How We Hired Inbound Sales Reps | Ep. 26

I’ve talked before about the importance for founders to be the company’s first sales reps. It gives you an in-depth understanding of your sales cycle, your customers, your unique value proposition, and your place in the market. These are all things you need to figure out before you hire your first salesperson. And that’s what my co-founder, Kevin, and I did for the first two years of Proposify. But as the company grew, other aspects of the business required more of our attention. We also realized that since we don’t sell high-priced enterprise plans, we needed to be hyper cognizant of acquisition cost — will the customers we acquire be worth the cost of a sales reps? So we concentrated on inbound marketing - SEO, blogging, podcasting, social, and other inbound channels. While not a quick win, this approach worked well for us (and still does!), driving lots of leads. More leads than Kevin and I could ever talk to on our own. Two factors motivated us to think seriously about hiring a sales team: In 2016 we launched our “enterprise” plan called “Trenta” to appeal to companies with larger sales teams. Our support staff were regularly asked by new trial signups for one-on-one demos. We encouraged many of them to watch our videos or webinars, but still the requests came in and they facilitated as many as they could So Kevin and I decided to experiment with hiring inbound sales reps to see if they could follow up on our leads, qualify those who might be a fit for the larger plans, and close those deals. Article: https://www.proposify.biz/blog/how-to-hire-inbound-sales-reps Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2clJVNarvY8