Building a Sales Team for Growth w/ Bryan Mueller

Outbound Sales Lift

#71: Listen as Bryan Mueller, HubSpot Channel Account Manager, discusses how to build a sales team. He and Tyler cover the process of building a modern sales team, hiring new sales reps, and thinking about that process on a high level.

Click here for the full show notes, transcript, and more!

Don’t feel like listening? Read the Episode Cliff Notes instead below:

Getting Started with Hiring (0:23)

You don’t need an absolute all-star sales rep for your first hire, but you need someone with the business acumen and presence of mind to give you a feedback loop.

Before you even go looking for someone, take what you’re currently doing and put it down on paper.

Get it into a process in a repeatable way of having conversations.

​​Hardcore prospecting that maybe you’re probably not doing your referring referrals, but you need leverage to get more people.

Enabling Your New Hires (7:51)

Enabling your new hire depends on what your hope is for the organization.

Bryan has worked with companies with a lifestyle-type business, and they want to grow it a little bit versus the companies who want to scale.

Often the ones who want to scale, no matter how good they are at sales, can’t get out of their own way. Acceleration is what they need.

Identify what you’re doing and document the main pain points you need hires to solve. It doesn’t matter where you are in the process. You need to ask good questions.

Ideally, you’re bringing on people who are raising the bar each time.

It is hard to retain good sales talents, especially today, so you have to give them a reason to stay.

It’s a commitment to your organization’s vision and actual mission that gets someone so passionate. So it’s key to make sure you have that right person.

Once a hire gets their groove, focus on the knowledge and information they need to enable why you hired them.

Bryan recommends the book Working Backwards.

Measuring Success (17:02)

The core of it is to measure inputs, track outputs, and then start to see what you can do to change those outputs.

You’ve got to take that part seriously because if you hire sales reps and put them in the system, they may or may succeed over a long period without that consistent feedback and consistent outreach.

You’re not only making them productive for you, but you’re keeping them happy because they feel like they’re still growing and learning.

Sales is a tough industry, and most top sales reps leave because they get tired of the conversation. Of course, they’re good at conversation, but nothing is challenging.

That’s why companies need to innovate, give them a new product line to sell you a new service, and have them figure out new problems.