How do you structure, hire, and train a high performing sales culture

Excellent revenue leaders turn into outstanding revenue leaders based on how and who they hire. Your number one job as a leader is to hire the right people, followed by supporting them. If you only hire A+ talent, your team will only need you for strategy vs. blocking/tackling personnel and process issues. Some things to consider:

1. Define the sales culture:

   1. Talent density: Slow down to speed up. We only hire A+ talent. Those who embody the innate skillsets that are difficult to teach (i.e. humility, hustle, high IQ/EQ, curiosity, relentlessness)

      1. Create a robust recruitment process to ensure you don’t deviate from top-tier talent. Great books to reference: Who & No Rules Rules

   2. Crystal clear on your mission, vision, values, and the importance of maintaining a strong culture especially at the age of our business.

   3. What are the skillsets and behaviors of your top performers today? You use the current examples of what you have to help define what sales excellence means to your business.

   4. Create revenue incentives to drive the right behavior (i.e. AE & CS comped off expansion so they can work together to drive customer outcomes)

   5. Recognize and reward top talent, while also celebrating the struggles and failures in order to learn and grow

2. Define and create a revenue motion:

   1. Define clear roles & responsibilities for all revenue

   2. Define clear KPIs, both shared and individual

      1. Expectation setting on performance/winning culture

      2. Performance management. Make tough decisions early and often

   3. Create and constantly iterate a revenue playbook in order to drive repeatability in our motion and forecast

   4. Leverage data to gain insights into sales performance, customer behavior, patterns of successes/failures, and leverage leading indicators to guide decision making

3. Establish virtuous revenue training:

   1. Clearly defined onboarding program to reduce time to ramp. Learn from your previous new hires. Every new hire should help iterate the onboarding playbook for the next round of hires

   2. Continuous call reviews to ensure our ICs are following your sales methodology. MEDDPICC can be fairly outdated. I recommend building a model from several methodologies that get your GTM team to understand customer use cases, challenges, desired outcomes, how to solution sell vs. feature sell, key risks within deals, executive alignment, multi-threading, etc.

      1. Custom training dependent on findings (i.e. value selling, objection handling, negotiation, competitive positioning, etc.)

   3. Foster collaboration, problem solving, sharing best practice

   4. Sell 90 initiative: ICs spending 90% of their time with the customer. This means we remove all internal inefficiencies. 

      1. Technology overhaul: What’s working, what’s not?

4. "We are customer obsessed":

   1. Customer-first mindset. Maniacally focused on value selling, understanding pain, providing solutions, and making your customers' lives easier. 

   2. "We pride ourselves on building long-term relationships"

   3. "We don’t put the competition down, we’re trusted advisors and know our competitors gaps inside and out"