Document sales process before hiring a sales team
That's the recommendation from David Cummings, Founder of the Atlanta Tech Village and also Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Atlanta Ventures.
As a start-up grows and generates revenue, there will frequently be a discussion about shifting sales to a sales team. David Cummings, Founder of the Atlanta Tech Village and also Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Atlanta Ventures, says that the founder needs to be careful.
In a recent column, he writes that it is important to first hire a process-oriented sales assistant who would help the founder make founder-led sales more efficient and productive, and most importantly, codify what works and what doesn’t work.
“After the sales assistant has shadowed the entrepreneur for some time and codified the sales playbook, it’s time to bring on a sales leader,” Cummings writes. That person’s priorities would be to build “a repeatable, scalable process, whereby the different milestones in a sales process are defined, and the inputs, like cold calls, emails, trade shows, and marketing qualified leads, turn into scheduled demos that then progress into proof of concepts or proposals, and so on.”
The column can be found here.
