In 2011, we started a ‘Sales As A Service’ business called ElasticSales. The vision for Elastic was to build a massive sales infrastructure and empower startups and companies around the world to tap into that infrastructure in order to scale their sales efforts.
Think Amazon AWS for Sales.
Our mission was simple: never again should a great company fail because of a lack of sales.
We started hiring top sales talent, opening offices and signing up clients within the first few weeks. It was clear that there was massive demand for this service out there. Much more than we were capable of handling at the time. We didn’t have a huge sales team with hundreds of reps readily available. We needed to hire more people, fast.
However, there was no experienced VP of Sales around to manage this. We had to figure things out on the fly. How could we quickly scale our sales team and get all those new reps productive in minimum time?
We didn’t know ‘the right way’ to do this. We didn’t know what the best practices for sales hiring were or how to properly recruit, interview and train sales reps.
So we hacked the whole process and discovered new shortcuts to building a high-performance sales team. What started out as a motley assortment of tactics over time evolved into a more coherent system for hiring sales reps.
- Written for founders and sales managers leading their own sales teams because hiring a VP of Sales doesn’t always grow sales.
- How to recruit, interview, and hire the best candidates specific insights and practical steps to filling your candidate pipeline.
- A playbook for onboarding sales reps quickly and effectively includes an hourly schedule for fully onboarding sales reps in just 4 weeks.
The Sales Hiring Playbook
by Steli Efti (PDF) – 111 pages
