You've built something good. Your service works. Clients love you. But growth has stalled because you're doing all the sales yourself - and you're exhausted.
So you decide to hire a salesperson. You find someone with "experience." You set them up with a list, some templates, and tell them to start making calls. Three months later, they're gone. Or worse - they're still there but not closing anything.
This happens to almost every service business that tries to scale. The problem isn't that good salespeople don't exist. The problem is that most business owners don't know how to build a sales team structure that actually works.
Before you hire anyone, you need to understand your own sales process inside and out. I mean really understand it - not the version you tell yourself, but what actually happens when you close a deal.
Write down every single step from first contact to contract signed. How do you find leads? How do you start conversations? What questions do you ask? When do people usually say no? When do they say yes? What's your close rate on cold outreach versus referrals?
This isn't optional. If you can't articulate your sales process, you can't teach it to anyone else. And a salesperson who doesn't understand your actual process is just going to flail around and eventually quit.
Once you have this documented, you'll see patterns. You'll notice which steps actually move deals forward and which ones are just noise. You'll see where deals die. This is your blueprint for building a team.
Not every sales job is the same. Most teams need different roles:
Most young sales teams try to hire one person to do all three. That's a mistake. You end up hiring a generalist who isn't great at anything. Instead, build for what you need first.
If you have zero sales infrastructure, hire a prospector first. They get leads flowing. Then hire a closer who can actually convert. This is the most efficient path to scaling.
Hire for attitude and coachability before resume. A person who has closed deals at another company won't necessarily close deals for you - they don't know your service, your market, or your process.
What you actually want is someone who:
During interviews, have them shadow you on a real call or meeting. See how they react. Do they take notes? Do they ask intelligent follow-up questions? Or do they just sit there passively?
Also - and this matters - make sure they actually want to do the job. Some people are attracted to sales because they think it's easy or lucrative. They're not. They're going to be frustrated and quit. You want someone who genuinely enjoys the interaction of selling.
Most companies hire a salesperson and expect them to ramp in 30 days. That's unrealistic. Expect 60-90 days minimum before they're independently productive. This is especially true in B2B service sales where your deal cycles are long and complex.
During training, don't just tell them about your process - let them watch it in action. Have them listen to your calls. Have them sit in on your discovery sessions. Have them help you close a few deals. They need to see the real thing, not just the outline.
After they understand the fundamentals, have them start small. Maybe they shadow you, then do parts of the call while you guide them. Then they take the call with you observing. Then they do it independently while you review recordings.
Track their progress. How many calls are they making? What's their conversation rate? Discovery call conversion? Close rate? If a metric tanks, that's where you coach them. Not with vague feedback like "you need to be more confident" - but specific stuff like "you didn't ask about their current solution before pitching ours."
Pay a salary that covers their cost of living plus a reasonable bonus for hitting targets. Don't try to run a pure commission model early - that just attracts desperate people who cut corners.
But also don't pay flat salary with zero incentive. People work harder when they can see how their effort translates to income.
A simple structure: Base salary that's competitive for your market, plus commission on closed deals. Make the bonus structure clear and achievable. If your average deal is $5,000 and your gross margin is 70%, maybe that's $500 commission per deal. It's not life-changing money, but it's meaningful.
Here's what most businesses miss - your salesperson is only as good as the leads they're working with. If you give them bad leads, they'll fail. Then you'll fire them and blame the hire, when really the problem was upstream.
Your prospecting and lead generation system has to work first. You need a predictable way to generate interested prospects. Whether that's cold email, LinkedIn, referrals, or something else - you need this dialed in before you scale a sales team.
A great closer with bad leads will go nowhere. An okay closer with great leads will build you a real business.
All of this assumes you have time to build and manage a sales team. In reality, most service business owners don't. They're trying to deliver work, manage the business, and build sales. Something has to give.
Some companies handle the whole thing themselves - prospecting, lead qualification, close rates, everything. They build the infrastructure, write the email campaigns, handle the follow-ups, and set up your sales team for success. That way you can focus on what you're actually good at - your service delivery - while they handle the revenue side.
That's worth exploring if you're tired of wearing the sales hat.
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