Typical Founder or CEO: “Let’s hire a Sales Manager or Account Executive, grant the person access to Salesforce and Sales Navigator, and offer good $ compensation benefits. If the Sales Manager is good enough, he/she will sell. Otherwise, the person is not qualified.”
It sounds like a real story I’ve heard many times throughout my career in tech sales.
But the matter is that it is not 100% true.
Now, if you are the CEO, reading this article, you may say: “H’m…What’s wrong with it?”
Have you heard about Joshua Bell and his experiment? He is one of the best violinists in the world.
In 2007, Joshua played in the New York subway. For his 45-minute play, the violinist raised about $30 in tips. Two days before, he sold out a Boston theater, where the seats averaged about $100.
The experiment proved that the extraordinary in an ordinary environment does not shine and is often overlooked and undervalued.
In the case of a product or software service, the situation is the same. You hire a top-tier Delivery Director or Head of Product, or whatever the title can be, and you are excited about the future transformation and revenue increase.
To set new hiring for success, you provide the person with Excel sheets and email threads instead of project management software. You have no clear roadmap and company strategy because you are still working on it. You don’t give the green light for the requests on workflow changes, team composition, etc., because it may lead to overbudgetting.
So, despite the expertise, the environment you’ve created limits the person’s ability. What is the result? Misaligned expectations. “This person isn’t as great as we thought.” That’s what you think. But the truth is that a high performer in the wrong environment can’t succeed.
The same goes for sales. We all tend to hire A-players, and these salespeople are rare, representing only 10–15% of the sales population. So, when a company has great salespeople, getting them to stay is in its best interest.
As a three-times Director of Sales with 15+ years in different sales roles, I’m a firm believer that one of the top priorities of any sales leader — other than increasing sales and growing revenue, of course — is to create an environment conducive to AEs and SDRs efficiency and productivity.
That includes:
👉🏻 Sales process aligned with the buyer’s journey. The company is easy to sell and do business with—simplifying the buying and selling process.
👉🏻 Solid service market fit. The approach we-can-build-everything no longer impresses your buyer.
👉🏻 Sales Enablement. That is not only training or onboarding, as many people think. Areas like sales enablement include buyer-facing sales collateral, sales and messaging playbooks, and a robust company knowledge base with easy-to-use tools.
👉🏻 Sales Operations. Solid reporting and sales dashboards are a must for making metric-oriented and data-driven decisions. As a Sales Director or CEO, you must track revenue numbers, win rates, sales cycle lengths, ACV, conversions, and much more lagging, leading, and behavioral indicators to make proper decisions. However, sales reps should spend 70% of their time selling, and your task is to get them rid of low-value, labor-intensive admin tasks. On top of that, the reps should be equipped with the right technology.
👉🏻 Cross-functional collaboration. A salesperson may create hundreds of great Opportunities, but who cares if 90% of them die in Tech Pre-Sale? Or marketing that generates neither qualified leads nor trust factors, which are crucial at the latter stages of the sales cycle.
👉🏻 Excellent Customer Support and Account Management. Ok, the paperwork is done, the client handed over to Delivery. Promising interest from the compensation plan should come every month, but the customer terminates the contract due to poor communication flow with AM and Delivery. If it comes again and again, you lose your rep motivation.
👉🏻 Coaching and Training Plans. It doesn’t stop once onboarding is done. Mastery requires repetition, refinement, and practice. The sales landscape constantly evolves with new products, market trends, competitors, and buyer behaviors. Continuous training ensures that sales reps stay updated on them.
You can invest in hiring the best sales reps of Salesforce or Outreach, but if your company can support them with “just do it”, they will leave the company in several months voluntarily or not.
Yes, sales talents can be an incredible asset, but they are only strong if your performance conditions are in alignment too.
