How to build a sales team:

To start, a note of credit to the great Jim Herbold from Box.

He was my hands-on mentor for many years. Bolt sales would not exist without him.

Much of this is learned wisdom from him.

Ok, here we go 👇

1/ Close the first deals yourself, end-to-end

It’s impossible to now how to construct a sales team without first knowing how to conduct a sale.

Some founders try to hire before this step.

Doing so is skipping a crucial step of getting intimate with your product and customers.

2/ Document the learnings

At Bolt we wrote a 50+ page sales playbook which included
- Email scripts
- Cold call scripts
- FAQ and Rebuttals
- Negotiating tactics
- Closing tactics

With this handy, new salespeople ramp 3X-5X faster.

3/ When ready, always hire in pairs

If you hire just one salesperson and they can’t sell your product, you’re in trouble.

Why?

You don’t know if the problem is the person or the product!

Hire two, and you have a point of comparison.