Scaling a sales team – the four things you’ll need (besides talent)

By Kris Duggan | November 17, 2006, 5:11 pm | 0 Comments

So besides sales talent (which means hiring, developing, and retaining the best and the brightest), there are a few key things that are required to build high-performance sales organizations:

Socialtext wiki, of course — knowledge repository to share sales tools across the sales team, including proposals, templates, collateral, best practices, competitive intelligence, specifications, customer feedback, and much more. It’s all about the unstructured ideas and knowledge that don’t fit into a CRM.
SugarCRM or Salesforce.com account – capture activities, manage the pipeline, support the forecasting requirements of the team. We use Sugar.
Hoover’s account – information source for territory assignment/routing of prospective clients internally, along with account information, contacts, and more for understanding an organization and determining how/why your solution will fit their needs and objectives.
WebEx account – web-based sales presentations and product demonstrations. We manage the team to 8 meetings per week per rep here at Socialtext, not counting face-to-face appointments.

All of these are easy to deploy, either only being available as hosted service, or in the case of wikis, also behind the firewall for security purposes.

Back to talent, we happen to be in a major hiring phase — with plans to sizably scale the sales team over the coming months. See one of our job placements here,. As always, send me an email if you have any ideas or referrals!