Welcome back to our multi-week series, How To Build Your First Sales Team: The 4 Ps Of Sales! In Part 4, we talked all about the third of the 4 Ps, Pay, and helped you discover exactly how much you should pay for sales.

If you haven’t read the earlier parts in this series, we recommend doing so before continuing on.

• How To Build Your First Sales Team (Pt. 1)
• How To Build Your First Sales Team (Pt. 2) – Process 
• How To Build Your First Sales Team (Pt. 3) – Performance
• How To Build Your First Sales Team (Pt. 4) – Pay

Let’s get into the fourth and final of the 4 Ps of Sales: People.

It’s no accident that “People” is last. It’s last because, in the highest performing sales teams, salespeople are the operators of an effective sales strategy, not the strategy itself.

The right approach is to create your sales system first by figuring out the sales process, performance, and pay requirements, and then finding people to run it who are the right fit — not the other way around.

So, who do you need on your sales team? 

First, don’t make the rookie mistake of assuming that hiring an “experienced” salesperson is all you need to do to accomplish your growth goals. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy, and it rarely produces meaningful results. Even if the salesperson has some success, it’s often temporary, meaning if that salesperson leaves, sales will quickly dry up. That puts your small business in one hell of a pickle.

The first step in figuring out who best fits your sales system is to consider their qualities, skill sets, and sales compensation requirements.

Sales Qualities

Qualities are things like personality traits, values, work habits, and personal style. Take a moment to think about which qualities are best fits for you and your business culture. What values do your customers respond positively to? What qualities do successful salespeople have that you yourself have had experience with? Some common qualities of great salespeople are things like:

• Resourcefulness 
• Tenacity
• Problem-solving
• Communication
• Fearlessness

Sales Skills

Skillset is simply a person’s knowledge, experience, and abilities. There’s not one definitive standard skill set all salespeople should possess, but there is a handful of must-have abilities. Things like:

• An understanding of buyers and what they want and need
• The ability to personalize their approach to buyers, rather than treating them all the same
• Possession of true subject matter expertise, not just product knowledge

Sales Compensation

Sales compensation requirements are something we’ve already covered in Pt. 4 of this series. You should have a really good idea of what you can afford to pay salespeople. Now it’s time to align expectations with your sales candidates. Simply ask:

• “What are your compensation expectations?”
• “The compensation range for this position is this, how does that fit with your expectations?”

Hopefully, by now, you’ve learned a lot about how the 4 Ps of Sales (Process, Performance, Pay, and People) can help you build your first high-performing sales team the right way. But we’ve only just scratched the surface. Be sure to take your time and work through our full online sales training course, Sales 102: How To Build Your First Sales Team.

We encourage you to keep learning, keep growing your sales structure, and ask us any questions you have along the way. 

Have a question related to this topic or anything else?