The Sales Influencer Series Presents: Rex Biberston

Welcome to Episode 33 of the Sales Influencer Series, a podcast featuring the brightest minds in B2B sales and marketing.

Welcome back. In today's episode, we welcome Rex Biberston, B2B startup and high-growth sales strategist and operations consultant at RexB.co. Rex joins us today to discuss the #1 mistakes that sales leaders at startup, SMB and high-growth B2B companies will make this year in how they manage their people, their processes, and their platforms

Ep. 33: The #1 Mistakes Young B2B Sales Teams Make

Interview Topics

Introductions. 0:00 - 6:12.

Rex has a strong background in technology sales, specifically for high-growth SaaS companies. He fell into sales by accident, working for a young startup and helping it scale rapidly right out of college. He's since held leadership positions at InsideSales.com and NorthStar Systems, before transitioning full-time into a B2B sales consulting practice.

The focus of our conversation will be to identify the #1 mistake that Rex has seen startup, SMB, and high-growth B2B companies consistently make in how they manage their sales people, processes and platforms, respectively. In a few weeks, we'll be hosting a follow-up webinar with Rex focusing on the #1 best decisions that these companies can make across these 3 areas.

#1 Mistake For Growing B2B Sales Orgs: Personnel. 6:12 - 19:43. (Jump)

Almost universally, the biggest mistake that young B2B companies make with their personnel deals with hiring. Namely, focusing on rapidly increasing headcount without having any philosophy or core strategy behind why their hiring. Thanks to external pressures and current dynamics in young B2B sales organizations - where rapid hiring signals strength, prestige, and industry notice - companies almost always dive headfirst into hiring high numbers of salespeople way too early.

The problem with doing so is that increasing headcount will inevitably exacerbate and magnify any existing problems, inefficiencies, or blind spots within your sales force. Hiring more salespeople often does nothing to solve them, typically costs a staggering amount of money, and sets companies back massively. The problem: many B2B companies are founded by people with little to no sales experience, who follow a "move fast and break things" / "publish and iterate" mentality, and follow instructions either implicit or overt to start hiring lots of people to sell their product, even though they don't know what they're truly looking for in a sales hire. A lot of young companies also have a hard time communicating culture and expectations in their job postings.

#1 Mistake For Growing B2B Sales Orgs: Process. 19:43 - 24:47. (Jump)

The top mistake growing sales organizations will make with their processes is failing to document what they're doing properly. If they get hit by a bus, who takes over for them? If they're trying to scale hiring, how do they efficiently communicate internal processes to sales? And beyond that, they're not experimenting and they're accepting mediocrity.

The challenge most growing sales organizations face is figuring what to document and how to do so efficiently. One example is by simply noting important, repeatable things within your sales process that will also help you in your day-to-day sales workflow. For example: create a Google Doc and list the top objections you face every day from prospects. Or create a master shared document or spreadsheet detailing what your current client list looks like and key contract and sales process details associated with each one. Example: length of sales cycle, inbound point, contract value, main pain point, involved decision-makers, and so forth. The cloud makes all this as easy as it's ever been for people to access.

#1 Mistake For Growing B2B Sales Orgs: Platforms. 24:47 - 30:26. (Jump)

The biggest mistake that growing B2B sales teams will make in terms of their technology is in leaning too heavily on tools and adopting too many extraneous software products early on in their company lifecycle. There are thousands of different sales tools out there for every sliver of the sales funnel. Rather than streamline the process with tools, they're actually bloating it.

Sales organizations need to look at each tool and perform a simple test: what is my time and/or financial investment with this and what's my return? If you're managing 11 vendor relationships, that's a huge time suck. If your reps are getting onboarded and going through rigorous software training before they can even start selling, that's also a red flag.

How to Contact and Follow Rex. 30:26 - 33:04. (Jump)

Connect with Rex on LinkedIn, shoot him an email or visit his website to get in touch. For a limited time, Rex is offering a free 7-day cold email training course, guaranteed to help young sales teams develop better cold email copy. If you're a growing B2B company that needs serious help figuring out how to scale your company, don't hesitate to contact him.

The Sales Influencer Series Library

To check out further episodes and see why CloserIQ has ranked the Sales Influencer Series as one of the very best sales podcasts of 2016, just click on the links below.

Episode 1. John Barrows

Episode 2. Lori Richardson

Episode 3. Max Altschuler

Episode 4. Matt Heinz

Episode 5. Mark Leslie

Episode 6. Kyle Porter

Episode 7. Jon Bradford

Episode 8. Eks Anderson

Episode 9. Matt Hottle

Episode 10. Heather Morgan

Episode 11. Ilan Ferdman

Episode 12. Ryan Jenkins