Getting the sales engine right

In my experience there is a huge (and costly) blindspot that many entrepreneurs have.Sales Function!As I’ve expressed on this sub before, I have seen a couple of mistakes made again and again by entrepreneurs that are beyond costly.They don’t set the sales function up for scalability and operation growth. Many entrepreneurs don’t think ahead and have to make huge structural changes to their sales function when they achieve growth. This is both disruptive and often undoes a lot of hard work.The vast majority of entrepreneurs come from a product background and don’t fully understand how the sales org operates and how to clearly define roles to maximise success. This is from basics things like KPI’s to which leading and lagging indicators will ultimately measure/drive success.Hiring the right profile of sales leader. Sales managers are great at managing sales people. They are often very poor at building the right process/methodologies/systems to align to overall business strategy and make sales teams hum. This one for me is the most dangerous as you’re relying on an ‘expert’ to ultimately build the most important part of your business when it comes to revenue.If you are going to market for investment - one of the first things potential investors will look for is sales capability. What’s your renewal rate? What’s your cost per acquisition? How predictable is your pipeline? How accurate is your forecasting?So how do you solve it?Three important things to get right early!Guided Sales process. Create key activities that need to be completed at each stage to guide the salesperson to drive the right activities, and qualify!Robust qualification methodology. Only work on deals that have a propensity to close. Qualify out all deals that are not going to turn into contracted business. 60% of sales time is spent on deals that will never come in.Align all of your organisational forecasting to the above steps. Think of both the macro and the micro. Every activity, sales stage, probability must feed into overall forecasting.Constantly improve sales people through quality training and coaching and align it to the above. Training in isolation is ok, but if it isn’t aligned to what the business needs and more importantly to your sales process, it’s a waste of time.I have a ton of free resources on the above. Shout if you want it. Genuinely for free. I have a learnt the above through working with orgs that get this part SO wrong. Always happy to help. see hubwealthy.com/wealthy