Technofile Europe: Don't build a sales force before you're ready

Good post here from Andy Blackstone about how to build a professional sales force in a founder-led business. It's a good cheat-sheet for entrepreneurs to make sure they've covered the bases before going out and hiring a lot of sales people.

As growth equity investors focused on bootstrapped entrepreneurs, we have learned this lesson the hard way over the years. Too often we invested in ramping up sales too quickly, before we had distilled the founders' sales magic into a manual that could be taught to a new sales force. This is probably the second-fastest way to burn cash (the first being buying traffic for a new dot-com).

Founders who sell are the best evangelists for a new product, and when they do it well it can create entirely new markets. But translating that ability into a scalable sales model is hard, and you can't really cut corners. So take the time to understand why customers buy and how to standardise your 'sales craft' before you determine the profile of sales people you need to recruit. This is especially true for entrepreneurs who take in outside capital to take the next step in building a sales force.