How to Transition From Founder-led Sales to Team-based Selling

If you are a founder leading sales in your business, you undoubtedly want to transition from founder-led sales to a team-based selling framework.?

Effectively evolving from founder-led sales to building a strong effective sales team can be the difference between ok business growth and exponential hockey stick growth.

Unfortunately, many business owners find this transition difficult because they don’t fully understand what is required to make the change.?

In today's newsletter, I will unpack the four key elements that must be satisfied during the founder-led sales phase of growth to successfully transition and allow your business to scale.

They are:?

1. The founder must be able to convert sales
2. The process for winning sales must be repeatable
3. The process must be teachable to others
4. Have a management framework

The founder must be able to convert sales.

This stage is self-explanatory but is critical nonetheless. This is the learning phase of the founder and the journey through the valley of despair.?

Converting sales in this stage involves learning what works and what doesn’t, but there are a few key points to consider here.

• Founder must be able to sell beyond their network
• Must learn how to use their subject matter expertise to create a competitive advantage
• Have a converting lead generation process
• Begin to build out an effective sales framework and process

Once this is beginning to take form, the next step comes into focus.

The process for winning sales must be repeatable

A business cannot scale if it can’t teach others how to convert sales.

To be able to teach someone later, it must be repeatable.?

Otherwise, bespoke sales processes are hard to duplicate and follow.?

It is important to begin building a repeatable process focusing on the buying stages of your target markets and clients.?

Here are some key topics to take into consideration.

• Develop a repeatable process for creating demand for the solution
• Build a conveyor belt of repeatable sales steps
• Begin building a sales playbook
• Look for efficiency gains with tool creation

Founders need to pay more attention to this stage of sales development because without it, future salespeople will not be successful and a high churn rate will result.?

The process must be teachable to others

Once the founder is producing sales results through a consistent process, it is now time to develop a process for teaching so exponential growth can begin to be realised.?

Founder must consider the following in this stage.?

• What does a recruitment framework look like
• How to develop a sales playbook to aligns to the repeatable process
• What is the coaching process for teaching and over what time frames

Without the important frameworks and considerations planned for, it will be really difficult to onboard effective salespeople which will lead to higher numbers of churn over time plus poor results.?

Have a management framework

Once you're able to teach others what you know as a founder to convert sales and onboard a sales team, the last part of the puzzle is to implement a management framework.

The aim of this stage is to get the best out of the team and continually evolve to the market conditions to get better over time.?

Here are some important considerations to think about.

• Building a recruitment framework?
• Effectively tracking deals to ensure they are moving through the pipeline because of the right activity
• The setting of KPI’s to ensure the right behaviours are encourages
• Implementing a lessons learned feedback loop to continually optimise the sales process.?

The reality is most businesses exist somewhere on this journey, may have unwittingly missed some of these steps out and stall as a result.?

But breaking your journey down into key stops along the way and knowing if you skip one, there will be a consequence.?

These elements must be addressed in sequential order and once achieved, the founder can then fully transition to a sales team based selling model with confidence.?

Questions for you

1. What stage of founder-led sales are you in?
2. Can you identify areas you are missing?
3. What areas are you stuck in?

Feel free to send me a message with the answers or put them in the comments.?

Also, if you found this useful, I’d appreciate it if you can share this with your network.

Cheers

Gavin?