Of course, it depends on budget but it also depends on how close fit do you need with your industry / business. If budget is not an issue, I’d recommend going with headhunter. In the US, it is easy to get screwed up with well-spoken sales guys.

Look at headhunters who are specialising in sales space in the US –

1. Gogohire.com – small team / niche in tech sales in Bay area
2. A Sales Guy –  solid brand presence amongst sales guys because of founder – Jim Keenan
3. Bettsrecruiting.com – larger sales recruitment agency

However, if you’re going with outreach – I’d recommend looking for behaviours / characteristics that are applicable in most industries rather than a tight fit with your industry (hence competitors & partners).

I highly recommend two readings on startup sales hiring:

• A tactical hiring knowledge dump article by Steli Efti / Close.io
• Mark Roberge wrote a chapter on Sales Hiring in his book Sales Acceleration Formula. Absolute top read in sales acceleration if you’re soon going to be scaling sales teams.

Finally, if you interview sales guys, I’d recommend 2 ways to structure your interview process. First, get them to do a DISC profile test. It will help you get a strength – weakness map for sales hires. (free DISC test version available courtesy Tony Robbins on this page link). Second, follow a STAR methodology in sales interview process It is discussed in details in my interview with the behavioral expert – Val Gray, on sales hiring with 100% confidence. (STAR technique explained after 11min point).

Pipedrive is positioned around small sales team’s tool, for simple sales management processes. If you are adding people to customer success and pre-sales role but without much need to add ‘process trackability’ to their work on CRM, then pipedrive might continue to be a decent solution.

If you are creating high velocity sales team, with an intent to ramp-up time spent on phone (and recording conversations for feedback), then CRMs like HubSpot CRM (basic free for all users) and freshsales.io might do the trick. These CRMs allow you to call from the CRM itself without additional software. Hubspot also has auto-email cadence i.e. sending automated follow up emails and forgetting about reconnecting. Pipedrive might rely on integrations with 3rd party vendors to do calling and cadence based emails.

However, salesforce beats all CRMs in terms of flexibility to customize process per each department, reporting & dashboard customisation for your sales intelligence and integration with most apps in sales environment.

In short, if you’re a small team and a standard sales process across sales team – continue to work with Pipedrive. If you’re sales team is going into ‘marketing’ role with high-velocity selling, larger target audience & multiple touches – then it makes to automate some of that with marketing focused tools like Hubspot CRM. And if you’re getting ready for complex sales process and ready to propel your startup rocket – salesforce beats them all (but its expensive, unless you qualify for non-profit / social enterprise deal).

(Disclaimer: I’ve sold and used salesforce.com CRM as an employee. And now I use Hubspot CRM + Sales Tool as a small business owner)

If you’re small,  not just in terms of sales team size but also just kick-started sales process, daily scrum can help a lot in sales team enablement,  understanding rep’s challenge areas as well as establishing inter-team partnership to resolve sales challenges.

The purpose of the sales scrum should be to define & refine your sales process as well as get a hang of early indicators of success / failure.

Your sales scrum would be a success only if

1. You as the sales manager ( also called scrum-master) go in daily scrum with an intent to establish leading indicators of sales success that translate to actual sales at the end of the month. In other words, what does a successful sales rep do in a day or how he structures his day that leads to his/her better performance at the end of the month?You should be able to quantify those leading indicators after consistently following 15 min scrums daily for few weeks. It is imperative that at this stage you should also have somewhat loose definition for sales process (i.e. identify, connect, educate and close stages) to be able to track leading indicators like call, demos, meetings, etc that propel prospects through each of these stages.
2. Daily scrums play out on team-work i.e. inter-dependability of your sales reps on each other as well as with other departments. For example, bringing to table the marketing team to hear sales rep’s challenges on content -gap, can help align the two teams with respect to their priorities.
3. Keep daily reflection (led by reps) as part of the exercise i.e. evaluating what was good / bad and ugly from previous day’s work.

While scrums are high cadence meetings, (and spread across wide range of sales updates), there should be 3 other types of sales meetings with lower frequency but highly specific. These meetings are also ‘independent works’ of sales reps and does not need any input from external players. I’ve covered these 3 meeting types in first part of Productivity Plan blog posts.

1. Pipeline Update Meetings – with 100% focus on keeping pipeline of opportunities as accurate as possible. This meeting’s goal is to keep pipeline fresh & accurate. This meeting should be centered around questions like :
   • Which new opportunities have been added by sales rep in early stage of pipeline? (if the focus is on keeping rep generated pipeline healthy).
   • Which opportunities have not been touched in X days or there are overdue activities?
   • How updated are the figures in CRM – Amount, Stage, Close Date, Next Action?
   • Which sales reps do not have enough pipeline to give high confidence levels in their closure for the quarter? And what are they going to do about it?

2. Forecast Meeting should be monthly where sales managers runs each deal in forecast (i.e. closure within next 30-60 days) and further re-qualifies it from lens of 3 questions
   • Why will they buy or sign up? [clarify prospect’s need and impact of non-action with the rep]
   • Why will they buy or sign up right now? [clarify the prospect’s urgency to act]
   • Why will they buy or sign up with us? [clarify the differentiation that rep has managed to create with the prospect].

3. Sharing & Learning Meeting: which is a rep-driven meeting and focus on peer to peer learning. Hera are 50+ learning topics you could organize these meetings around.