviors.
    • Retention—Implement mechanisms and initiatives to retain top talent.
    • Succession planning—Ensure a strong leadership bench and facilitate executive transitions.
    • People, culture, and the future of work—Keep up with shifts in the workforce and the changing nature of work.

A VP HR’s typical talent-related mistakes:

Focusing on the operational side of HR rather than the strategic side. An HR function can get lost in the weeds of transactional processes. A VP of HR should have the capacity and sensitivity to operate in the inner circle of the CEO and CFO, and advocate for talent being as central to company strategy as finances are.

Not delivering on sales hiring goals fast enough. A VP of HR must search for external sales talent with curiosity, tenacity, and outside-the-box thinking to meet hiring goals on time. They need to support the VP of Sales in developing a talent pipeline that’ll help them adhere to growth models.

 

CEO

The CEO of a company is responsible for its overall business performance, and acts as the highest level of authority for key decisions. The CEO can be a huge asset when it comes to recruiting sales talent—they have visibility with the community, press, investors, partners, and customers, and as such should act as talent scouts.

Key responsibilities of a CEO:

    • Own the company vision—Unite all company efforts with a consistent vision.
    • Balance resources—Allocate and prioritize resources between departments and initiatives.
    • Invest in culture—Actively cultivate culture, because like a garden left untended, a company culture will form regardless. A CEO must evoke core values and shared attitudes to help it grow in the right direction.
    • Oversee performance—Measure company performance, deliver on goals and vision, and implement strategies to increase shareholder value.
    • Communicate on behalf of the company—Drive messaging to employees, shareholders, partners, the press and public, and regulatory entities.
    • Lead executive team—Maintain responsibility for the outcomes of the executive team’s decisions and evaluate their work.
    • Scout talent—Identify and attract top-performing talent.

A CEO’s typical talent-related mistakes:

Not personally participating in talent acquisition. The CEO should actively scout for sales talent in their network, cultivating those relationships and contributing candidates to the sales hiring pipeline.

Blocking the VP of HR from the top circle of executives. For talent to be a central asset and competitive advantage, a CEO should elevate the head of HR to a strategic position in the upper echelon of leadership—rather than making it an afterthought.

Deprioritizing sales compensation and hiring forecasts. A CEO must work with Sales, Finance, and HR to create a sales hiring forecast that supports the company’s growth … and then adhere to it. To follow through on the plan, the CEO must allocate and protect resources to appropriately compensate top performing sales talent, which helps both hiring and talent retention.

 

CFO

A Chief Financial Officer is the company’s spokesperson for all financial matters and performance. When it comes to talent, a CFO manages a company’s investments in people. This means that CFOs and heads of HR should be highly aligned: finance oversees the investment, while HR delivers on it. Too often, they’re disconnected, but a talent-first company must have a CFO who is on board.

Key responsibilities of a CFO:

      • Financial performance—Report and analyze high-level performance.
      • Optimize use of resources—Perform cost-benefit analyses and identify strategies to optimize financial performance.
      • Managing the company’s financial risks—Identify risks and develop strategies to mitigate them.
      • Forecasting—Generate forecasts for finances, growth, and future risks and trends.
      • Regulatory compliance and taxation—Ensure that the company is compliant with government regulations and tax responsibilities.

A CFO’s typical talent-related mistakes:

Budgeting too few resources to support talent acquisition efforts. In a talent-first company, CFO’s must prioritize talent initiatives when allocating resources, invest in the sales force, and adhere to hiring forecasts. (ZS Associates found that organizations that hire sales teams based on analytical models exhibit higher short-term and long-term profits, while companies that hold off on expansion compromise their standing.)

Acquiring and retaining top-performing sales talent can be particularly costly, but the best sales organizations still design compensation plans around top performers, using competitive base rates as well as accelerator and product volume bonuses. CFOs must also budget for employee referral programs, outside talent acquisition specialists, and technology that assists in sourcing and vetting candidates.

Being resistant to releasing talent. A dilemma that CFOs often face is knowing when to let talent go versus wanting to “rescue” them. This is often evident in situations involving high performers who don’t work well in the team, or likeable individuals who just aren’t performing, or employees who have been passed over for a promotion. A CFO must decide whether to retain and develop the individual, or to release them, but a release often does not come soon enough, to the detriment of team productivity and morale—especially in sales organizations.

Staying process-oriented instead of shifting focus to growth. Too many CFOs are still process-oriented. Modern companies must recognize that the new role of the CFO is to drive value and strategy. CFOs should adopt technology that automates old processes, freeing them to think more strategically. They should also use their processes and models to give other departments, like HR, access to data-driven, high-level insights.

 

The Board of Directors

The Board of Directors is a group of individuals elected to represent the best interests of a company’s shareholders. They meet several times a year and have a unique responsibility to oversee important talent-related initiatives.

In the past, a board of directors’ involvement in talent was focused on electing a quality CEO and managing the people on the board itself. Today, with talent as a central competitive advantage the board’s talent responsibilities extend beyond a company’s highest leadership positions. They’re responsible for the company delivering on talent objectives as a whole.

Key responsibilities of a Board of Directors:

    • Review financial results—Oversee company performance and shareholder value.
    • Monitor leadership—Evaluate the performance of executives and managers.
    • Decision making—Vote on strategic decisions proposed by the leadership team.
    • Maintain integrity—Help the company demonstrate integrity at a high level.
    • Set direction—Participate in the creation of long-term goals and strategy for the company.
    • Governing talent objectives—Hold the company accountable for delivering on talent-related goals and mitigating talent-related risks. Boards must be directly involved in reviewing talent strategies and programs, as well as workforce KPIs, talent risks, demographic trends, recruiting pipeline, retention performance, and succession plans.

A Board of Directors’ typical talent-related mistakes:

Neglecting retention strategies. Talent retention is a huge risk that warrants board oversight. Externally-hired executives have a failure rate of 30 percent to 40 percent after 18 months—an incredibly high and costly risk.

Boards should mitigate this by evaluating onboarding programs, monitoring the success rate of external hiring, and ensuring that all employees have a clear idea of the company’s strategy and their own career growth opportunities within the company.

Forgetting that talent is a key risk area of the business. The risks don’t just stop with retention: businesses are vulnerable to reputational hits, legal breaches, and adherence to regulatory constraints. Boards should review talent-related risks and mitigation strategies twice a year. They should also compare retention and attrition to industry benchmarks, monitor talent pipeline, and make sure to do “talent due diligence” during mergers and acquisitions.

Not holding management accountable for talent KPIs. Boards should review talent-related performance regularly, including:

      • Pipeline for critical roles and sales talent
      • Strength of the succession bench
      • Leadership capabilities that will be required in the future, and how current capabilities match up
      • Employee engagement

Ignoring broader workplace trends and demographic changes. Boards must be aware of demographic changes and consider their influence on a company’s approach to talent. For example, has the company seriously considered the effects of:

      • The broad range of ages in the workforce. With Boomers staying in the workforce longer and Gen Y redefining the future of work, significant life events (like starting a family) can happen at many ages.
      • Different nationalities, cultures, and abilities in workplaces, and the need to make work environments inclusive and supportive of all individuals.
      • Gender equality, especially in terms of pay gaps and leadership gaps. Women today make up 50% of the workforce, but only 22.2% of Fortune 500 board seats are held by women.
    • Technology’s effects on the way people collaborate, work independently, and interact with confidential company information.

Under-developing board members. As market forces and workplace trends change, so do the required skills of the board. A company should bring in expert trainers for its board members and outside facilitators board discussions. It should also ensure that the board itself is diverse and inclusive.

Not being directly involved in succession planning. A board should have a process to identify and vet succession candidates, and ensure that the company offers training to develop and nurture internal candidates before they need to step up.

A company’s ability to scale its sales team depends on its leaders being focused on a talent-first organization. Are all executives allocating appropriate resources to talent initiatives? Are they thinking big when it comes to talent strategy, and measuring hiring performance? The most successful companies recognize that talent is the main way they can compete—and to attract and nurture that talent, they need to have their Avengers assemble.

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Connect:

Eliot Burdett

CEO at Peak Sales Recruiting
Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.

Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.

He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.

Connect:

Soft dB Drives Strategic Expansion Across North America

Soft dB Sales Recruiter

Sound Masking Market Leader Adds U.S. Sales Force, Achieves Outstanding Year Over Year Growth

Recognized as a worldwide leader in its market, Quebec-based Soft dB provides patented technologies and products for sound masking, acoustical consulting, and related services. Since 1996, Soft dB has been optimizing acoustic comfort for business and industrial clients. The company’s sound masking system, SmartSMS-Net, is just one example of its ground-breaking solutions that enable office workers to enjoy more privacy, productivity, and comfort.

“We have been around for more than 20 years, specializing in acoustic vibration, and while our crown jewel is sound masking, we continue to deliver innovation to the market,” shares Co-Owner and Vice President Jeff Cauchon. “We have a special mission at Soft dB and this is reflected through the work of our team, our attention to product quality, and our dedication to customers.”

The company had primarily sold its products through distributors, but this recently changed when product growth drove the need to expand its sales force in the U.S.

“With the tremendous growth our Soft dB products are experiencing, we identified 20 metropolitan areas in the U.S. to stage a strategic expansion. We needed excellent sales managers on the ground in these cities. Our vision was a fast track deployment of our sales force, product line, and turnkey systems in North America. Building an expert sales team in the U.S. was critical.”
– Co-Owner and Vice President Jeff Cauchon

 

Soft dB partners with Peak Sales Recruiting

With the high stakes of the company’s hiring goals and without internal resources to do the recruiting, Jeff needed to get the hires right the first time. The company made the decision to evaluate recruiting firms.

“We know that finding good sales people is always a challenge, especially for a technical product line and a diverse customer base like ours,” continues Jeff. “We needed a recruiting partner that understands our business, has deep sales experience in the technology sector, and can reach the right people. We also needed someone who would take the time to understand our business and go the extra mile to find very special sales people for us.”

For Jeff, another goal was building a strong sales culture. “We have relied on a great distributor network for many years, but with the future addition of a sales team, we needed to create a great selling environment for our new team. We looked for a recruiting partner who could recognize the nuances of our business and situation, and could help us identify and evaluate candidates with this in mind.”

After interviewing several recruiting firms, Jeff chose Peak Sales Recruiting for its experience in the technology sales market, competitive pricing, and commitment to sales success through the Peak guarantee.

“Mitigating risk by having the right partner was very important for us. We came across Peak Sales Recruiting and we were very impressed and intrigued by the company’s offering. The experience that Peak has working with technology companies that were going through a similar growth stage as Soft dB was really reassuring. We were confident we found the right partner.”

 

Peak Sales Recruiting puts its tech sector experience to the test

After gaining an understanding of Soft dB’s business, goals, and the sales culture they wanted to build, the Peak team quickly began tapping its proprietary network of candidates to find perfect fits and applying its structured 4-step sales recruiting methodology.  

As Jeff shares, “I was extremely impressed with Peak’s process. We had one point of contact on Peak’s team who took complete ownership of the process and managed deliverables expertly. He understood our business philosophy, our values, and what type of candidates we were looking for as well as our markets.”

“The challenge in the race to hire, is that the business goes on and requires your time. With Peak, we immediately knew we were in good hands and this really helped us focus on our business at the same time,” he says. “We were presented a number of great, qualified candidates and the Peak team extensively screened the candidates, managing first and second interviews, and assessing candidates through their comprehensive process.”

 

Five hires placed, on track to exceed goals

After successfully placing five hires for Soft dB in Atlanta, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Vancouver, B.C., the Peak team is now working on placing hires in three other metropolitan centers.  According to Jeff, his new U.S. team has already made a major impact on a number of fronts.

“We have some real superstars on our team. All of Peak’s hires have either met or exceeded their sales goals. The beautiful thing is they are all contributing to improving our culture at Soft dB.”

Would Soft dB partner with Peak again?  “We have made significant progress toward our sales objectives and I’m very excited about where we are as a business,” shares Jeff.  “I’m also very excited with our partnership with Peak Sales Recruiting and we want this to continue. It has been a great experience and has already delivered many benefits. We now have a structured, well-tuned process for hiring and this is critical as we continue to scale and grow our Soft dB footprint worldwide.”

 

Are you ready to take your talent acquisition to the next level?  Learn more about Peak’s services or contact us today to recruit top sales talent.

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Focus 360 Builds-First U.S. Sales Team in Competitive, Niche Market

Focus 360 Sales Recruiting

Technology Innovation Leader for Home Builder and Real Estate Market Establishes Business Development Team, Secures Net New Customers.

 

Steve Ormonde founded Focus 360 nearly 30 years ago with a vision to disrupt the home building and real estate market through the use of innovative technologies. Led by Steve, the company’s talented team of artists, architects, animators, and programmers was the first to combine marketing techniques and architectural CAD elements to develop the first ‘virtual model home’ for the home building market.

Today, Focus 360 leads its market and has established a global reputation for using virtual reality technology to produce premium architectural renderings and quality illustrations, visual analysis, animation, and interactive elements for builders, architects and developers around the world.

As Steve reflects on the company’s consistent growth, he admits that the company’s niche market can present challenges recruiting sales talent. This became clear in 2015 when Focus 360’s leadership team put a North America growth plan in motion that required establishing a U.S. sales force.

“Recruiting salespeople for our organization is an especially difficult task. We are in a very niche, competitive industry. When we set out to build our first U.S. sales team, it was really important to us that we consulted a recruiting service that had the proven ability to recruit the specific type of sales professionals we were looking for.”

– Steve Ormonde, Founder of Focus 360

 

Peak steps up to the niche market challenge

For Steve, the acquisition of top sales talent was absolutely critical to the plan’s success. The recruiting partner had to have the proven ability to recruit top senior sales talent and help Focus 360 put a strong, national business development team in place to secure net new business and drive year-over-year growth. Ultimately, Focus 360 chose to partner with Peak Sales Recruiting because of Peak’s track record of success hiring sales leaders in niche industries across the U.S.

“We took a look at several recruiting firms and without question, Peak was the best choice,” says Steve. “Seeing the success they had recruiting top sales leaders in other niche industries, gave me the confidence that their process would get us the sales talent we needed.”

Peak and Focus 360 collaborated, developing a unique hiring strategy for Focus 360’s corporate objectives. Peak then profiled ideal candidates who had the skills, experience, and DNA necessary to be successful in the roles. Using the defined candidate profiles, Peak headhunted passive candidates who had a proven track record of meeting quota for five consecutive years. Finally, each candidate was evaluated using Peak’s 4-step sales recruiting methodology – system that includes behavior-based interviews and role playing, psychometric profiling, and benchmarking.

On a very fast timeline, Peak was able to deliver top candidates that met the Focus 360 criteria. “We got the right sales talent and the proof was in the results,” shares Steve.

 

National business development team drives net new business

Focus 360 was able to launch a national new business development team, recruiting senior account executives in Colorado, Texas, and California. The team has not only increased sales, they have been consistently driving new business.

Another advantage to partnering with Peak?  Based on the high caliber of the hires, Steve and his team were also able to reduce ramp up time.

“I am very impressed with our business development team. They continue to bring in new business and in our niche industry, that is not an easy job. The team has been a major influence on our ability to achieve our growth goals.”

The new sales force has also driven significant brand awareness for the company.  Focus 360 was recently recognized with several prestigious industry awards, including three National Association of Home Builders awards, two Marketing and Merchandising Excellence awards, and three SoCal awards.

Steve couldn’t be more proud of his team and satisfied with his decision to partner with Peak. “Peak brings enormous value to our organization. They remained dedicated in their scientific, metric-based approach throughout the entire process. I trust them to get me the sales talent I need.”

 

Are you ready to take your talent acquisition to the next level?  Learn more about Peak’s services or contact us today to recruit top sales talent.

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How Incopro Built Its US Sales Team From the Ground Up

Incopro Peak Sales Recruiting

As the holiday shopping season comes to an end, were the gifts we purchased for family and friends truly the brands we know and love? Sunglasses, jeans, sneakers, headphones, jewelry and more. Products that looked like our beloved brands but may not be the case. As the global market for counterfeit products grows – to the sum of half a trillion dollars – one company is waging a successful battle to protect corporate brands from the unscrupulous business of fake goods. For Simon Baggs, online infringement attorney and CEO of Incopro, legal action is effective to an extent, but not enough. He believes the solution lies in technology.

In 2012, Simon teamed up with technology expert Bret Boivin and founded Incopro.  Starting from small beginnings, Simon and Bret have built a successful global operation with a laser focus on providing innovative technology and supporting services to stop brand infringement taking place online. Today, the venture capital-backed company has offices in London, Wales, the U.S. and China with a client base that includes a who’s who of enterprise customers with well-known brands across multiple verticals — sports, fashion, luxury, automotive, consumer products, pharma and more.

Through its comprehensive technology solution, Incopro automates the entire process of identifying commercial scale operators that are working in the counterfeit world and removing these products from sale across major social and retail platforms. The company protects these iconic brands against infringement across all digital platforms, in any language, tracking down and stopping perpetrators anywhere on the internet.

U.S. sales effort key to global plan

Shortly after Incopro’s inception, Simon and his team moved forward with plans to build a strong sales effort in the U.S.  Simon explains, “It was an ambitious thing to do early on. We had big goals for our sales effort in America and virtually no U.S. footprint established at the time. This person would be the first tasked with building our U.S. sales effort, and would also be our first employee in America.”

“We were fortunate to have a couple of rock star sales people early on in the UK, so we knew what good looked like, but we also experienced some poor performers who delivered little,” he continues.  “When it came to expansion in the U.S., we felt even less sure of our ground. In America, we had less familiarity with the companies and a limited candidate pool. There were also cultural differences to consider and time differences that could result in a lengthy recruitment process.  It became clear we needed to work with a qualified recruitment partner.”

Peak steps up to the challenge

Through a referral from another VC-funded startup company, Simon turned to Peak Sales Recruiting to launch Incopro’s U.S. sales effort. With a goal to hire the very best sales professional on the East Coast, the stakes were high but the Peak team stepped up to the challenge. Adds Simon, “We needed someone who had some experience in brand infringement, possibly an analyst who had used technology like ours but also had strong sales experience. This person would also need to hit the ground running in an entirely new market.”

As a start-up, Incopro’s sales culture was very entrepreneurial and customer centric. “Our focus has always been on the customer. This was especially true early on as we built out our product to meet our customers’ needs,” he says. “Our approach to selling has evolved but it has always focused on understanding the customers and the need, not selling the wrong benefits to the wrong persona. If you’re selling to a brand protection manager, you will have one dialogue, and if you’re selling to a marketing or e-commerce manager, it’s a different conversation.  It’s all about being in the shoes of the customer and understanding what they are looking for. At the same time, you need the right people, structure and culture to empower your sales team to succeed.”

Peak Account Manager Kara Ragsdale and her team met with Simon to gain a good understanding of his criteria for the position, business objectives and selling culture, and quickly started identifying and evaluating candidates to find the perfect fit.

“The key advantage in working with Peak was the team took the time to understand our company and our needs and then they focused hard on finding candidates with the right background and fit,” Simon explains. “Each candidate was presented to us very carefully, with a full personality profile and reference check.  It gave us good control over the recruitment effort and a high level of confidence.”

Peak’s talent acquisition process relies on a 4-step sales recruiting methodology that includes determining corporate objectives, identifying the profile of an ideal candidate, targeted headhunting to find the top candidates and scientific assessment. Through its proprietary P95 assessment method, Peak takes the process one step deeper and evaluates candidates’ selling behaviors through three phases of advanced assessment that are critical in determining whether candidates have the sales DNA to perform in a client’s selling environment.

“We liked Peak’s approach and believed it was very effective in helping us find the right candidate to launch our U.S. sales effort. Kara was very good at finding candidates that were suitable and pushing forward quickly and thoroughly. It was a well-structured, responsive and professional process.”

— Simon Baggs, CEO of Incopro

Incopro’s U.S. sales team now a reality

At the time the company retained Peak’s services, Incopro was also in the process of finalizing a deal with a leading trademark search company that had a small team in the U.S.  Incopro acquired the company’s operations as well as the U.S. staff. Incopro now had a Boston-based candidate that Peak had found as well as a sales team member from the trademark search company based in Orange County, California.

“The timing was amazing. We had 10 staff members in the U.S. right at our doorstep about the same time that Peak had found our ideal U.S. candidate. This came together at the same time and gave us an effective east-west bridge. We also gained a team member in Washington state and New York,” he explains. “We now had to integrate the team but this all went very well because of the caliber of candidate that Peak recruited. We were now able to offer Peak’s candidate the luxury of a bigger footprint in the U.S. so it would be easier to get up and running.”

U.S. sales team contributes over 50% of global revenue

For Simon, Incopro’s expansion in America has been essential in delivering revenue targets for the business. “It was critical that we faced the challenges and moved ahead with our U.S. plans. Peak was a true partner helping us take this significant step to put our U.S. sales team in place.”

Chris Hardy, Incopro’s Chief Revenue Officer, agrees. Chris joined the company in 2018 to grow Incopro’s revenues and leads the Sales, Marketing and Partnership functions.

“Prior to building our U.S. sales team, our revenues were 100% from UK and European customers. Today, over 50% of our global revenue comes from our U.S. operations. This is a significant accomplishment from a relatively young, evolving company.”

— Chris Hardy, CRO of Incopro

With a goal of doubling revenue worldwide in the following year, Incopro is on a strong trajectory for success.  The candidates secured by Peak are still driving revenues for Incopro’s U.S. operations, now part of a 6-person strong sales team across 4 states.

Are you ready to take your talent acquisition to the next level?  Learn more about Peak’s services or contact us today to recruit top sales talent.

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2019 is here. Is your salesforce ready?

2019 Sales Planning

2019 is here and for many of us, that brings new priorities, sales targets, and even faster execution than the previous year.  What are your top sales priorities this year? What market factors will challenge or propel your plans?

At Peak, we are already preparing for our next stage of growth.  And that translates to more innovation and services for our customers.  Leading the charge is our CEO Sean Sykes, joining us last year to guide our expansion with a continual lens on customer needs.

Who is Sean Sykes?

Sean Sykes CEO of Peak Sales Recruiting

Sean has over 20 years experience building and integrating high performing direct and indirect sales organizations. Most recently he was the Managing Director, Americas for Avast, a global leader in digital security solutions. At Avast he led revenue responsibilities for the company’s SMB business in North America and Latin America. Prior to Avast he was a member of the senior leadership team at two technology firms acquired by publicly traded companies and led sales and marketing for a custom software development organization with a focus on IoT, cloud and mobile.

Sean and I were able to catch up recently and he shared his thoughts on the hiring market – and how best to position your company to win in another strong, candidate-driven market. Below is a closer look.

Brent: You have interviewed and recruited B2B sales teams throughout your career.  What challenges and learnings have you experienced?

Sean:  In today’s strong fast-paced economy, building a sales force that is capable of driving revenue growth is more challenging and complex. I’ve experienced this in prior roles, most significantly in the past two years as the competition to find top B2B sales talent has continued to increase. And now I see our team at Peak and our customers facing these challenges.

There is a lot at stake. Mis hires and turnover are detrimental to an organization. We know that somewhere between 35-40% of sales reps fail to make their numbers. That may be an astonishing statistic to people outside our market, but these risks have been top of mind for me throughout my career.  

I’ll admit that my past hiring strategies haven’t followed a perfect process. As team builders, we know that approaching this market without defining the role, or without leveraging new interview techniques and assessment technologies, sets us up for failure. But the reality of aggressive goals and hiring timelines, coupled with lack of internal resources and time, create real barriers to an ideal process. That’s a continual challenge I’ve faced. And the learning for me is that hiring without a focused plan or strategy is not going to consistently deliver candidates with the skills, experience, and DNA needed to excel in our unique sales environment. Making the time to work cross-functionally with our HR and Talent Acquisition leaders to make this happen is what’s helped me to make my best hires over the years.

Brent: What traits do you believe separate today’s best salespeople from the rest?

Sean: Sales DNA has always been a critical consideration for me in evaluating candidates and is also central to our candidate assessment, interviewing and analysis work at Peak. Beyond sales skills and experience, top sales performers often share similar traits and behaviors. For example, people with sales DNA have the drive, tenacity, communications and listening skills that translate to selling success. Engagement happens because they have invested the time to hear and understand what is critically important to a client’s business. These sales pros are often the quietest people on the team, reflecting silently on the needs, challenges and best strategies to build trust with prospects and ultimately close the sale.

Brent: What are world-class sales organizations doing differently?

Sean: These are the companies putting plans in place to build their teams and a process to attract top talent. Many have experienced lack of success using traditional hiring processes and are either reshaping their own strategies and processes to adjust or turning to recruitment partners to help them develop the right process and bridge access to these passive candidates. Companies with leading sales teams also understand that finding people with sales DNA is driven through the networks you develop and the approach and techniques you apply in identifying, assessing and luring the best sales talent. They don’t approach hiring as a one-time event – they have established/designated it as a core business process in their organization.  

Brent: Will we see any major changes in sales talent acquisition this year?

Sean: I believe we will see the race for sales talent continue this year and this will place a higher value on B2B sales professionals. The market shifts we experienced in 2018 will continue and will force more organizations to re-evaluate their approach to talent acquisition and the emerging winners will be those companies that have made the transition from traditional hiring methods.

This will place a higher emphasis on the need to quickly scale resources to meet this year’s hiring market demands. Progressive methods and unique candidate assessment systems will continue to evolve and advance. As we know from our work with clients and our 2019 planning, one important priority will be continuing to augment and advance qualitative candidate assessment methods with data-driven science. A great example of this is the work we’re doing with our P95 assessment system. I experienced the advantages of this multi-phase system first as a Peak client. This proprietary system takes a deeper look at candidates’ selling behaviors through three phases of advanced assessment that are critical in determining whether candidates have the sales DNA to perform in a client’s selling environment.

All of these factors will raise the bar even higher for companies like Peak and we will be ready. As I’ve discussed with you and our team, scaling our business and services to stay well ahead of the market and our customer needs are major priorities for this year and beyond.

Brent:  What is the best advice you can offer companies building their sales teams today?

Sean: One of our customers recently shared that sourcing, recruiting and onboarding sales talent is too critical to their growth strategies to not consult specialists.

Industry data also reflects the value of comprehensive recruiting resources. In CSO Insights’ recent Sales Talent Study, only 22.6% of organizations less than ¼ claimed hiring as an organizational strength. This is significant as the impact from making a wrong hire is not only damaging to a company’s bottom line, but productivity and team morale suffers.

Other estimates show the cost of recruiting, onboarding, and training a new salesperson is between 1 and 1 ½ year’s compensation while another study puts the hard and soft costs at five times the hire’s salary.  And as you’ve shared, this is in line with our own data estimates at Peak. Another survey has shown that following a bad sales hire, 36% reported a negative impact on employee morale and more than 40% loss in worker productivity.

I’ve experienced this first-hand in my past roles. And through my cumulative time working with Peak as a candidate, customer, and now CEO, I have a new respect for a mission and process that is values-based and thoughtful, structured and data-driven, and drives ROI in the short and long run.

Are you ready to compete for 2019 talent? Get the tips to improve your sales hiring by downloading our eBook, Make the Right Sales Hire, Every Time.

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Brent Thomson

Co-Founder at Peak Sales Recruiting
Before Peak, Brent worked in sales and sales-leadership positions for 18 years. He has considerable experience building and running high-performance teams, which consistently won awards and exceeded sales targets. He was Vice President of Sales for a financial management consulting company, and served with Borland Software as a Regional Sales Manager.

2018 L&D Report – What CHRO’s Need to Know

What CHROs need to know

At the end of the day, the primary goal for any CHRO is to ensure organizations remain high-functioning, productive, and efficient. L&D departments vary in size and scope across industries; however, many share several successful practices in common. By interviewing and surveying organizations that have demonstrated innovative and effective practices in the leadership and development field, we can draw strong correlations between success indicators, the insight of which can inspire other organizations of any size to improve their own practices.

If they aren’t already, CHRO’s can, for example, embrace new technologies, promote a culture of learning, and improve reporting processes for the best ROI. A vast majority of executives are willing to invest and make the changes necessary to drive their organizations forward. Thus, with the right ideas and the research to support them, CHRO’s can lead company growth and success.

Understand the Challenges

Aside from limited budget, many organizations reported that small team sizes, illustrating ROI on talent development initiatives, getting employees engaged in L&D, and getting executives involved in the organization’s professional development rounded off the top-five challenges facing their L&D departments. Before CHRO’s can determine the best way to lead organizational development, they need to understand the challenges they are up against.

Although intimidating, once an organization has an idea of their most pressing challenges, they can begin to prioritize where they would like to make the most improvement and craft a strategy to put the changes in effect.

Measurement is Key

Over half (55%) of the companies surveyed who reported that they do not measure L&D success also noted that they perform at a lower or much lower level than competitor organizations that do. In effect, when the metrics related to L&D are not collected and analyzed, companies do not have the necessary information to make vital decisions concerning organizational development.

Consequently, budgets to fund such initiatives are also negatively impacted. Many CHRO’s report that their L&D budget will either decrease or remain the same, despite the need for more resources to develop their organizations. On the other hand, 100% of companies who plan to increase the budget are also the ones who indicate they measure the impact of L&D.

Therefore, the take-away is that if they aren’t already, CHRO’s should ensure that their initiatives are being measured in order to demonstrate the full impact of their efforts.

Learning is Fundamental

Retention rate is a measurement that nearly all companies collect, analyze, and often worry about. It’s common knowledge that low employee retention has a large impact on monetary and personnel resources. Organizations struggle to come up with ideas to increase retention; yet, the numbers suggest that companies can benefit from funding learning initiatives for employees that increase not only employee engagement but also employee competency.

Thus, it’s a win-win for CHRO’s who are concerned about their organization’s retention rate and employee training. Companies without staff engaged in learning are twice as likely to lose staff before three years. On the other hand, nearly half (42%) of L&D professionals indicate that employees were noticeably more engaged in the overall operations of the organization when they were being engaged in professional development and training.

So, for CHRO’s looking to increase their organization’s employee satisfaction rating, consider requesting funding be dedicated to training employees on all levels across the company.

Embrace Technology

For CHRO’s with limited budget or small team sizes, technology is your best friend. In the past few years, the popularity of virtual learning has dramatically increased. E-learning and virtual classrooms still lead the list of popular forms of virtual learning, but as technology becomes more innovative, so do organizations in the way they use such technology.

Companies are now reporting that they use online game-based learning, mobile learning, and virtual reality to get their employees engaged in professional development. Oftentimes, these are cost-efficient alternatives to sending employees to training providers or large conferences. It also allows for flexibility when it comes to time management and productivity, as employees can login and do their training whenever time allows.

It also provides a great way for CHRO’s without a big L&D budget to kickstart their training initiatives and begin tracking ROI.

Get Executives On-board

Support from top management is integral for any organizational decision. A CHRO’s best chance at initiating leadership and development success is to, therefore, get the executives behind their ideas. With upper-management support also comes the funding and time necessary to get the best ROI. Unfortunately, over 30% of professionals surveyed reported that top management could value L&D initiatives more or didn’t value them at all.

By comparison, 90% of companies with strong learning cultures also said that senior executives were actively engaged in L&D. This suggests that employees across the organization from entry- to senior-level are more likely to get involved and take their professional development seriously when they see executives are supporting and encouraging them.

Assess the Impact

Measuring ROI is the most efficient practice to monitor the impact of L&D training, and for good reason. Of the companies who had grown in the last financial year, 100% reported that they tracked the ROI of training. However, for CHRO’s there’s other indicators of success that should be taken into consideration.

Most important is the feedback from the employees themselves. Feedback regarding their professional development training allows CHRO’s to see what’s working and make changes where things are not. The result is a more effective training program that capitalizes on both time and money. In a similar vein, CHRO’s can also ask employees who directly manage teams to assess how they think training initiatives have positively impacted their work flow and how they can still be improved.

Another good indicator is to keep track of which employees who have completed training are also promoted internally. The higher the correlation, the more likely the training being invested in is having a positive influence.

The Key Takeaway

Leadership and development is a priority for top-performing organizations.

Companies who have figured out that training initiatives at every level within their organization are key to employee engagement, revenue growth, and innovation are reaping the benefits and ready to share.

Therefore, it’s a great time for CHRO’s to get invested in L&D and promote organizational growth. With the right information, CHRO’s will have no problem convincing top-management to buy into their ideas and support initiatives that have proven successful for competitors.

To see all the statistics and learn more, check out the full 2018 L&D Report.

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VP Sales Interview Questions

Corporate and HR leaders know that getting their interview process right is important. But when it comes to hiring a VP of Sales, it makes all the difference to the future success of a company.

Certain interview questions bring hidden information to the surface. At Peak Sales, we’ve assessed and interviewed over 10,000 sales leaders for our clients over the last 18 years, and we’ve compiled an exhaustive list of interview questions that will help you select your next VP Sales.

VP sales interview questions

Interview Questions for a VP Sales: The Complete List

We’ve collated the interview questions that have yielded the best outcomes. The full list of questions are grouped into four “buckets” covering each of the key areas associated with the role: personal, people management, customer management, and business management.

Shortlist: Our 10 Most Popular Interview Questions for a VP Sales

  1. Please discuss your quota performance over the last three years. What obstacles did you encounter, how did you overcome them, and what were the actual results?
  2. What attributes make a strong leader and strong coach? Discuss the attributes you possess, and share examples of how you’ve leveraged them to drive team performance.
  3. Discuss your sales management process. In particular, what parts of it are structured, rigorous, and focused on accountability, and what parts of it are unstructured? Please share examples of how your process has worked in a past role, and why it’s been successful.
  4. Please tell us about your experience in hiring and growing a sales team. What characteristics do you look for when hiring sales professionals? In a specific example, past or present, what was your recruiting approach?
  5. How do you create a winning environment? Please share examples of strategies you use to motivate your team.
  6. Talk to us about the way you approach designing and executing a sales strategy, providing examples of your most recent strategy and the impact it had on the company.
  7. Can you provide one or two recent examples of significant deals with existing key clients where you developed and executed a sales strategy to increase account revenue?
  8. Please discuss the selling tactics that were most successful in a past role. How did you develop them and implement them across the sales force? What were the results?
  9. Please describe a time when you needed to rapidly scale your sales force. How did you implement the change and what was the impact (e.g., on quota, new client acquisition, gross profit, etc.)?
  10. Please describe the best sales infrastructure you’ve put in place in your past roles. What tools, systems, and support did you use? How did you go about implementing this?

Personal attributes

These questions are designed to uncover a candidate’s values, behaviors, and character traits away from the office.

  1. Tell us about a couple of the best and worst decisions you’ve made in the past year with regard to your team or sales approach.
  2. What attributes do you possess that make you a strong leader and coach? Please share a past example of how these have come into play in relationships with your team.
  3. Please tell us about what drives you to succeed in the sales context.
  4. Describe a situation in which you had to quickly learn about a new product, service, or technology to serve a new customer base. How did you go about learning, and how successful was the outcome?
  5. Please describe your decision-making approach when you’re faced with difficult situations. Are you decisive and quick, or are you more thorough? Are you intuitive or do you go purely on the facts? Do you involve many or few people in your decisions? Please share one or two examples of difficult decisions you’ve made, how you approached them, and what the results wore.
  6. What are the biggest risks you have taken in recent years when it comes to your sales organization or sales approach? Include those that have worked out well—and not so well.
  7. What are some of the biggest challenges you have ever faced and overcome in your career as a sales leader?
  8. When you’re not at work, what do you do to enjoy yourself?

People management

A VP of Sales is not just a strategist and client manager—they are a key player in a company’s recruitment, training, and development of salespeople. The following questions address these responsibilities.

  1. Discuss how you’ve built a high-performance sales culture. What are the elements you focus on? What’s worked, what hasn’t?
  2. Discuss your sales management process. In particular, what parts of it are structured, rigorous, and focused on accountability, and what parts of it are unstructured? Please share examples of how your process has worked in a past role, and why it’s been successful.
  3. Tell us about sales teams that you have directly developed, managed and led. How did you go about building your team?
  4. What characteristics do you look for when you’re hiring sales professionals in our business?
  5. Thinking about your own extended network, who do you currently know that would be interested in joining you in our company’s sales department, right now? Why would they be a fit?
  6. How do you alter your management style when working with very seasoned sales team members, as compared to less experienced reps?
  7. Walk us through, in detail, the process you use for onboarding and training new sales reps. In terms of training specifically, when and how often does this occur on your team?
  8. Tell me about the most satisfying sale a previous team member made; what made it special for both you and your sales rep?
  9. Tell me about your relationship-building skills and style, in respect of the following:
    • Your sales team
    • Your external customers
    • Your internal customers (sales support, service, the warehouse team, senior management, etc.)
  10. What are your expectations of:
    • Your sales team
    • Your internal team
  11. How have you gone about establishing performance goals for your sales team?
  12. How do you communicate your expectations for managers and individual contributors? Discuss how your approach has changed over your career as a sales leader.  
  13. How have you gone about building a teamwork environment in the sales organization’s you’ve led? How have you done this for a remote team (if applicable)?
  14. Discuss how you typically run your weekly sales meetings with managers and individual contributors? What makes for an effective one-on-one meeting?
  15. How much feedback do you like to get from people you report to? What form do you prefer—written or face-to-face?

Customer management

These questions test the candidate’s aptitude for sales strategy and leadership, as well as their focus on results.

  1. What is your sales team’s track record for acquiring and retaining clients? Please share examples of results from past teams.
  2. Talk to us about your sales management process? Provide a brief description and tell us why it works.
  3. Provide one or two recent examples of significant deals with existing key clients where you developed and executed a targeted account sales strategy to increase account revenue?
  4. Discuss how you’ve implemented new go-to-market strategies, adjusted existing strategies, or developed new sales processes to achieve substantial revenue growth. Please provide one or two specific recent examples where your efforts and innovations resulted in significant gains.
  5. In your previous roles, what sizes were some of the largest contracts you obtained on an annual volume basis? What was critical for you and your team to win those deals and how have those learnings changed your sales strategies or selling approaches?
  6. Tell us about a deal you lost to a competitor in a previous role and what happened.
  7. Please walk us through how you approach field engagement—making joint customer calls with reps and understanding customer demands and expectations in today’s marketplace.
  8. Describe how you would involve marketing with your team for lead generation, at our company’s current stage.

Business management

The best candidates are more than just sales experts. In addition to their expertise in sales compensation and improvements to sales force efficacy, they steer the business and have influence in technology, tools, and budget allocation. The following questions are designed to help identify those candidates with outstanding business acumen and management skills.

  1. Do you have experience managing a company’s revenue forecast? If so, can you please provide a specific example of your achievement in delivering on it?
  2. In the past year, what have you done specifically to remain knowledgeable about our industry’s competitive environment, market and trade dynamics, product/services and technology trends, innovations, and patterns of customer behavior?
  3. Which sales tools do you use, and why?
  4. If you joined our organization, what specific actions would you take in the first month?
  5. What will our sales revenues look like 120 days after we hire you?
  6. Explain your strategies or thought processes around how our company can win over competitors.
  7. What do you expect from sales support roles (engineers, operations managers, etc.) at this stage of the company, and at future, scaled stages?
  8. How many salespeople do you estimate our company needs, given our goals and current position?

Finally, a closing question can help draw out the candidate’s thoughts and provide insight into how they feel about the position and the company in general:

  1. Do you have any concerns at this stage of the interview process?
  2. Do you have any questions you would like to ask me?

This comprehensive set of questions will provide a framework for filtering your candidates, based on their skills, experience and personality.

Key Responsibilities of a VP Sales

“The average tenure of a new sales leader is 19 months. No other member of the executive suite fails as often as the sales leader.”

Matt Sharrers and Greg Alexander

One of the critical mistakes companies make is building an interview process and questionnaire before fully understanding the responsibilities and functions of a sales leader. It’s is one of the reasons why the most common mis-hires in business is that of VP Sales.

This role directly influences a company’s revenue, market share, expansion potential, and culture, and the disparity in sales leaders’ performance is stark. There was a 51% gap in quota attainment between high-performing and low-performing sales leaders in a study of 400 VPs of Sales and managers: the high performers achieved 104% quota on average while the low performers reported 54%.

Your company’s revenue will end up on one side of this rift or the other because of who you hire, and hiring the right leader depends on your ability how the candidate influences people, business strategy, and customer relations to drive performance.  Let’s start with the foundation skill of a sales leader – being a people leader.

1. People Management

Preeminent sales leaders instinctively create an environment—and a culture—for success.

A VP of Sales must be a great coach. They achieve their success through the sales talent that they build, guide, and nurture. They develop individuals and help them to navigate the company when they need support and resources. Structured approach to holding people accountable.

For this reason, investing in a top sales leader is often more important than investing in a top sales rep. ZS Associates found that a team with an average manager but excellent salespeople performs well in the short term. But in the long run, excellent managers with average salespeople consistently outperform. Great managers elevate their whole team, while average managers bring excellent salespeople down to their level. And sixty-nine percent of salespeople who exceeded their annual quota rated their sales manager as being excellent or above average, according to a survey by USC’s Steve W. Martin.

Excellent sales leaders are self-disciplined and fixated on target revenue goals. They’re skilled at guarding their team from any distractions and negative attitudes that may detract from this priority focus. And they implement a strict sales process and hold their team accountable to it; according to Martin, 43% of high-performing sales managers use a closely monitored, strictly enforced, or automated sales process, compared to just 29% of underperforming sales managers. Underperforming sales leaders were more likely to have an informal sales process or none at all.

And, perhaps most importantly, sales leaders drive their hiring efforts. After all, “first class hires first class, but second class hires third class.” The future success of the sales organization rests on the VP Sales’ ability to implement systems that find, hire, and cultivate above-average talent.

2. Customer management

Industry leading VP of Sales drives financial results through their understanding of their customer segments and their ability to connect with them today and into the future. They know how nurture customer engagement by setting high-level strategy and driving their sales force to focus on the right activities and behaviors. They also represent the needs of the customer to the rest of the company, directly and indirectly.

When evaluating a VP of Sales for customer management abilities, look for their understanding of the market, the competition, and how they plan to maximize revenue by optimizing the sales process. Dig deep to understand their strategic philosophy to gain market share, segment the customer base, and influence contract size and length over time—as well as their approach to collaborating with marketing departments to achieve these goals.

3. Business management

The VP Sales steers the direction of the sales function, aligns resources, and improve key selling processes & channels.

They drive operational improvements through investments in technology infrastructure, improved data harvesting, and analysis with better data tools. They also optimize budget allocation, sales force compensation, and a whole range of team development programs. At a go-to-market level, their forward-thinking strategies can help the company increase market share and focus their efforts during expansion into new territories and markets.

_______

With such a wide range of responsibilities and influence associated with the position, hiring managers should thoroughly assess a candidate’s ability to deliver on these sub-responsibilities:

    • Recruiting a sales force
    • Designing compensation plans
    • Overseeing rep training and coaching
    • Developing a sales process and ensuring that it’s executed appropriately
    • Helping the sales force to make use of tools, customer data, and research
    • Managing metrics and setting goals
    • Managing rep performance and ensuring that it is aligned with company direction
    • Driving a culture of success
    • Setting high-level sales strategy to drive revenue

Hiring managers should also closely examine a candidate’s success with previous companies as a key indicator of future performance.

Candidate Evaluation

When developing an interview questionnaire, the first task is to create a set of mandatory hiring criteria: the qualities, attributes, abilities, and experience that a candidate must demonstrate in order to be considered for the position.

These criteria should be codified in a candidate scorecard that each interviewer fills out after interviewing a candidate. In sales hiring, these formal scorecards, as well as rubrics and structured interview questionnaires, yield the best results. They also combat hiring biases.

Indeed, research has shown that unstructured interviews and hiring methods can actually harm selection to such an extent that companies would be better off were they to select candidates entirely at random. Conversely, companies that use structured hiring tools in the interviewing process have been shown to have a more effective sales force. Research by CSI Insights indicates that a greater percentage of such companies’ reps achieve quota, and have a greater confidence in their organization. Particularly noteworthy is that retention rates are also significantly improved.

Our scorecard worksheet and template is available for download here.

Post-interview reflection

Once the interview is over, fill out your scorecard and reflect on the following five questions:

  1. Can this candidate hit their targets quickly?
  2. Can I obtain verifiable proof to assure me that this candidate has delivered in the past?
  3. Is the amount of disruption this candidate will cause proportional to the amount of disruption the company can handle?
  4. How will the customers react to him or her?
  5. Is this candidate better than, equal to, or worse than the person in the same job at my top three competitors?

By taking these questions into account, along with the hiring criteria on a formal scorecard, hiring managers can significantly improve their chances of making the right hire. These carefully curated questions are specifically designed to do just that.


Your next VP of Sales is a crucial hire. They influence your people, your business strategy, and your customer relations, so it’s imperative to design interviews that weed out the bad candidates and deliver the one outstanding individual who is a perfect fit for your business.

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Ten Austin Tech Companies To Watch If You’re In Sales

Austin texas sales hiring

If you’re a sales leader looking for your next career move, Austin should be on your radar. It’s “the home of live music,” but it’s not just the music scene that’s thriving—the city’s reputation as a tech hub continues to grow, and now may be just the right time to consider joining one of Austin’s flourishing scale-ups.

Here we look at ten up-and-coming, Austin-based tech companies that are already making waves with disruptive products and innovative positioning. They all have strong investor support and fresh, individual visions … and they’re definitely worth keeping your eye on.

Why? The city’s tech community is attracting some of the country’s top sales talent, but it is hungry for more. Hiring grew 11% in June 2018 compared to the same period just 12 months earlier.

hiring rates in austin texas

 

These ten exciting Austin tech companies are contributing to the hiring landscape and the city’s tech nexus:

1. ThousandEyes

Thousand eyes logo

ThousandEyes empowers businesses to see, understand and improve connected experiences everywhere. The ThousandEyes cloud platform offers unmatched vantage points throughout the global internet and provides immediate visibility into experience for every user and application over any network. Companies can deliver superior digital experiences, modernize their enterprise WAN, and successfully migrate to the cloud.

Industry: Software

Industry Outlook: The cloud services market is expected to double from over $150 billion in 2017 to $302 billion by 2021, and grew 21% in the last year. Infrastructure-as-a-service is the fastest growing subcategory, and Chief Information Officers are using cloud services as basic infrastructure for new business initiatives. Enterprises are rapidly migrating applications into the cloud or simply deploying them in the cloud to begin with; 45% of applications workloads were in datacenters in 2017, down from 60% in 2016. Amazon Web Services has the largest public cloud market share, followed by Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and a long tail of providers.

Growth stage: Series C

Selling tools available:Free trial; demo request for lead generation; learning and resource center with webinars, whitepapers, tech talks; case studies in PDF and video formats; hosts an annual industry conference

Awards received:

  • Named “Best Data-Driven SaaS Product” in the 2018 SaaS Awards program
  • Ranked 22nd in Glassdoor and Battery Venture’s “Top 25 Places to Work in 2018”

Funding: $60.7M in 5 rounds

  • 5 investors in latest round
  • 3 lead investors
  • 5 investors total

Employee perks:

  • Health insurance, dental, and vision benefits
  • Retirement plan and stock options
  • Free daily meals
  • Commuter benefits

Glassdoor reviews: Ratings: 4.6 out of 5 stars. 88% recommend to a friend. 99% approve of CEO.

View ThousandEyes Sales Careers.

“Great team, high energy, excellent resources, amazing solution offer—this company values its employees and supports as best they can (for their pound of flesh). When in, role your sleeves up and hold on! ThousandEyes is a hit and will go from strength to strength based on their unique offer.”

“The environment is really friendly, creative, young and talented. Office is full of perks such as stocked kitchen, catered lunches … and games/toys everywhere. If you’d like to try the challenges of a startup, this is definitely the place to be. Flexibility is required to fulfil the many needs of a young and quickly growing company. Very different environment (much more dynamic and fun) if compared to a corporate.”

 

2. New Knowledge

new knowledge logo

New Knowledge is a cybersecurity company that helps businesses monitor and defend against the viral spread of intentionally damaging misinformation. They help detect false narratives before they can make an impact, and they monitor social media to identify fake accounts, fake news, and propaganda campaigns.

Industry: Artificial intelligence and machine learning

Industry Outlook: Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to be one of the most exciting and fastest growing sectors across the tech industry. Leading CEOs in all industries agree that AI represents a significant potential business advantage to their organizations. Chief among the factors driving the market are the increasing adoption of AI-enabled products, and software solutions, both of which improve customer service. Consequently, the market is poised for growth, with a CAGR of above 35%. By 2024, the AI market is expected to reach $191 billion.

Growth stage: Series A

Selling tools available: Demo request for lead generation; resource center with ebooks, reports and whitepapers; tech podcasts

Funding: $13M in 4 rounds

  • 3 investors in latest round
  • 2 lead investors
  • 9 investors total

Employee perks:

  • Flexible spending account, dental and vision benefits
  • Retirement plan and stock options
  • Flexible working
  • Unlimited vacation policy
  • Training and conference opportunities
  • Casual dress, beer on tap, and company outings

Glassdoor reviews: No ratings or reviews available.

View New Knowledge Sales Careers.

 

3. CognitiveScale

cognitive scale logo CognitiveScale enables businesses to win with machine intelligence. Its focus is on “augmented intelligence” to emulate and extend human cognitive function, rather than “artificial intelligence” to replace it. The company’s flagship products—CognitiveScale ENGAGE and CognitiveScale AMPLIFY—help enterprises transform customer engagement, improve decision-making, and deploy self-learning business processes.

Industry: Artificial intelligence and machine learning

Industry Outlook: AI is already helping businesses and their customers in meaningful ways, and as it evolves, it will become even more central to enterprises. Machine learning helps businesses harness customer information to understand digital behavior, helping ecommerce companies personalize experiences, helping financial businesses prevent fraud, helping healthcare providers automate administrative processes, and more. For AI to take a prime time seat in enterprise, says founder Ashkay Sabhiki, it needs to develop in three core ways: performance (demonstrating business improvements), assurance (data safety and guardrails for AI systems), and governance (end-to-end visibility of AI systems).

Growth stage: Series B

Selling tools available: Resource center with whitepapers, reports, webcasts and video tech talks; PDF case studies

Awards received: 

  • Recognized in World Economic Forum “Technology Pioneers Cohort 2018”
  • Named as one of seven “Hot Vendors” by HfS Research
  • Included in “Cool Vendors in Retail 2016” report by Gartner, Inc.
  • 2016 Stratus Award Winner, Cloud Disruptor, Small Company
  • Included in CRN’s “10 Coolest Startups of 2016”
  • One of BuiltinAustin’s “Top 50 Startups to Watch in 2016”
  • One of 12 companies included on Austin Chamber of Commerce’s “A-List of Hottest Startups 2015”

Funding: $40M in 3 rounds

  • 1 investor in latest round
  • 2 lead investors
  • 7 investors total

Employee perks:

  • Health insurance, dental, and vision benefits
  • Retirement plan
  • Unlimited vacation policy
  • Free meals and stocked kitchen

Glassdoor reviews: 3.8 out of 5 stars. 79% recommend to a friend. 76% approve of CEO.

View CognitiveScale Sales Careers.

“Easily one of the best AI companies out there. Amazing vision that is being delivered with each release. Great partners and investors. Good people. Free lunches are awesome. Takes away the pain of dealing with choices and traffic during the day. Encourage social activities every week.”

“I’ve been with this company since very early on. I knew something amazing was going to happen when I saw the quality of people who were leaving high level careers elsewhere to join what appeared to me to be a ‘nice little tech startup’ …  I see the passion and commitment to truly ‘changing the world’ … I feel very fortunate to be here and look forward to what the future holds for us.”

 

4. TrendKite

trendkite TrendKite helps PR professionals and agencies build a timely, highly-accurate picture of their brands’ media coverage with ease. It’s an innovative platform that is transforming how companies like BP, Snapchat, Campbell’s Soup, and CDC measure the impact of earned media.

Industry: Enterprise Software, Analytics, Big Data

Industry Outlook: PR tools monitor digital, social, and print media to help companies understand their media coverage and consumer engagement in one place—as well as find actionable insights, quantify impact, and calculate ROI. The global PR tools market size in 2015 was $4.5 billion and estimated to reach $13 billion by 2024.

Big data as a broader industry category is enormously useful in helping organizations identify customer behaviors and derive useful decisions from patterns. The current market revenue for big-data-related software and services is $42 billion. According to an Accenture study, 79% of the executives of enterprise companies think that embracing big data is essential to their businesses’ survival and 83% of them have pursued big data projects to gain a competitive advantage. Worldwide big data revenue from software and services is expected to increase from $42 billion in 2018 to $103 billion in 2027—that’s a CAGR of 10.48%.

Growth stage: Venture

Selling tools available: Demo request for lead generation; resource and learning center with tech videos, reports, whitepapers, webinars, ebooks, toolkits and case studies

Funding: $47.6M in 7 rounds

  • 1 investor in latest round
  • 5 lead investors
  • 11 investors total

Employee perks:

  • Health insurance, dental, and vision benefits
  • Unlimited vacation policy
  • Stock options
  • Stocked kitchen
  • Commuter benefits

Glassdoor reviews: 3.7 out of 5 stars. 67% recommend to a friend. 82% approve of CEO.

View TrendKite Sales Careers.

“I started my sales career at TrendKite, and I learned more than I could have ever expected to. It’s rare that you hear of a high energy, high velocity sales environment at a company that sells a high-ACV product.”

“Great atmosphere with amazing people combined with work that is fulfilling—a winning combination.”

Trendkite team

 

 

5. Datical

Datical’s mission is to transform the way businesses build software by modernizing and automating the database release process. They’re connecting phenomenal open source IT projects and automation solutions to enterprises that need them, and aim to solve pains that proprietary software vendors ignore—read: “The Velocity Gap.”

Datical database release chart

Industry: Software

Industry Outlook: Datical addresses the $22B IT Systems Management market. DevOps tools specifically help development teams, operations teams, and QA teams work together seamlessly for better software delivery. They enhance productivity, automate software development, shorten product cycles, and lower costs. The market is estimated to be worth $12.8 billion by 2025 with a CAGR of 18%.

Growth stage: Series C

Selling tools available: Resource center with webinars, tech videos, and whitepapers

Funding: $17M in 7 rounds

  • 2 lead investors
  • 8 investors total

Employee perks:

  • Flexible spending account
  • Disability insurance
  • Dental benefits
  • Retirement plan and company equity
  • Parental leave and unlimited vacation policy
  • Casual dress
  • Company outings
  • Commuter benefits
  • Training and conference opportunities

Glassdoor reviews: 5 out of 5 stars. 100% recommend to a friend. N/A approve of CEO.

View Datical Sales Careers.

“Datical has a great community of talented, results-driven individuals who are genuine and fun to be around! It’s a healthy culture that’s good about recognizing and celebrating individual and collective success. There is a lot of opportunity to have an impact on the business and leadership is very receptive to new ideas that would add value to the business.”

“Great office, lots of snacks, experienced management, legit core values, good comp, customers love the product.”

Datical team

 

6. OneSpot

OneSpot is a content marketing personalization platform that helps brands bring customer journeys to life. They help brands and publishers deliver individualized content experiences through technology and strategic support. OneSpot uses machine learning and natural language processing algorithms to understand website visitors’ consumption patterns and then deliver relevant content across websites, email, and other channels.

Industry: Machine learning and marketing technology

Industry Outlook: Savvy marketers are already harnessing the power of AI to understand customer behavior, automate routine tasks, and help them be proactive instead of reactive planners. The human touch is still required to create great content, but AI can make personalization recommendations that humans may not see, cut production times, and automate laborious tasks.

AI is the technology that most marketers feel unprepared for—a recent report indicates that 34% of global marketing executives felt ill-prepared to implement the technology. AI SaaS businesses are here to change that. According to Salesforce, just over half (51%) of marketers are currently using AI, but a further 27% expect to implement the technology by 2019. Of all leading technology that marketers expect to rise in implementation in the next year—including the Internet of Things and marketing automation—AI shows the highest anticipated year-on-year-growth.

Growth stage:Venture

Selling tools available: Demo request for lead generation; resource center with whitepapers and guides, case studies, webinars and infographics packages

Awards received:

  • Winner inaugural Advertising Week StartUp Pitch Competition 2017
  • Named in the EContent 100 List of “Companies That Matter Most in the Digital Content Industry”
  • 2016 Silver Edison Award winner for “Innovative Services, in the Digital Management & Marketing” category

Funding: $17.9M in 7 rounds

  • 1 investor in latest round
  • 2 lead investors
  • 11 investors total

Glassdoor reviews: 4.3 out of 5 stars. 83% recommend to a friend. 73% approve of CEO.

View OneSpot Sales Careers.

“The best thing about OneSpot is the great people. They’re not just friendly, but very capable and experienced in each domain from development to marketing. They’ve held true to the “no jerks” hiring policy … Management expects the best from you while you’re working, but respects the fact that you have a life to live outside of work as well …”

“Great working environment, smart experienced co-workers, quality work/life balance, transparent executive team, ability to reach above and beyond your role, lots of voice/input for mid-level employees, great snacks … Because it’s a startup, it can be challenging at times without working processes in place.”

Onespot office

 

7. Brightpearl

Brightpearl logo

Brightpearl is a cloud-based ERP (enterprise resource planning) for retailers and wholesalers, based in Bristol, UK in addition to Austin, Texas. Their mission is to automate the back office so merchants can spend their time and money growing their businesses.

Industry: Software and ecommerce

Industry Outlook: It’s not surprising that ecommerce increasingly accounts for a larger proportion of retail sales in the US than ever before. Global ecommerce markets are projected to grow to $4 trillion in 2020, so it’s clear why small and mid-sized businesses are migrating some—or even all—of their operations to online platforms. Online operations improve efficiency and transparency, and give retailers scalable access to new audiences. Cloud-based services drive this all; the market for ecommerce-specific software is currently around $4 billion. ERP software as a larger category—not retail-specific—is projected to grow to around $63 billion by 2025, propelled by demand from small and mid-sized companies and growing acceptance of mobile and cloud-based infrastructure.

Growth stage: Venture

Selling tools available: Demo request for lead generation; resource center with articles

Awards received:

  • Named “Best SaaS Company to Work For in the UK” at the SaaS Growth 2018 Awards, ahead of companies like Microsoft, Adobe, LinkedIn, Slack and Hootsuite
  • Named “Venture-backed management team of the year” at the 2018 British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association (BVCA) awards

Funding: $54.5M in 7 rounds

  • 3 investors in latest round
  • 4 lead investors
  • 8 investors total

Employee perks:

  • Health insurance, dental, and vision benefits
  • Retirement plan and stock options
  • Casual Dress
  • Company outings
  • Some meals provided

Glassdoor reviews: 3.9 out of 5 stars. 77% recommend to a friend. 76% approve of CEO.

View Brightpearl Sales Careers.

“Cool product! Solid UI, and overall pretty easy to use. Flexible enough for most SMB e-tailers to take advantage of, and gain some clarity into sales.”

“Cutting edge sector. Very lucky to have joined this company as I now know they are about to become a major player due to the leadership of the CEO and management. A lot of opportunities to progress your career here if you are willing to work hard and be imaginative… Like any company on the verge of major success, you have to be able to move fast so that means putting in a lot of time and being adaptable but the big decisions the CEO has made are being proven to be right.”

 

8. SpyCloud

spycloud logo SpyCloud is a pioneer in breach discovery. They strive to help businesses of all sizes mitigate data breaches by proactively alerting when employee or company assets have been compromised. They accomplish this through their early-warning breach detection service powered by a world-class team of intelligence analysts.

Industry: Software and security

Industry Outlook: As the digital world expands into every aspect of life, cybersecurity has become increasingly important and prominent in the consciousness of the public as well as businesses. Companies and governments routinely collect enormous amounts of confidential data—and it sometimes seems as if data breaches have become commonplace occurrences. Companies are allocating more and more resources to secure their data, as awareness of high-profile cyber attacks and data losses grow. Venture capital firms have invested approximately $13.6 billion in cybersecurity since 2013:

Cybersecurity venture deals chart

Predictions:  The global market for information and security products and services is expected to grow to $124 billion by 2019 — an 8.7% increase.

Growth stage: Series A

Selling tools available: Free trial; resource and learning center with whitepapers, webinars and ebooks; case studies; tech videos

Awards received:

  • Winner of the “Best of Show” award at Finovate Fall 2017
  • Winner of NATO’s Defense Innovation Challenge 2017

Funding: $7.5M in 2 rounds

  • 2 investors in latest round
  • 2 lead investors
  • 2 investors total

Employee perks:

  • Health and dental benefits
  • Company equity options
  • Generous PTO and flexible working
  • Stocked kitchen and catered lunches

Glassdoor reviews: No ratings or reviews available.

View SpyCloud Sales Careers.

 

9. Mineralsoft

mineralsoft logo MineralSoft is the leading solution for mineral rights and royalty management. They develop solutions to help investors manage their mineral, oil, and gas investments.

Industry: Management information systems and business analytics

Industry Outlook: The oil and gas industry has seen a massive influx of capital into mineral interests over the last decade, bringing the market for this asset class to an estimated $1 trillion. But oil and gas investors struggle with managing their portfolios, as most processes are based on paper and outdated technology. There’s a growing need for new technology to help investors manage portfolios at scale, track ROI, and identify new investment opportunities.

Growth stage: Series A

Selling tools available: Case studies

Funding: $9.2M in 4 rounds

  • 3 investors in latest round
  • 1 lead investors
  • 7 investors total

Employee perks:

  • Comprehensive benefits package
  • Flexible time off and paid sick leave

Glassdoor reviews: 5 out of 5 stars. 100% recommend to a friend. 100% approve of CEO.

View MineralSoft Sales Careers.

“This is a startup that has done a lot of things right. They have created a great environment that values collaboration and respect. The work is interesting and we’re solving big problems. There are no big egos here. There are just people getting the job done in an inspiring environment.”

“MineralSoft has a great product and a great team that cares about that product. They are focused on the right aspects of growing a business. They truly care about their customers’ satisfaction and feedback, they’re scaling and processing appropriately for forecasted growth, proactively improving their product, and building a solid employee support”

 

10. Worksmith

Worksmith Logo Worksmith’s marketplace connects commercial clients like retailers, restaurants, salons, spas, clinics, etc. with local service providers, such as cleaners, handymen, painters, plumbers, event planners, and tailors. The platform also simplifies the hard work of finding, scheduling, managing, and paying them. Clients can submit work orders, review estimates and pay their chosen service provider with Worksmith—for free.

Industry: Enterprise software

Industry Outlook: The local on-demand industry had an estimated market value of $34 billion in the United States alone in 2016, which includes rideshare services like Uber and Lyft. The commercial clients that Worksmith serves are a portion of this market. The local on-demand services sector has grown more rapidly than ecommerce when comparing market penetration in the US over time.

Growth stage: Later-stage VC

Selling tools available: Demo request for lead generation

Funding: $20.64M in 4 rounds

Employee perks:

  • Company outings
  • Flexible leave and sickness policy

Glassdoor reviews: 4.0 out of 5 stars. 65% recommend to a friend. 65% approve of CEO.

View Worksmith Sales Careers.

“Fast paced work environment where your work is valued and makes a difference everyday. Coworkers are goal oriented, hardworking, & bring a high energy. Management team has experience and makes it easy to learn from them.”

“They are constantly looking to improve their product, which provides a lot of opportunities to contribute ideas, implement processes, and provide feedback. They try to do frequent Q&A’s with the CEO so people can bring up questions or concerns. There are frequent team outings like ping pong tournaments or happy hours.”

 

These are a few of the most eye-catching new companies in Austin, a city world-renowned for its music and gorgeous landscape—and perhaps soon for the opportunities it holds for talented sales leaders. If you’re looking for a new career challenge, look no further than Austin, where the sun keeps shining—and the innovation never stops.

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One-on-One Meeting Templates

We’ve collected wisdom from sales leaders on how to run efficient and performance-focused one-on-ones with reps.

One-on-One Agenda Template

Download the template as a PDF

Jump to:

One-on-One Meeting Agenda Template

Sample One-on-One Questions for Managers

The importance of one-on-ones for sales teams

One-on-ones are an important platform for developing trust and rapport between sales reps and managers. They’re a chance for leaders to engage in a personal dialogue, understand individual strengths and weaknesses to best guide and motivate reports, and keep the team focused on sales results.

One-on-One Meeting Template for Sales Managers

Rep productivity increased by 25% in under 18 months at one consumer services company as soon as a sales leader stopped issuing blanket sales directives and started implementing one-on-one sessions and ride-alongs. Managers focused on nurturing specific skills and set concrete goals to enforce rep development. The human element to management had been missing, but once the company prioritized it, it made an undeniable impact on revenue.

Interestingly, there’s a discrepancy between how much sales leadership believe they coach, and how supported reps feel. Leaders at another Fortune 500 company perceived that they spent enough time coaching their direct reports, scoring themselves in the 80th percentile. Meanwhile, their direct reports believed they receive little to no coaching from their leaders, scoring them at the 38th percentile. Could there be a similar gap on your team? This guide will help you close the rift.

Coaching style influences revenue results

A sales leader who is dedicating just the right amount of time to coaching and one-on-ones may still be able to improve their coaching style. Formal and dynamic coaching styles are correlated with a 13% and 27% increase in win rates, respectively, as compared with random and informal approaches.

  • Random coaching: Coaching is “left up to managers,” and there are no top-down guidelines.
  • Informal coaching: Guidelines are available, but no defined process has been formally implemented.
  • Formal coaching: Leaders are expected to coach according to a structured process; there is a formal effort to develop their skills; there are periodic reviews to optimize process and guidelines.
  • Dynamic coaching: A formal process is connected to the sales enablement approach to ensure reinforcement and adoption of the initiatives by salespeople.

Sales leaders should evaluate their company’s coaching process to implement a system that is structured and predictable, yet flexible enough for a personal approach that’s effective in driving results.

Create a agendas to provide structure to your one-on-ones

Agendas bring this proper structure to one-on-ones, help squeeze more value out of every minute, and provide continuity across meetings week to week.

Asking the right questions in one-on-ones clarifies actions and expectations from both sides and opens the discussion to wider problem-solving and troubleshooting. One-on-one meetings are a dialogue, and an agenda can help you stay on track.

Do’s and Don’ts of One-on-Ones

There are a few ground rules for sales managers to ensure the best outcomes.

Do:

  • Come to the meeting prepared, and have your rep prepare as well. A good place to start is to share an agenda (a sample template is included below).
  • Review performance metrics, but take a holistic approach. Laurie Page, Managing Partner at Bridge Group, says, “Go beyond the metrics. For example, as a Sales Leader, I always had reps come with responses to the following questions:”
    • Top 2 accomplishments (from our last meeting or the week)
    • Top 2 challenges with a proposed solution (from our last meeting or the week)
    • What you’d like from me (as your leader)
  • Document the outcome at the end of each meeting. Agree on action items and deadlines, and record them in writing in an email summary or shared document. Writing them down ensures accountability and eliminates misunderstandings.
  • Strategize with reps and help them identify solutions. Page recommends, “Instead of saying, ‘you need a bigger pipeline,’ brainstorm with reps on actual strategies and tactics to increase pipeline.”
  • Schedule regular, recurring one-on-ones with every member of the team. They can be weekly, biweekly, or monthly, but place them at the same time and on the same day. This predictability helps the rep to deliver on action items from the previous meeting by creating clear deadlines.
  • Be on time or early. This demonstrates that you value and care about the employee.
  • Schedule 5–15 minutes of buffer time at the end of a one-on-one to privately synthesize your thoughts and notes about team needs. (If your one-on-one is 25 minutes, schedule 30; if it’s 45 minutes, schedule 60.)

Don’t:

  • Never cancel one-on-one meetings, and reschedule only if absolutely necessary. This supports accountability.
  • Never use phones during the meeting. It’s crucial that you are 100% present. Taking brief notes on a laptop is fine, but discussion and connection are the priorities, and they should take precedence over everything else.

A few advanced tips:

Salesforce’s Colin Nanka suggests that employees can send their manager an agenda in writing 24–48 hours ahead of the one-on-one. This helps them identify high-priority discussion meetings and lets you get up to speed in advance so the meeting stays concise but provides maximum value.

He also suggests to schedule one-on-ones for the beginning of the week, preferably on Mondays and Tuesdays. This allows reps to plan their week according to the priorities identified in the meeting.

Meanwhile, Cameron Herold, author of Meetings Suck, recommends that managers schedule one-on-ones on the same day as sales leadership meetings, in which managers review numbers, dashboards, and goals. That way, all sales leaders are on the same page and bring the same core priorities to their one-on-ones later.

One-on-ones are easy to neglect or get wrong, but they’re not difficult to get right when you follow these core principles and rules of etiquette. A little thought and planning will quickly enable you to get the most out of your relationships with reps.

 

One-on-One Meeting Agenda Template

This agenda template provides a high-level structure for your one-on-ones, which you can customize using our sample questions below (or write your own).

How long the meeting lasts is up to you, but they’re usually in the range of 30–60 minutes. Sixty minutes allow you to dig into the issues at hand. Thirty minutes forces you and your rep to be more efficient and may be more manageable if you have a large number of direct reports.

One-on-One Agenda Template

Download the template as a PDF

Schedule 30–60 minute calendar block for a 25–45 minute meeting.1. Meet with rep (25–45 min):

  • 5 min: Open-ended starter question (“How was last week?”)
  • 15–30 min: Structured questions (see examples of questions below)
    • Evaluate previous week’s performance
    • Problem-solve specific situations
    • Ask the rep for feedback about the manager
    • Assess areas for personal and professional growth
    • Set up next week’s goals and expectations
  • 5 min: Define action items in writing

2. Transition (5–15 min): Buffer time for the manager to consolidate high-level thoughts and jot down notes, take a short break, and make it early to the next meeting.

 

Sample One-on-One Questions for Managers

To encourage this dialogue, we’ve developed these open-ended questions to help open up the discussion and to stimulate the rep to think critically about the points raised.

To encourage this dialogue, we’ve developed these open-ended questions to help open up the discussion and to stimulate the rep to think critically about the points raised.

Evaluate the previous week’s performance

  • What was last week’s goal?
  • Did you hit it?
  • Ask about specific selling activities:
    • Calls
    • Emails sent
    • Demos
    • In-person meetings
    • Proposals
  • What happened during these activities?
    • Dig into the details and ask for any data available. For example, when discussing calls, look into the number of calls attempted, how many connections were actually made, the call lengths, and the results.

Set up next week’s goals and expectations

  • What are your plans and priorities for the coming week?
  • What are next week’s targets, in terms of the selling activities discussed above?

Coach and problem-solve specific situations

  • What’s working?
  • Where are you getting stuck?
  • If there is a problem, what do you think it is? (This question-and-answer-based, collaborative style of “argumentative” dialogue is known as the “Socratic method,” and it helps you work more closely with the rep to identify the root causes of any issues and get buy-in for change.)
  • What might you do differently?
  • Kelly Riggs of The Business LockerRoom recommends asking the rep to detail one thing that worked and one thing that didn’t in the previous week, and to name:
    • One thing to start doing
    • One thing to stop doing
    • One thing to keep doing

Utilize the following types of sales coaching to guide the rep through real-world scenarios they’re currently engaging with:

  • Sales skills coaching: Troubleshoot sales skills and a rep’s ability to communicate value.
  • Lead and opportunity coaching: Examine a specific lead or account to determine its position in the buyer’s journey. Discuss the optimal activities for the rep to move it forward.
  • Pipeline coaching: Together with the rep, assess their pipeline and determine the most promising accounts. Collaboratively define where they should focus their energies.

Laurie Page shares a tactic she loves to use, developed by Larry D’Angelo, SVP of Sales at LogMeIn. “The idea is that a leader should go through their reps’ forecasts deal by deal. You’ll do another layer of sales qualification by asking:

  1. Why does the the prospect need to buy anything?
  2. What’ll happen if they do nothing?
  3. Which of our key differentiation have they locked on to?

If the reps can’t answer all three questions clearly, don’t report that opportunity up into your forecast.”

Ask for a rep’s feedback about you as a manager

  • Do you have any feedback for me?

Feedback for you as a manager is just as important as the feedback you give to your rep. Ask what you’re doing well, or what you can do to provide better support. Kelly Riggs suggests asking the rep to use the SBI model (Situation, Behavior, Impact) when delivering this feedback.

Assess areas for personal and professional growth

  • How are you doing?
  • What is one thing I can help you with this week to support your growth?

Asking insightful and incisive questions during one-on-one will yield a large amount of information and direct your attention to areas where your rep needs the most development.

Evaluating Employees During One-on-Ones

One-on-ones are not a forum for berating or badgering a rep; on the contrary, their primary purpose is to nurture and benefit the employee. According to Kelly Riggs, the chief idea of a one-on-one is for sales leaders to ask open-ended questions and listen carefully to the answers so they can properly evaluate their employees. Being attentive will alert you to particular patterns and behaviors that need work.

As you work through an employee’s performance reports during one-on-ones, ask yourself these questions:

  • Does she create an effective plan each week? Is it consistent with her overall sales plan?
  • Is she executing her plan?
  • Does she have a strong understanding of our sales process?
  • Is her sales pipeline full of qualified opportunities?

Riggs advises against knee-jerk reactions and instant results-oriented decisions. “I resist the need to correct and criticize every problem I see,” he says. “Don’t jump into major correction during the first two or three one-on-one meetings, because you’ll want the pattern to surface and become apparent through observation.”

Similarly, it’s often a good idea to ask for permission to give advice when behavior correction is necessary—for example, there may be occasions when more serious issues simply can’t wait until an annual review. “In those situations when I most definitely want to offer specific advice, I actually ask permission,” Riggs notes. Wording the advice diplomatically—and asking permission to do so—will usually yield better results than laying down the law. “You will be surprised at the difference it makes to ask rather than simply dictate next steps,” he says.

Take brief notes during or after the meeting, to which you can refer during future one-on-ones, and which will help you evaluate the rep’s planning abilities and how they’ve achieved their goals from the previous meeting (or not).

Throughout the process, the focus needs to be on the rep and the development of their potential.

Make one-on-ones happen

Every sales force is judged on its performance. But every team is also made up of individuals, and great sales leaders make sure that they connect personally with every member of their team to meet their unique needs and help them reach their highest potential. By holding effective, meaningful one-on-ones, you can have tangible effects on sales results, as well as employee morale and retention.

Every organization has a different culture and philosophy, but sales leaders can customize one-on-ones to suit their team’s environment and temperament. The meetings’ frequency and length, as well as the type and number of questions discussed, can be continuously refined and adapted, growing and evolving with the team and the business.

What’s most important is consistency, and ensuring that the meetings happen in the first place. If you don’t yet have a practice of regular one-on-ones, it’s up to you to make it happen. Instigate your first meetings straight away and optimize them from there.

The data reveals the value of these meetings, but your team’s morale—and sales results—will speak for themselves.

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