CEO: We need to grow our revenue faster.

CFO: We need to hire more salespeople.

Me: Are your AE's already at capacity? 

CEO: We need better salespeople.

CFO: Yeah they barely hit quota.

Me: So you need better salespeople or more salespeople? 

CFO: The more we hire, the more good ones we'll find.

Me: The more you hire, the more cash you'll burn and people you'll fire.

CEO: We need to show that we have a plan for growth.

Me: You also need to have a plan that works. 

Me: Have you considered investing in training, development, and operations to maximize the performance and capacity of the existing team?

CFO: We need to invest in revenue producing roles.

Me: Didn't you just mention your AE's aren't producing enough revenue?

CEO: Good point. 

Me: Any problem you have now gets multiplied by every AE you add.

Me: Your objective is to get to the point where hiring AE's adds positive benefits, right now hiring more will do the opposite, so it's not a plan for growth, it's a plan for cash burn and chaos. 

CEO: That actually makes sense.

Me: McDonald's didn't become a franchise until the flagship location was running like a well oiled machine. 

CFO: We need to build our flagship AE team.

Me: Bingo.

Think of your first 10 salespeople as your flagship location of a future franchise and don't consider expanding until you've perfected every aspect of their onboarding, training, process, performance, and operations. 

Then think of the next 10 salespeople as your "franchise test" which is where you go through the process of proving you can duplicate it all. This will require new levels of leadership and solving a bunch of new problems for the first time. You're laying the groundwork for being able to do this many times over. 

From here you can push to 30 salespeople (3 teams of 10). If you can do this successfully, your objective is once again to get the team to full capacity, and then (and only then) does it make sense to scale into 50-100+ salespeople. 

Everything in stages; never level up before perfecting the current stage.

Happy Selling,