I recently ran across an article called The Sales Learning Curve from the Harvard Business Review that I thought had a lot of relevance for startup sales. It’s from a July 2006 issue and it’s written by Mark Leslie and Charles A. Holloway. They talk about the need to start with a small sales force that can figure out the sales methodology first. Only when the sales cycle is well understood should a startup ramp up a sales force.
Here is a quote from the article:
“When a company launches a new product, the temptation is to immediately ramp up sales force capacity to acquire customers as quickly as possible. Yet in our 25 years of experience with start-ups and new-product introductions, we’ve found that hiring a full sales force too fast just leads the company to burn through cash and fail to meet revenue expectations. Before it can sell the product efficiently, the entire organization needs to learn how customers will acquire and use it, a process we call the sales learning curve.”
Here is a link to the article:
http://www.signallake.com/innovation/SalesLearningCurve.pdf
Hope this helps,
Steve
innovatorstraction
