Recruiting Salespeople: The Death Of A Sales Plan

Overview: This case study is an amalgam of several true stories about technology-based companies that faced the challenge of recruiting salespeople and building a sales force to take on the giants in their industry. When a technology-based company is created, the first people to be hired are usually in engineering and manufacturing functions. These hires are nearly always experts in their respective fields. As the company develops a bit further, it hires more specialists. Finance is usually among the first, along with marketing and more experts in engineering and manufacturing. Given this pattern of starting the company with specialists, it certainly makes sense to continue the pattern by hiring the most experienced sales people one can find from the established industry leaders. However, for most technology-based startups, experienced salespeople fail to produce. Its seen that technology-based startups that grow and thrive usually develop their own sales force rather than hire from their major competitors. They look for bright, aggressive people whose careers are on the way up and who are entrepreneurial enough to make do without the entire support infrastructure of a bigger company.

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Format: HTML | Date: Jan 2003 | Pages: 1