During a company's early days, product is king. As momentum builds and the business gets prepared to accelerate its growth, though, the focus shifts to assembling a high-impact sales team. At the helm of the scale-up initiative and most integral to its success is the head of sales. Because of the position's immense responsibility, hiring a head of sales can be a daunting task, especially for a young founder or inexperienced CEO.
In an article published by Forbes, Dev Ittycheria, a partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Greylock Partners, outlines a number important factors to consider when searching for a head of sales to lead your scale-up efforts. Driving many of these factors are two personality traits that could indicate a candidate has what it takes to thrive in your company's competitive, results-driven environment:
People-focused
While sales leaders' primary responsibility is selling their products, it is not their only one. Also important is their ability to build an effective sales department to support their vision. This starts with their penchant to attract and recruit other talented salespeople to join their staff. The best sales leaders also excel when it comes to developing talent once it joins their team, Whether through motivational techniques or investing in product and sales effectiveness training (or, ideally, both), top-notch heads of sales know how to help their employees become more productive.
Forward-thinking
The most effective sales leaders can make accurate forecasts about their future sales performance. In being honest and forward-thinking, heads of sales provide forecasts whose reliable data is much more useful to a company than those who cannot predict performance accurately. Similarly, sales executives must be able to think beyond the current quarter or month's goals and develop and stick to a plan that will ensure longer-term success.
Working with a retained executive recruiting firm can give your organization an advantage in engaging with top sales talent across the globe. In fact, YES Partners has already successfully placed a number of sales leaders. Learn more here!
Finding people is easy, but finding the RIGHT people is not. YES Partners helps companies FIND the right people – for all company functions, across many industries and globally.
