I was recently catching up with some friends of mine who run an IT services firm and discussing the progress they have made towards hiring sales people. I thought my discussion with them warranted another article for those of you who are still following this space. The scope of this article is IT services firms looking to hire sales folks for the purpose of business development in their chosen markets.

These guys mentioned that they are thinking of hiring this guy from Pune (they are themselves in Noida). He seems to have done well with another company and his specialty is in developing virgin markets, i.e. he would identify a market, and develop it from scratch. I thought this was a very risky approach, this seems like a long haul where these guys are likely to lose patience in 6 months. After all, when you hire people to sell, you expect well, sales!

Lets break down the sales process a bit. First you make a list of target companies. Then you try to gain entry through some sponsor and try to present to a power sponsor – somebody senior enough with a budget. Then you make a presentation, try and do a pilot and win some work. Now what I have seen is the most difficult part of this process for a company sitting out of India is to gain entry to a power sponsor. It’s very hard to get even a little mind share from somebody senior, specially sitting out of India. In my opinion, this is the part that a company should try and solve by hiring sales folks.

If you work with this theory, then ideally your sales people should have an existing network. They should be able to put you in front of power sponsors in several companies very quickly. Whether the sale gets completed is a different matter and depends on your product, positioning, competition etc. But you can refine that as you pitch to different people. To me, this is the number one (by far) goal of a sales person – to put you in front of lots of power sponsors in your target market. There is other stuff like following up on pricing, creating a senior channel and other stuff, but this is the main.

Taking a cue from this, I think the right profile for these people is then experienced folks (15-20 years ideally) sitting in a local market, which is rich with your target companies. It could be the Bay Area, New York, London or something else. If they have been operating in that local area for long in the sales space, chances are that they would know enough people locally to put you in front of them. These are expensive people (150K + expenses + commission) but if you can find the right person, they pay for themselves many times over within a very short period. The other opportunity these days is to try and find a significant part-time arrangement with one of these guys – an experiment worth doing for the budget constrained.

As far as the guy in Pune trying to enter a virgin market through a new strategy, well.. I wouldn’t count on him to deliver my sales targets!

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