This year has started off with a flurry of sales hiring, building on some pent-up demand and the desire to get back out and win some business. Sellers are in a position of power and getting multiple offers but don’t let the excitement to hire have you make some bad decisions. 

Inc. article Building a Sales Team? Avoid These 10 Deadly Mistakes shares some great insights but three stood out to me as top:

#2 Underutilizing comp plan – From a CEO’s toolkit, using the compensation plan as a way to drive strategic change often gets missed. Leaders course-correct regularly throughout the year, why not the comp plan? Companies that have figured out how to get their data and tech aligned have moved to a continuous planning mindset and are setting performance lifts from it. Forrester shared some great numbers in their ebook on the topic Unleash Your Growth Potential with Continous Planning.

#4 Not planning far enough in advance – This speaks to onboarding to full productivity. It is critical to get real data here and back that into your annual sales planning efforts to know your true capacity needs. Given the increase in efficiency from last year’s pandemic, what does that look like now, and do your models account for it?

#8 Buying tech for mgmt rather than sellers – They speak specifically to pipeline review and forecasting and the negative impact on data integrity, thus the accuracy but I believe the tech is too often point solutions that too often stand alone. They solve a problem but if they do not work with other tech or share data, often create extra steps. In many cases you can have it both ways, just need to really flush out more than just if the tool will solve the problem. 

Which ones do you feel are holding your sales org back?