Top 5 Things a Great VP of Sales Does At An Early, Growing Company (In Order Of Priority) #1) Recruiting You hire a VP Sales not to sell, but to recruit, train and coach other people to sell. So recruiting is 20% + of their time, because you’re going to need a team to sell. And recruiting great reps and making them successful is the #1 most important thing your VP Sales will do. And great VPs of Sales know this. #2) Backfilling and Helping His/ Her Sales Team Helping coach reps to close deals (not doing it for them). Getting hands­on when needed, or in big deals. Spotting issues before they blow up. Seeing opportunities ahead of the horizon. #3) Sales Tactics Training, onboarding. Territories (you need them). Quotas, comp. How to compete. Pitch scripts. Coordinating FUD and anti­FUD. Segmenting customers. Reports. Ensuring they and the team can get what they need from the sales / CRM system. Etc. #4) Sales Strategy What markets should we expand into? What’s our main bottleneck? Where should our time & money go? What few key metrics tell us the most about the health of our team & growth? #5) Creating and Selling Deals Him/Herself This is last of the Top 5. Important, yes for select deals. But last on the list because if your VP Sales (or CEO, for that matter) is doing the closing rather than their team – you’re bottlenecked. No scaling for you, sir. SO: don’t hire a VP Sales until you are ready to scale and build and fund a small, growing sales team. And any VP of Sales that doesn’t see this themselves — probably isn’t a great long­term Sales VP for you. Instead, he/she is either just a great individual contributor, a great builder … or a simply a flawed or desperate candidate. One challenge in hiring salespeople is that they’re often extra good at “selling” themselves too…whether or not they’re actually a good fit! CASE STUDY: A RECRUITING PROCESS TO HIRE SALES STARS & SPEED UP RESULTS FIVE KEY SALES METRICS (WITH A TWIST) 1.) Number of Open Opportunities in total and per rep: Measure the total number of open opportunities each rep is working at any given time, and understand how many total new opportunities they should be getting per month –– not too few, and not too many. What to do with it: Your reps should get a sufficient inflow of new opportunities to have a steady number to work in their pipeline: (a) giving them enough opportunities to hit their number, but