You should start building your inside sales team by first mapping out your big vision. Then, start hiring small and approach growth in manageable increments to provide a sustainable framework for realizing the big vision of the sales organization. A common question I get is:

Should I hire more generalists or specialists? The specialized sales model has become increasingly popular among sales organizations over the past five years. Many organizations have moved away from generalist models and are moving towards specialization or some sort of hybrid. And rightly so. These are decisions you need to make early on while establishing the framework for your business organization or your dikes will start to give way quickly. Here are my top tips for building an inside sales team.

HIRE MANAGEMENT EARLY

The mistake organizations often make is to hire a great sales rep and promote them to a management role. There are a million articles about hiring a manager and losing your best sales rep in the same promotion.

BUILD A SCALABLE RECRUITING PROCESS

If you haven’t read Mark Roberges’ book, The Formula for Accelerating Sales, then go buy a copy and read it before you do anything else. He outlines the framework of a recruitment process that has no equal. Approach your recruiting process the same as your sales process. You want it to be data driven. Build it in a way that you can determine the quality of your recruiting and the success of your reps. You can then adapt your recruitment strategy based on the success of your hires. This will give you a framework for determining where you should focus your efforts. We have built a strict recruitment strategy and interview process that every candidate goes through. It encompasses interviews with role plays and an individual rating that is given from each interviewer. We then compile all of this data to look at the quality of the candidates we put through the recruiting process. sales. After making hires, we can set up a repeatable process to continue hiring top reps or adjust our selection process based on pre-hire assessments.

ESTABLISH A SALES PROCESS

Establishing a sales process is crucial to deploying a sales organization. A good sales process will give you the ability to track data and gain insight into any point in the sales cycle, from marketing to SDRs to AE and more. Determine the important metrics in your sales cycle and build stages into your sales cycle to give you visibility into those stages. This highlights the importance of having direct managers who understand Salesforce and the process well enough to determine them. A good sales process will make it easier for reps to stay organized. This will often lead to reps documenting important information in places other than your CRM. The hardest part in a sales organization is building a scalable and repeatable hiring framework.