COVER

TABLE OF CONTENT
CHAPTER 1: Sales In Digital Era

CHAPTER 2: Spot Shining Talents, Build Your Sales Team

CHAPTER 3: Building Sales Engine That Works For your Business

CHAPTER 4: Get The Deals

WRAP UP
GUIDE TO BUILDING YOUR SALES TEAM & PIPELINE

CHAPTER 1

SALES IN
DIGITAL ERA
Digital technology may has not yet reached its peak.
However, the impact of its development brings
substantial improvements in nearly every aspects in
life. Sales is one of the aspects which heavily
influenced by the advancements of digital
technology. By harnessing the power of information
technology, sales processes are made easier than
ever before.

One noticeable impact of digital technology in sales
processes is usage of social media as a
lead-generating engine in a company. Statista,
online statistics website, predicted there are roughly
2.55 billion social media users in the world currently.
Additionally, social media influenced 78% of
consumers’ behavior and buying decision making
process (PrincewaterhouseCooper, 2015). This
shows how vastly available the opportunity of
expanding sales in digital era is.
Several ways social media is useful in maximizing
sales potential:
● Expanding market share of product/service
● Generating market data and consumer
insights
● Proper implementation of digital strategies
are proven to increase purchase
In the following chapters we’ll guide you on
building, maintaining and improving your sales
team productivity.

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GUIDE TO BUILDING YOUR SALES TEAM & PIPELINE

SALES VS MARKETING

Before going further into our core

topic, let’s define the individual
scoop of sales and marketing.
Some companies use those two
terms interchangeably, but
technically speaking each has
different role and contribution in
company.

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GUIDE TO BUILDING YOUR SALES TEAM & PIPELINE

DEFINING MARKETING

Marketing is defined as using scalable

strategies to enhance value of product or
service to customer. Generally speaking,
marketing focuses on 4Ps (Product, Price, Place
and Promotion).

And to succeed in digital era, companies need

to diversify, modify, and optimize their
marketing strategy over time. Contributing to
bigger brand awareness, engagement and
leads from multiple channels, both offline and
online.

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GUIDE TO BUILDING YOUR SALES TEAM & PIPELINE

DEFINING SALES

Sales function in companies focuses on

strategically approaching potential leads or
customers in order to achieve sales target.

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GUIDE TO BUILDING YOUR SALES TEAM & PIPELINE

SALES VS MARKETING
Aspects Sales Marketing
Scope Attempting to convince potential Investigating market condition and its
customers to purchase products / aspects such as advertising, public
services. relations, customer satisfaction and
service, also supporting sales team in
attracting potential customers into the
sales pipeline
Working Process In most cases, sales adhere one to Analyzing product performance (market
one method. share, sales achievement, brand
awareness,etc) and making necessary
adjustments to meet customer’s needs.

Target Meeting expected sales numbers Achieving product-market fit

Priority Selling company product or service Establish long term relationship with
customers

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GUIDE TO BUILDING YOUR SALES TEAM & PIPELINE

PROBLEMS OF MANAGING
SALES TEAM NOWADAYS
Finding excellent sales associates is a big deal to businesses as good sales people is
limitedly available in the market and can be quite tricky to spot. The challenge doesn’t
stop with finding, but also maintaining good sales associates.

Hubspot stated that the biggest challenge for companies in 2018 is not losing clients, but
losing sales team member. Several factors that stimulate higher turnover rate are:

● Company Culture and Management

Company culture affects and is reflected by how
the company solve problems, cooperate to
achieve goals, prioritize, and treat employees.
Good leadership and proper management can
nurture and empower sales team to achieve
company’s missions and goals

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GUIDE TO BUILDING YOUR SALES TEAM & PIPELINE

PROBLEMS OF MANAGING
SALES TEAM NOWADAYS
● Ambiguous Career Path
Growth and career development are important
drivers of millennial employees. As an employee, it
is important to know and locate one’s state in
career journey and navigate through desired
career path. Absence of career path in current
company may strongly lead to bright employees
leaving and finding better opportunities
elsewhere.

● Competitive Remuneration Package and

Incentive across Industries
You are not the only company who need good
quality sales associates. While other companies
are raising their bar to incentivise
good-performing sales associates, you can’t do
nothing and let your sales team be lured to jump
to other ships.

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GUIDE TO BUILDING YOUR SALES TEAM & PIPELINE

CHAPTER 2

SPOT SHINING TALENTS,

BUILD YOUR SALES TEAM
Right Individuals for Your Sales Team
Few tips to help you finding best sales troops for your business:

● Know When to Recruit

Before deciding to hire new sales associates, consider these
conditions:
❖ Customer Lifetime Value (values generated by customers
during engagement with your business/products). Make sure
you have considerable amount of customer lifetime value
before hiring new sales associate.
❖ Conversion rate of customers. Sales associates are needed
when you have potential customers that already decide to use
your product or service in a long term relationship.
❖ Complexity of Selling Process. If your sales process requires lots
of stages/funnel/time, your sales associates will not be able to
handle too many clients. You certainly need more sales
associates to handle more clients.

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GUIDE TO BUILDING YOUR SALES TEAM & PIPELINE

SPOT SHINING TALENTS,

BUILD YOUR SALES TEAM
● Be clear about job description and requirements for your
sales associates
Define specific and clear job description for your sales
troops. It helps increasing your chance to meet your
shining salesperson fast and you’ll be exempted from
spending too much time processing unsuitable
candidates.
Skills needed to perform sales job is different by company
but these qualities are generally required by most
employers:

❖ Hard Skills
knowledge of common softwares (related to
business and sales activities), policy knowledge,
product knowledge, sales presentation and others.

❖ Soft Skills
responsible, adaptable, empathetic, passion,
ambitious, self motivated, goal-oriented and others.

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GUIDE TO BUILDING YOUR SALES TEAM & PIPELINE

SPOT SHINING TALENTS,

BUILD YOUR SALES TEAM
● Experienced or freshies? You decide.
There are a lot of benefits hiring experienced salespeople: no need
complicated orientation, training, they might contribute to
improving your current sales processes. However, be ready to
spend higher rate for their experiences.

On the other hand, beginners are typically open to lower pay. But
you need to provide more comprehensive orientation and training
at first. Also, it may take some time to see them performing at full
capacity.

● Pick Your Right Hiring Platforms

From job portals, headhunter service, to talent marketplace, try
different channels to increase your pool of applicants. After some
time you will find your preferred hiring channels where you’ll most
likely find your next candidates.

Job portal is good to generate quantity, headhunter is for the

convenience, and talent marketplace is for speed, quality, and
flexibility since you can always curate and directly connect to the
candidates through talent marketplace, so you can hire faster!

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GUIDE TO BUILDING YOUR SALES TEAM & PIPELINE

SALES TEAM STRUCTURE

One must consider solid structure for its sales
team to nurture team efficiency and
effectiveness. Your company’s vision should be
reflected in your sales team structure too. Try
these tips below will help you to build solid sales
team structure.

● For first members, recruit potential

candidates that you believe will lead your
bigger team in the future. Spot and recruit
mastermind of your sales team whom you
can mentor and teach directly. Supervisors
and team member can follow after.
● Create measured recruitment process. A
measured recruitment process provides
data you need to track and learn from the
success and failures of candidates you
have processed in the past.
Sales team structure can be so complicated and
tricky thing to begin with. But, if you do those
three steps above perfectly, you will build a good
sales team structure. So, how exactly a sales
structure should look like? Here’s a sample of
sales steam structure cited from Sales Hacker.
Note:
● SDR: Sales Development Rep, responsible for
communication opening with client.
● MDR: Market Development Rep, responsible to
follow up leads.
● AE: Account Executive, responsible to develop SQL
(Sales Qualified Lead)
● ONB: Onboarder, responsible to integrate client.
● CSM: Customer Success Manager, responsible to
achieve repetitive application of the service
● AM: Account Manager, responsible to increase
profit by developing the opportunities of upsell.

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GUIDE TO BUILDING YOUR SALES TEAM & PIPELINE

SALES TEAM STRUCTURE

Above diagram shows the complete funnel of sales development from left to right.
First process is to find prospects and communicate with them. This stage is done
by MDR and SDR. In addition, the those departments also execute MQL (Marketing
Qualified Lead - an estimation method that shows the probability of getting new
customer) and SQL (Sales Qualified Lead - the expected customer has been
researched well and ready to proceed to next stage).

The SQL and signed contract is the duty of AE and ONB. Then the business
relationship between company and customer, MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue - a
scalable tool that helps you to to measure the predicted and recurring income of
your existing business relationship). Those stages are done by ONB, CSM, AM and
ADR.

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GUIDE TO BUILDING YOUR SALES TEAM & PIPELINE

CHAPTER 3

BUILDING SALES ENGINE

THAT WORKS FOR YOUR
BUSINESS
Building Sales Pipeline
So what is sales pipeline? And why it’s so
important for your business?

Sales pipeline can be defined as a set of

certain sequence that embodies every stage
of sales process. This sequence enables
business owner to keep up to date with each
deal’s status.

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GUIDE TO BUILDING YOUR SALES TEAM & PIPELINE

BUILDING SALES ENGINE

THAT WORKS FOR YOUR
BUSINESS
So, what does it take to build sales pipeline? HubSpot
suggests these following steps in order to build your
sales pipeline.

● Determine stages of sales cycle

● Recognize quantity of possible opportunities
which are normally proceed to the next stage.
● Doing backward work to find out how many
opportunities are needed at all stages to fulfill
your profit targets.
● Identify the characteristics of opportunities which
commonly appeared as it indicates possibilities
to convert sales stages.
● Establish proper sales process and improve
based on current situation and condition.

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GUIDE TO BUILDING YOUR SALES TEAM & PIPELINE

BUILDING SALES ENGINE

THAT WORKS FOR YOUR
BUSINESS
What goals, metrics or KPIs should be implemented?

● Specific goals, metrics or KPIs (Key Performance Indicator) will

guide you to achieve company’s goals and target. Most
important metrics for each companies and products are
different according to their goals and focuses. In sales, typical
KPIs are:
○ Sales volume
○ Sales growth
○ New leads
○ Lead conversion Rate
○ Product Performance
○ Average Purchase Value
○ Customer retention

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GUIDE TO BUILDING YOUR SALES TEAM & PIPELINE

SALES ASSOCIATE
INTERVIEW GUIDE
Sales Associate Interview Guide
Getting a prolific salesperson most likely determined in the interview
stage. These following steps will guide you to do effective interview
that increase your chance to score best sales associates.

● First Interview Stage

Communication skills through email and verbal
communication by phone can help you to screen candidate’s
fit to the job.
● Second Interview Stage
This stage consist the practical abilities of potential candidate
such as doing sales presentation and practical sales. You
should be able to explain more detailed about the
responsibilities and circumstances of the job with candidate.
This will show you the potential candidate’s field capability.
● Third Interview Stage
Direct conversation is a best choice for this interview stage.
You can get to know the candidate better and measure
culture fit based on deeper, more detailed interview questions.

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GUIDE TO BUILDING YOUR SALES TEAM & PIPELINE

CHAPTER 4

GET THE DEALS

How Sales close Deals Faster

Closing deals finalizes all of your efforts

in scoring prospects. The faster you
close, the faster you can reach your
goals. According to HubSpot, there are
several sales closing techniques used
across industries.

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GUIDE TO BUILDING YOUR SALES TEAM & PIPELINE
GET THE DEALS
● The now or never close, this technique relies on
stimulating customer’s sense of urgency by
pushing prospects to purchase at that specific
time. In return, customers who close immediately
will get special benefits.
● The summary close, by using repetitive explanation
about the product or service, salesperson
emphasizes benefits and values of the product or
service.
● The sharp angle close, this technique uses
surprising approach on prospect’s demand
(normally about price reduction). Salesperson
agrees about price reduction, but stressing
contract deal immediately.
● The question close, several questions are
asked to to clarify with customers that the
product or service meet prospect’s needs.
● The assumptive close, Sales associates do
the pitch to customers by talking in positive
note to the customer from the beginning
as if they know prospects are going to take
the deal. This has to be supported with
good communication and presentation to
potential prospect.
● The take away close, by removing some
features or services from your product and
reducing prices, prospects may instead
want more of the incremental features
badly.
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GUIDE TO BUILDING YOUR SALES TEAM & PIPELINE

GET THE DEALS

Sales closing techniques mentioned can be
combined with following steps by Close.io, in order
to close deals faster.

● Accurately qualify your prospects

In order to qualify the potential prospect, you have
to do preliminary research about the prospect. If
the prospect is more likely to become customer,
you can close the deal faster.
● Spot the decision maker and promptly commence
conversation
Deals can be closed faster if you relate with the
decision maker. So, you have to make an approach
to the decision maker and start the conversation
promptly.
● Emphasize the product and additional solution for
prospect’s needs
You must show the advantages of your product
and service to your customer. Particularly, it should
match and offer solution for customer’s needs and
problems.
● Overcome prospect’s objection
You may face objection from the prospects, it’s
normal. However, you still have to figure out how to
handle the objection. You should handle the
objection by persuasive ways such as shows the
advantages of your product or service.
● Ask for the deal
First, you must decide when is the proper time to
ask for the deal. Indeed, you must finish your pitch
and notice the prospect is likely to become new
customer.

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GUIDE TO BUILDING YOUR SALES TEAM & PIPELINE

WRAP UP
Digitalization in almost every aspect of life isn’t a
new challenge. on the other hand, it can be
substantially significant for business, as it does in
sales. The application of digital technology in
sales should be supported by prolific salesperson.

By hiring right salesperson salesperson, you can

establish solid sales team structure that support
your sales process and help you to achieve your
sales goals.

Still looking for the right candidates that fits

perfectly on your company? Having hard time to
find one? Relax, we can help you! Feel free to chat
with us, psst, it’s free! Click here now!

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