Early-stage SaaS founders: You’re setting your VP of Sales up to fail by putting them in a hole before they even start. Want to dig them out?
Here’s what happens: You start your hiring process for your first VP of Sales. With your time focused on hiring, foundational work to gear up the sales team takes a back seat.
After all, the VP of Sales will take care of everything when she joins, right? But then it takes 4-6 months to get the new VP of Sales aboard.
Once she finally starts, she gets stuck.
Here’s why (and how to fix it):
The Problem
VPs of Sales need to start producing results ASAP, yet many of the key initiatives she’ll put into place will take months to have an effect.
Hiring is a great example. It takes 1.5 sales cycles to ramp a new rep. If you have a four month sales cycle (6 month ramp time) and it takes three months to hire new reps, you’re looking at nine months before you start seeing serious revenue from the new hires.
That means just three months of revenue impact in the current year.
BUT the VPs of Sales has to deal with all of that foundational work that you haven’t been taking on BEFORE she can fully focus on her major initiatives. You’ve got to gas up the plane before you can start the engines.
Let’s say that hiring gets delayed by one month because the VP of Sales has too many foundational tasks on her plate.
You lose 33% of the year one revenue impact from the new hires (you get two months of revenue impact instead of three).
Delay = disaster.
The Opportunity
It doesn’t have to be that way. You can get your company “VP of Sales ready” while you’re doing the hiring process.
There are a number of things you need to do, but if you space it out over the course of a 4-6 month hiring process, the team will take it all in stride.
Most of the tasks aren’t rocket science anyway.
But if you leave it all for the VP of Sales to do when she arrives, there will be too many tasks competing for too little time and you’ll end up with delay you can’t afford.
Getting “VP of Sales Ready”
So what do you need to do? Five things:
- Prepare for talent management
- Clean the pipe and mind the gap Part 1, Part 2
- Create meaningful sales stages
- Start top of funnel initiatives (Coming soon!)
- Clarify your value themes (Coming soon!)
