When you’re first starting your business you do it all – from office manager and accountant to human resources specialist and business planner, to even marketing expert and sales leader.
However, as your business starts to grow, you’ll quickly realize that you can’t manage everything on your own. Eventually, you’ll need to hire another leader or else you’ll see your business start to suffer in productivity and performance.
A great place to start is by adding a sales leader to your team. A sales leader can be extremely helpful for small growing organizations and most businesses could use some help honing their sales processes and efficiency.
While there’s no easy formula to know when to hire a sales leader, there are some signs you might be ready.
YOU HAVE MORE REPS THAN YOU CAN MANAGE
The more sales reps you add to your team, the more time you’ll spend training and coaching your reps. If you find that you’re unable to stay on top of each sales rep’s daily tasks and performance, it’s time to bring a sales leader on board.
As a general guideline, if you have more than 2 or 3 sales reps, you should at least start to consider hiring a sales leader, and if you have 4, 5 or more sales reps, then you should hire a sales leader as soon as possible.
It’s important to give each sales rep the time, attention, and coaching they need to perform at their best and as an owner, this person is not always going to be you. Hiring a sales leader will give you the ability to focus on running the business as a whole and focus your attention on the parts of the business that need it the most.
YOUR SALES REPS ARE UNDERPERFORMING
There’s a big difference between a rep who is putting in minimal effort and doing just enough to get by and a rep who is putting in the work and performing at a high level. As a leader, it’s important to recognize when your sales reps aren’t reaching their full potential and work to help them become a top performer.
If your sales reps aren’t performing to a level you want and you can sense that they have more capacity than they’re producing, then it’s a clear sign they’re not being properly motivated and coached. It takes a lot of focused time to perform all the tasks needed to improve sales rep performance – from ride-a-longs to monitoring and screening sales rep’s phone calls, to performance meetings and one on one coaching sessions. If that time commitment is too hard for you or you don’t have the expertise to coach them to the next level, then you should hire a sales leader.
YOU’RE EXPANDING YOUR BUSINESS OR LAUNCHING A NEW DIVISION
There are many signs that indicate you should hire a sales leader to improve sales rep performance and productivity, but by the time you see you need it, it could be too late.
However, in the case of launching a new division or expanding your team, you will know ahead of time that there’s going to be an increased workload and responsibilities and you can start to hire people to help you during this transition.
Hiring a sales leader is important during this time because they can help you manage a growing sales team as well as help you manage the workload that comes with launching a new division of your business. Also, if you’re expanding into an area of business that is beyond your core strength or you’re unfamiliar with, it will be useful to hire a sales leader that has experience and expertise in that area.
In fact, there are many benefits of hiring a sales leader when adding a new division like improved sales culture and productivity. If you want to find out more about these benefits, check out this case study from one of our satisfied clients.
YOUR TIME DISTRIBUTION IS UNEVEN
You’re not always going to spend equal amounts of time in every area of your business, but if you’re having to spend way more time in some areas and not devote enough time to others, then that’s when it becomes a problem.
For example, if you’re experiencing challenges with customers service, you might need to spend more of your time, execution and operation on fixing these problems. But if you’re spending more time on those issues, you need to get a sales leader to focus on the sales side.
It’s okay to spend more time on certain aspects of your business than others, but just make sure you have coverage in the areas you’re not spending any time on or else you risk creating more problems for your business.
Use these 4 signs to help you determine when you should hire a sales leader. While the decision of when to hire a sales leader is ultimately up to you, if you’re seeing one or more of these signs in your business, you should start to consider hiring a sales leader today.
What is keeping you from bringing in a sales leader for your growing business? Share your feedback below!
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