AMA: Outreach Sr Director of Strategic and Enterprise Sales, Greg Baumann on Establishing the Sales Function

In my view, the first role of leadership is that of a talent magnet. If you can't identify very talented people and create a compelling vision for them to join you or your team, you're going to have a really hard time accomplishing any goals. I've made it my mission as a leader to work backwards from that and think to myself, what would I want as a high talent seller? It's very clarifying and prioritizes how I approach my team. For me, a guiding talent principle is create a space where the team ...Read More

A friend sent me a quote recently that sets a great standard for high-performing sales cultures. "Your best player must set the tone of intolerance for anything that gets in the way of winning." It gives a great picture for how you structure your team culture, how high your standards need to be for the spots that you fill, and the standards by which you need to be training your team. I've also found it important to be very specific on things that are important for my team to achieve excellence, ...Read More

Accountability is a team sport - the team needs to know that you're as accountable to their efforts as they are. For my teams, I've communicated the standards needed for us to hit our pipeline generation efforts on a monthly basis. I spent a session at the start of the fiscal year walking them through the data that I used to support that number. On the first team meeting of each month, everyone buys back in to the program. It's a small but important trust building exercise. When that number is m ...Read More

When sales leaders at 0-1 companies are doing this well, I've noticed that they're all regimented about understanding why they're winning and losing deals. It sounds simple, but few are willing to really do the work to inspect deals, and it creates a lot of noise in a small company that's assessing PMF and figuring out where-and-how to grow. Take the time each month to review your sales funnel: be specific about what's moving and what isn't. Revisit those notes and adjust quickly to the patterns ...Read More