As you might or might not know,
Experiment 27 has been growing
like pretty crazily over the last month
to two months. We've gone from 4
employees to 11 and I'm hoping to
keep going, on the employees side. One of
the things we started doing now is
building up a sales team to sell our
services to potential clients. I've been
doing all the sales before this. And in
this video I want to break down how to
build a sales team. How am I thinking
about building this team? And then
for you as you're scaling up - what that
hiring process should look like or what
I think it should look like. I'll do an
updated on this one maybe in six
months and tell you how it's going.
But just felt like it's good to
document all of this. So, here we go.
#1 is do sales yourself to find KPIs.
Originally when Experiment 27 started, it
was me and my co-founder Robert. Robert
did all the production and I did sales
and then strategy for the clients.
Do the sales yourself. And the reason why
I recommend doing that is: you'll figure out,
easily, how much you can physically do.
As the founder you're gonna be working
as hard as you possibly can to grow your
company. Which means you'll be a very
good baseline for your salespeople. When
I was running sales only,
I was sending between fifty and a
hundred cold emails a week and we're
closing on average six to eight new
contracts a month since July. So 6 to 8 for
me, 50 to a 100 emails for me.
Plus I was doing all this other stuff.
I did that. I set the KPIs and then I did
number two. Number two is hire two sales
guys. I hired the two salesmen and now
we had KPIs. For the sales guys I was
sending 50-100 cold emails a week working
part time. So I told them, 'Hey, you guys
send 150 cold emails or cold calls. You
can split them back and forth. A
150 touch points per week each
should be achievable
because, and I know it's achievable
because I was doing it before.' So that's
that. I also had a good KPI
because I was doing sales and step one
as to how many deals I should close. So I
was closing 6 to 8 a month based
on that 50 to a 100 emails so I told each of
those new sales guys, Afnan and Cam that
we should be closing 10 a month each.
Their effort has increased between
30 and 66 percent on mine.
And their sales, I'm not going to say
their sales should increase 30 to 66 percent
on mine as well, but we should get pretty
close to. And now I know that
goal is achievable. And I'm running two
sales guys at the same time. Jason
Lemkin of SaaStr always recommends hiring
2 in every role so that you can
figure out whether it's the person
that's wrong. If somebody
doesn't work out you can't figure
out whether it's the product that's
wrong or the person unless you're
running more than two people. Right? Cuz
let's say both fail. It might be that
your sales process sucks
or your don't have product-market fit. If both
persons succeed, both people succeed,
then your company is doing well. You
have product-market fit and it's not an
issue, but if one succeeds and one fails
then it's skill. And you know to just get
rid of the one that fails. So, Jason
Lemkin always says hire two. From there,
check out SaaStr.com, also. He's got a
really amazing blog on scaling SaaS. The
third thing is once you have those two
sales guys and you have a lot of revenue
coming in from sales. You want to hire a
Director of Sales or promote somebody
from that team to be the Director of
Sales. Director of Sales is going to be
somebody that can get you into
enterprise clients and is very good
actually being a sales manager. Which is a
fully different skill than being a sales
man. I'm not leveraging real-life
experience at this point. This is, now we
we've broken into theory territory, but
what I've seen in the past is the worst
sales managers I've had have been
salesman in the past, but also the best
sales manager that I've had have also been
salespeople in the past. There's no
real way to tell this. And this is where
I think it's worth digging into a future
video or maybe even
doing an interview with somebody that
has hired a Director of Sales.
Actually, I'm gonna add to the
to do list so you guys expect that video
coming up. I'm hiring a Director of Sales
and having him set the KPIs for you
using the process that you built with
the two sales guys and taking it to the
next level. Taking your team from
like 3 people to a 100 people. And that
actually brings us to the number four
point which is: have him build the team.
If you get a good enough Director of
Sales and you have two sales guys that
are ready crushing it and you proved out
the KPIs. This new Director of Sales' job
is basically HR for the sales team. Right?
His job is to go out and recruit the
best of the best salespeople that he can
possibly get. Negotiate the rates
so that you're not paying through the
teeth for them and then run them so that
you destroy your KPIs. For Cam
and Afnan, I'm expecting between me,
Cam and Afnan next year to break over 2
million dollars in new business. That's
what I want between us three in new
business. Not counting MRR, not counting
recurring revenue. So just new
business, 2 million dollars. If you hire
a Director of Sales I would say go by
the Grant Cardone rule and try to 10x it.
So if I hired a Director of Sales
our goal would be to get to 20 million
and actually that's probably what we're
going to do as we continue to grow
at the end of next year if I hire a
Director of Sales or promote Afnan or
promote to Cam to director. That goal is
going to be 20 million dollars in
revenue. You don't wanna grow
like this, you want to grow hockey stick
style. So a good Director of Sales will
also tell you if that's bullshit.
If I go to a Director of Sales
that's been crushing it at a company and I
tell him I want to do 20 million dollars
in sales and he laughs me out of the
room. That either means I'm wrong or he's
wrong and if he's wrong you shouldn't be
working for the company and if I'm wrong
he should tell me and tell me exactly
why and then what our more realistic goal is.
That's why I recommend that. That's my
theory on how to build a sales team. Or
do sales yourself then hire two sales
guys then hire a Director of Sales and
have him build out the scalable team. If
you liked this video feel free to like
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