| Hiring good people is the main key, and a good VP of sales is crucial. Depending on your product you can control it with comp as well. For example, for an enterprise product, especially one that renews annually and/or has milestone payments, comp the sales person as the cash comes in (and pay out for the renewals same as you would for the initial deal). Unhappy customers don’t pay. I have also paid out commission on time (when customer should have paid, when the delay was due to engineering, and not manageable by salesperson. Sometimes engineering delays are due to sales people though :-(. Have engineering work out the milestones and deliverables with the customer. Have the CEO sign contracts, nobody else. Count as sales only deals that have both customer P.O. and signed contract (so common to have only one and have the sales person argue that the deal should be booked anyway. Amazing how they could get both in on the last day of the quarter though). Etc. When I was about 20 my dad told me he’d fired half the sales people he’d ever hired. I shook my head and thought, “what an idiot”. A couple of decades later I looked back and it was about the same for me. I mean table stakes for a sales person is selling themselves. And getting canned isn’t always a bad mark against a sales person. So it’s hard to judge up front, but if they don’t sell “right away”* shove them out the door. It’s not like an engineer for whom you want to invest extra time to help them get into the groove; that’s part of the sales person’s way of life and the good ones are proud of it. Pay the good sales people well. At your annual sales shindig have the CEO show up for a day, or half a day, to give a pep talk, enthuse about the VP of sales and the top sellers (who made it by following the rules) and then bow out. Maybe have the CFO talk about how many commission checks they had to cut. And have them mention that the top sellers make more than the CEO. Another tip: have every member of the exec team, yes even CFO, VP of Manufacturing or whomever, go on a customer sales call every quarter. Sometimes a first visit, sometimes a sales person “check in” call or or whatever. It will make the execs understand how the customer views your product, not what marketing and the sales folk think the product is. * right away depends on your sales cycle. Could be the end of the second month (but you’re already breathing down their next after two weeks), or first quarter, or six months (ugh). And if you sell semiconductor manufacturing gear with a sales cycle of 48 months, good luck. |