In search of a perfect C-Level match! Are you the one for edrone’s CSO (Chief Sales Officer)?

• “When an engineering chief is promoted from a lower position, she/he is usually successful. However, when someone who has been working in the company for a long time becomes the head of sales, the mission almost always fails. "
• "Hiring someone who has been where you want to go can dramatically accelerate the pace of change and development."

~ Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things

This note is about recruiting a Head of Sales, someone who plays the role of VP of Sales in a small and medium-sized organization. Thoughts about searching for a person combining opposites of leadership and management, a person empowered to create and implement sales strategies.

Empowerment is not a privilege granted by management, it is not just decision-making. Empowerment is also a skill set and attitude. You are empowered, in other words, you are ready to take responsibility for your strategic decisions. You are able to oppose a contemplated order if it interferes with the achievement of the goal and you are ready to accept this order and habits if they are proven, but contrary to what you are used to. You are open to change and leave your comfort zone. Your experience and success in building a team and achieving goals is key, but interestingly, you will only be able to use this experience after some time. In the first days or weeks, your creativity and intuition will be more important than techniques and experience.

I hope this text will help someone to find the right manager. Not necessarily for the Head of Sales position, but for sure with C-Level approach. I personally hope that our goal - expanding the Steering Committee team with a CSO - is on the right track. 

Pic. The University of Texas at Austin, MBA students at edrone HQ

Who are we looking for?

If you want to find a suitable candidate, you need to be able to answer one crucial question: who am I looking for? Triviality, but often overlooked in the recruitment process. The more detailed you define your target, the smaller the chance that you will make a choice based on features that are not crucial for the manager, i.e., how impressive a manager is, whether a manager is liked, how a manager looks. It will be much more important how a manager can support people and make them grow through development. In other words - what the leader and what the manager will be. I will write more about this later.

Choose on the merits, not the disadvantages. Pay more attention to the candidate's STRENGTHS than to their weaknesses or limitations. To define who we are looking for I started by asking myself three key questions:

- What advantages do we expect from the candidate?

- What disadvantages are we able to accept?

- What are the approaches or disadvantages we are not able to accept?

What advantages do we expect from the candidate?

Intelligence, creativity, high level of organization, extensive experience (international, several years) in building large (over 30 people) teams, willingness (and not only readiness) to shape the directions of the strategy. Culture fit - do you feel that the candidate will feel good in a team of 25-35 year-olds, in an atmosphere of high challenges, difficulties, high market competitiveness, working with a sales team in which someone may resist or sabotage their work (which is normal when you come to a working team and not just build it from scratch)? We want our candidate to create the most optimal team and sales process based on the available data, insights and history of our company as well as her/his own experience.

What disadvantages are we able to accept?

You don't have to assume this. Remember that advantages are more important. When doubts about defects arise, consider whether your fluctuations relate to the candidate's skills and abilities, or whether it is just your subjective feelings that will not affect the result of the activity.

Approach or defects that we are unable to accept.

• The candidate should not address such objections as:
• "This market is too competitive." We are aware of this and it is part of our company's strategy. Our Value Proposition is based on a new approach to solving the same problem.
• "I can't get results because the product is not developed enough / the customer says that the competition has a better solution." We have a benchmark showing that our clients are companies of various sizes and with different awareness of CRM tools.
• "Our offer is too expensive, the competition sells cheaper."

Pic. At edrone HQ

What are our expectations?

The next question is about the selection criteria. I have prepared a set of several dozen questions to answer the following issues:

• Will the candidate reach the world level?
• Does the candidate have outstanding advantages in terms of operation?
• Will the candidate make a significant contribution to the direction of strategic development of the company (in other words, is it very intelligent)?
• Will he be an effective team member (pay attention to whether you judge the candidate by his competences or by the impression he makes?). A manager does not have to be popular, but he has to be effective and have to influence the team.
• Does the candidate have the qualities of a leader and manager?

Leader or manager?

These are two opposite approaches to team management. In my opinion, the ability to combine these opposing skills is crucial to success. The "Chief" Sales Officer is, on the one hand, a leader who can influence people, infect them with her/his attitude and courage, motivate them and be an example and authority, and act as a servant to release the team's potential. CSO knows that leadership is removing obstacles on the road to success, as well. On the other hand, CSO is also an efficient manager who can delegate tasks in an unambiguous, understandable and measurable way, train, decide, organize the work of the team. As a result of the combination of these opposing competences, the team will be able to achieve its goals, will be mobilized and ready to act, and will know what are the expectations. 

Image: https://www.lifehack.org/674254/leadership-vs-management-is-one-better-than-the-other

Am I talking about you?

I will try to answer this issue by asking a few questions from my collection of several dozen. If, while reading these questions, you feel that I am talking about you, and feel comfortable answering them, then it is worth talking to me. If you are facing the challenge of employing a Chief Sales Officer / Head of Sales yourself and you like the way I approach it, write to me and I will share a larger set of questions with you.

Sample recruitment questions (5 of 81)

1. Define the position and define the responsibilities of the position for which you are applying. If the candidate / candidate starts to whine at this stage and does not want to use their imagination, it should be a red light for you. The more surprising the answer, the better it shows the temperament and predisposition of the manager.
2. How will your new job differ from the current one? An experienced manager should have no problem answering this question. A good candidate should not claim that much of his previous job experience will be immediately and directly applicable to the new environment. Experience - will be useful, but not today and tomorrow.
3. Tell me about the worst feedback you got and what has it changed? In this question, we want to hear the truth. We value honesty more than we expect the candidate / candidate to turn out to be a superhero.
4. Your salespeople have trouble reaching C-Level. How would you handle it? We want him to provide both soft solutions, such as training, interviews, but also process / technical solutions, e.g. tactics to reach such people, sales techniques.
5. How big a team did / do you manage? What team (characteristic and scale) would you like to lead and why? There are certain boundary conditions for the planned scale of the organization. You must experimentally select a candidate / candidates to the expected scale in a specific time perspective. Additionally, note how these answers correspond to the questions in the "What are our expectations" section.

Besides all of what we have above, one more criteria. The Candidate, she or he should not be Polish. Why? Internationalization is one of our most important KPIs. Therefore, your network here is not an advantage. The great advantage is if you were able to build a local structure and manage dozens of people at a scale of a region. The team should also retain to be international, so why not you? You won't need to move to our HQ City. Remote work and visiting HQ from time-to-time are fine. Once we agree with our cultural fit, you’d love the product and deep-dive would satisfy both sides, the main thing we would expect is to work with someone that already has been there where we would like to get to.

I have bootstrapped a MarTech company (edrone.me) to a $2M (USD) ARR on that red-ocean of marketing automation / customer data platform. We double our revenue YoY since we entered the market in 2016. We’re 40+ people, but only a few on Sales. The appetite is to accelerate, build and run the 30+ strong sales team and compete with market leaders in Europe and LATAM. Especially on Emerging markets initially. We’re rather a Black-box, only one product branch and avoiding tailor-made solution offering (pure Saas).