Whether you are one of the 20,000 new tech start-ups in 2020 or run a business looking to scale, you will eventually have to generate more revenue tomorrow than you do today.
Early stage sales are likely to be made by the founding team, however this eventually means that you need to hire a sales person or sales team.
Many business owners from a non-sales background often worry about this stage of growth.
Common questions they ask themselves are:
- How do I ensure they look after my brand?
- What experience levels should I look for?
- How do I target them?
- Is there technology out there that can help me build a successful team?
If you have these questions then you will enjoy this interview with Jamie Hamer – Co-Founder & Commercial Director, React News.
Jamie was a co-founder of React News and led the growth of the sales team from inception, the first hire, until it numbered over 15.
We talk to Jamie about the following things:
- The importance of understanding your product’s value before you go to market
- Hiring sales people based on behaviours vs skills
- How he leveraged personality assessments to hire right person first time
- How data from Cognism helped his sales team know who were the key players in their target markets
- The importance of a documented sales process to measure successes and failures
- How technology helped him improve the quality and quantity of business development activity.
Key Takeaways:
- Choosing a B2B niche based on research and customer demand
- Why recruiting for behaviours is key when recruiting your first sales team
- How to build out leadership team to run the sales function
- Why technology can help a new sales team over perform.
About Jamie Hamer:
Jamie’s career is defined by his love of learning and self-improvement. Moving beyond books and podcasts, Jamie has set himself the challenge of interviewing 100 sales leaders to learn their tips for sales and leadership success. Which he has turned into a book called Exceptional Sales Career.
His sales career started selling educational book’s door to door, before moving on to the higher margin world of B2B sales.
In 2019, He started React News with 3 other founders. His goal was to build a paid for news and insights platform for the real estate platform. After 24 months of scaling quickly, React News was purchased by Green Street.
Alongside his responsibilities at React News, he is an active angel investor and currently researching his latest book.
Jamie’s Dream App:
Jamie would love two things from his dream app.
1: For there to be a single place where all his training content, and “best of” call recordings could be located and provide this content to his new sales consultants at the time that knowledge is needed.
2: The ability for a sales person’s effectiveness on phone calls to be rated and critiqued in the moment by an AI coach.
Jamie’s Business Book Recommendation:
- Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t – Simon Sinek
- Flash Boys – Martin Lewis
