In early-stage startups, sales is often in the “let’s learn this together” mode. There are rarely sales managers or different tiers of reps ‒ it’s just a small group of people trying to fine tune a sales process, learn how to sell a new product, and build a working team as they go. More often than not, these early-stage sales reps are happy doing all of this at once. There’s a reason they’re often called “evangelical sales reps” after all.
But as sales teams (and the companies that contain them) grow, this dynamic changes. All of the sudden, you’re hiring different types of sales reps with vastly different skills and experience levels. You may split your team up into closers and development reps. Perhaps you add a sales manager or two. So now, instead of a cohesive, small team of evangelical reps, you have a diverse (and rapidly) growing team.
This is when you need to ramp up your sales training.
A recent article from Harvard Business Review explains the benefits of and strategies for improving sales training: “The decision to create a coaching culture must be done in the context of a broader corporate goal ‒ a growth strategy to increase revenue, perhaps, or a need to speed the time it takes new salespeople to become productive, or a desire to decrease costly sales turnover.”
In this way, it’s easy to see how sales managers make your quota-carrying reps more efficient. They help them learn (and follow) your sales process, they onboard reps more quickly, and they identify areas of weakness (on an individual rep and team-wide basis).
It may seem weird to add a non-revenue-generating salesperson to your team with the intention of bringing in more revenue per rep, but it’s been proven to have enormous returns.
But there’s one more common way that growing sales teams can book more revenue without adding much more revenue.
