The "Why"

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Having partnered with venture capital and private equity firms and a number of their portfolio companies in recent years, a consistent theme has emerged as it relates to the challenges which these transitional companies encounter as they seek to scale their sales organizations.

While these portfolio companies have obviously had a sufficient degree of success with their original sales strategies, messaging, structure, corporate sales efforts, etc. to achieve the exit objectives of their initial investors, many lack a clear definition of the strategic modifications which will be necessary to accommodate the accelerated growth which they intend to become positioned for.

At best, this situation can lead companies to make only moderately educated guesses regarding the sales processes, sales talent, sales targeting and market messaging which they hope will support their next level of growth and then place large, often irreversible bets upon their next generation sales structure.  At worst, many firms are so intimidated at the prospect of placing the wrong bets in this critical arena that they encounter a level of paralysis which delays action and negatively impacts their opportunity to scale in a manner which fulfills their investment thesis.

There are no magic bullets as it relates to a company’s ability to define how best to scale their sales strategy.  Every organization has challenges discerning how to leverage the sales success which they’ve enjoyed with individual facilities into the corporate sales arena, how to select and train the sales personnel who will take their organization to the next level, how to refine the sales messaging with which those professionals will be armed, how to train those individuals and structure their geographies, how to measure their performance and forecast their results, how to effectively design their commission programs, etc.

The investment firms with which we’ve partnered have come to realize that an experienced sales and sales management professional is required to ensure that as much strategic intelligence as can be known is leveraged immediately and that the strategic sales issues which require an element of experimentation in the market are addressed in an accurate, complete and expeditious manner.

Unfortunately, the hiring of this type of resource can become an “unknown bet” in itself due to the associated expense, the uncertainty of the required skill set and the unqualified return on the investment made in the identified scaling strategies.

To address the dichotomy which results from the need to create and deploy new sales strategies, structures and processes in current and expansion markets without bearing undue risk relative to the expenses incurred in hiring the necessary sales leadership, Sales Design & Delivery was created to allow growth companies an enhanced ability to:

• Rapidly go to market with new messaging.
• Test new markets and messaging while driving corporate sales revenue via our personal “bag carrying” activities.
• Recruit and develop internal sales talent and enhance their ability to enter the corporate sales arena (and elevate their point of call).
• Design and deploy sales training, sales force automation and sales performance management systems.
• Utilize the informatics which result from the above activities to define a clear strategy for the recruitment of new sales personnel, the design of field territories, compensation plans, etc.