Cut-throat sales culture? How founders can empower their sales team

The world of sales can feel brutal for founders. The stereotype in the function is cut-throat, a live by the sword, die by the sword mentality.

In some instances, this can be the case. Many sales people will have experienced losing their job or missing commission at some point in their career, likely due to a blind focus on targets that should never have been set in the first place.

When founders haven’t come from a sales or commercial background, this perceived culture of sales can be intimidating and off-putting, and as a result founders avoid the territory. 

Sales doesn’t have to be like this but there are a few things you need to get right.

1. Hire the right people

To set yourself and your sales team up for success, you need to make sure you’re not only recruiting the right person, but that you’re recruiting the right role.

We advocate for a process which means you don’t jump straight from founder-led sales to a VP of sales but instead start with someone that is operational in sales. A VP of sales will have had a team around them, they’ll have been doing a lot of strategic work at a senior level and might not have actually done any hands-on sales work for a while.

As a startup, this won’t help you. You need someone operational that can get moving right away.

2. Empower your sales team

Empowering your sales team is not the same as ignoring the sales team, and despite potential discomfort, as a founder you need to be involved.

There are tools and information that you will need to provide as a founder to your sales team in order to enable them, and they will need your support. They’ll need to know from you what good looks like, and a clear and agreed sales process. You can read more on this here.

We see it getting uncomfortable for founders when they feel the sales team isn’t delivering but they’re not sure how or what to do about it. The best way to deal with this scenario is to avoid it entirely, and by hiring the right role and enabling the right person, you can do just that.

3. Set the culture 

Setting your own organisational culture is one of the benefits of starting your own venture.

If you’re uncomfortable with the traditional culture of sales, you can develop your own and work with the team in an empowering and enabling way. For example, there’s some (admittedly now fairly old) research which suggests a correlation between improved performance and employees setting their own targets. 

Another suggestion which the Sales for Startups team recommends is a significantly closer relationship between sales and marketing than most companies achieve. The two functions can work in partnership to generate and convert leads, which culturally can make a big difference to your commercial function.  

Ultimately, there's no need for founders to be wary of sales. As with any other function it requires specialist expertise, and if sales is outside of your skillset, that's where we can help.