Start a Successful Business by Colleen DeBaise

Author:Colleen DeBaise
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AMACOM
Published: 2018-01-21T05:00:00+00:00

<<<<<<CASE STUDY>>>>>>

FiveStars

VICTOR HO KNOWS A lot about hiring sales staff. Shortly after co-founding FiveStars, a loyalty program platform for small businesses, he made the decision to triple the startup’s sales team, hiring a hundred reps. The strategy paid off, with the San Francisco company adding merchants (its paying customers) five times faster than before.

Ho says he followed certain rules in order to build a sales force rapidly but successfully. For starters, he only hired reps whose experience specifically matched the job. He resisted the temptation to hire star reps whose skills didn’t fit, even if they had incredible track records.

“We don’t want to hire people and churn and burn them as other sales organizations sometimes do,” Ho explains. “We will pass on somebody if we don’t think we have the structure that will make that person successful.”

As FiveStars quickly grew, Ho says the company made training a priority, with top managers and founders spending two to four hours a month training new hires. “This investment in training to reduce ramp time is particularly valuable in sales,” Ho says.

The company also had some of its most experienced and successful sales reps devote all their time to training new hires. “Most companies wouldn’t tell their best sales reps to stop selling and focus on training,” Ho says. “But for us, making sure every individual rep is set up to succeed will end up being the best for the company.”

That’s also why the company only hired as many reps as it could train—the right way.

“When designing our onboarding system, we prioritized scaling our culture and keeping the training personalized and engaging,” Ho says. The company decided to limit each new “class” of sales reps to fifteen, to maintain an intimate feel.

Most companies would figure out how many people they wanted to hire and then design a training system around that target, he adds. But he believes cultivating the right experience is too important. “People are coming out of onboarding with solid knowledge of our founders, our products, and how we talk about the company,” he says.

As FiveStars expanded into new markets, Ho says he never wanted sales offices to feel cut off or removed from the center of the action. So, when the company opened a new sales office in Denver, one of the founders actually moved to Denver for six months to be on hand while the new office got up and running. “It’s a big mistake to treat a new office as an extension,” he says.

Thanks in part to an investment in its sales staff, FiveStars secured nearly $100 million in financing in 2016. It plans to use the funds to build its brand and business across the United States.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.