Building an inside sales team means creating a team that can sell remotely with the same depth of engagement as a face-to-face sale — minus the hours lost to travel and late meetings. It sounds too good to be true, but it isn’t. It is, however, a genuinely complex undertaking.

Many CEOs and sales leaders assume that building a successful team is simply a matter of hiring experienced salespeople and letting them “do what they do best”. What they miss is that the team is built from the top down, and that it only works when the priorities are set before the first hire.

Design your sales process first

Before you start recruiting, define what your sales process looks like. It sets out the stages every rep moves through and the approach they take with a prospect, from first contact to closed deal.

For example: Prospecting › Contact and qualification › Research › Presentation › Handling objections › Close › Onboarding and expansion

Whatever the stages, what matters is that the process is systematic, logical, repeatable and proven to work.

Segment the team

However small your sales team, segmentation pays off. It lets reps shape the message and tailor the entire approach to the contacts in a given segment.

You can segment by:

• Company size, measured by headcount or revenue
• Industry or market
• Geography, time zone or language
• Any other criteria that matter in your business

Plan compensation and commissions early

Compensation already? Yes — it matters that much. Every department contributes to the company’s success, but none is as directly tied to revenue as sales. Commission plans exist to link performance to concrete rewards and point the team at equally concrete outcomes.

A few guidelines for striking the right balance between base salary and variable pay:

• Experienced, specialised reps expect a stronger base salary.
• If your process is highly specific and you plan to develop less experienced talent, a lower base with heavier commission can work.
• Reps working long sales cycles need a fair base — they cannot live on commission alone.
• Lower commission rates make sense when margins are thin and the model is subscription-based.

Create the sales playbook

If a sales rep has ever surprised you with how quickly and precisely they answered your question, chances are they were working from a sales playbook. As the name suggests, it holds the company’s rules of the game: processes, strategies, documentation and resources that cut response time and improve accuracy.

When the whole team works from the same playbook, the customer experience becomes consistent — and sales become scalable.

Define the salesperson profile

A single bad hire can damage an entire financial year. The way to reduce that risk is to know exactly what you are looking for, which should already be clearer after designing the process, segmenting the team and writing the playbook. Build a detailed profile for the role:

• What will this person actually do day to day?
• Which skills does the role require?
• Which behaviours, attitudes or traits are associated with strong performance in it?

Then design a hiring funnel that surfaces the things a CV won’t show: whether they solve problems, whether they enjoy learning, their work ethic, how they operate in a team and how they fit your culture.

Plan onboarding and prepare for ramp-up

Contrary to what you often hear, selling is not an innate gift reserved for a lucky few. It is a skill that anyone willing to learn can develop. That is why onboarding matters: it is what gets new reps productive quickly.

Use that time to teach the sales process, the approach and the playbook — but also to let them learn the product properly. Expecting someone to sell well without knowing the solution inside out, and the competition alongside it, is wishful thinking.

Many companies feel they have no time to lose and push new hires into the field immediately. It usually backfires: skipping training lengthens ramp-up, the time a new rep needs to perform the role well and independently.

Building a team is more than reading CVs

For all the focus on skills and profiles, one thing is easy to forget, and this quote captures it well:

“Hiring the right people takes time, the right questions, and a healthy dose of curiosity. What do you think is the most important factor when building a team? For us, it’s the personality.” — Richard Branson

If this sounds like a daunting task, that is because anything new comes with a learning curve. Working with an inside sales specialist is a way to shorten it, whether you are creating the function from scratch or adapting an existing team to the model.

Grow with Digital Selling

Digital Selling works with Growth Intelligence: strategy, managed execution, training and technology in a single partner, with AI built into the operation. We act as an extension of your team — with shared accountability for targets, an explicit SLA and a real-time dashboard — and with local teams in every market where we operate.

Predictable growth isn’t bought, it’s built. Talk to our team and see how managed execution fits your numbers.

Intelligence to grow without borders.