How to build your first sales team - part 2

Hey folks,

In my previous post, I shared the lessons learned while scaling our sales team to 24 AEs.

I’m trying to wrap my head around how I can provide value for early-stage B2B SaaS founders.

So I would love to have your feedback on what’s the most painful part for you when building a sales team!

Today I’ll share what I learned about ramping up new AEs - after having onboarded around 15 AEs myself in the past 2 years.

In our early days, onboarding was not scalable nor consistent.

In hindsight, the problems were pretty clear:

  1. It took way too much of my time
  2. The training wasn’t consistent
  3. The outcomes depended too heavily on my ability to train people

Eventually we took the time to build a structured, repeatable onboarding system.

Something that:

  1. was not dependent on one sales leader
  2. could develop talent rather than hope we had hired a superstar rep.

(And this also made us always hire for coachability as key trait - non negotiable.)

So we built what became our 4Ps ramp-up framework:

1. Product

Trainer: Product Manager or Solution Engineer

Why: We knew that 80% of the customers chose us for 20% of the capabilities. So we had our SE / PM deliver a product training on core features.

What we cover:

  • Core product features
  • Product Competitive Landscape
  • Key product USPs

What we learned:

At this stage less is more - throwing too much product information at the rep will overload him with new knowledge.

2. Prospect

Trainer: Sales Manager

Why: A rep who knows how to build a gap, amplify pain, and speak the prospect’s language will always be able to sell.

What we cover:

  • Who buys from us?
  • What are their pains and challenges?
  • What’s the buying process?
  • Who/What are their alternatives?
  • Why do they sign with us?

What we learned:

Reps coming from other industries or personas will default to feature-selling unless they understand the buyer.

3. Process

Trainer: Sales Manager

Why: This was the core of building a repeatable sales motion. We’ve seen that deals are 23% more likely to close when AEs follow the defined sales process.

What we cover is split in 2:

  1. Sales process (remove ambiguity):

  2. What the ideal sales process looks like from discovery → close.

  3. The criteria to move from one stage to the next.
  4. Sales playbook: talk tracks, frameworks, top rep recordings

  5. Teach the rep: how to do discovery, how to demo & how to close

  6. Operational processes (remove friction):

  7. How to create a quote.

  8. How to send a contract for signature.
  9. When/How to loop in an SE, PM, or manager.
  10. How approvals work (discounts, legal, procurement).

What we learned:

Process clarity accelerates ramp. Without it, every rep needs to build their own version of selling, which creates inconsistency and slows everything down.

4. Pipe

Trainer: Sales Manager

Why: No pipe = no quota

What we cover:

We helped new hires build quota from day 1, by:

  • Providing a list of accounts
  • Give them access to the tools for contact data & automation
  • Create cold email copywriting together
  • Provide cold call talking points & call recordings
  • Provide activity metrics & pipeline KPIs

What we learned:

This step is overlooked in a surprising number of companies. Helping reps build pipeline early removes the inconsistency between the reps who naturally have extreme drive and the ones who don’t.

Happy to share more of this journey.

I’m trying to understand how I can provide value to early-stage B2B SaaS founders.

What the most challenging part for you when building your sales team?

Author: reachsummit30