Startup CXO

Chapter 61Scaling Your Team Through Culture

Your team will scale naturally as you grow and by that I mean, you'll hire people based on what works for your company, and based on the growth rate of the company. When I think of scaling your team, I think of creating the type of sales culture that will allow your team to scale—not so much just hiring more people, but hiring people who make a big impact in the company in the way that fits with your company values. If you build the right sales culture first, then you can spend your time proactively building the pipeline rather than reactively solving internal problems. You create this impactful sales organization through your management, your systems, and your culture. The sales culture is the essence of a good sales organization and that means having an organization where everyone is holding themselves and one another to really high standards of performance and accountability.

There are a lot of companies that subscribe to a productive competition mindset as a way to motivate salespeople, to focus them on getting their quota, making their numbers. That works to some extent, but it's more effective to reward performance through recognition. For example, it's possible to create standard awards for recognition and even crowdsourcing awards among the team so that you are recognizing performance, like biggest deal to close, breakthrough in a new industry, whatever it might be. This is different than making it competitive among the sales ...