How To Build A High-Performing Sales Team From Scratch

Building a high-performing sales team is one of the most transformative steps a founder or business owner can take. It’s where strategy meets execution. Done well, it becomes the revenue engine of your business. Done poorly, it becomes a revolving door of costly hires and missed targets.

Whether you’re launching a B2B tech scaleup, a DTC product line, or part of a hospitality leadership program looking to upskill teams, the fundamentals remain the same. This guide offers a practical, tactical, and strategic roadmap for building a resilient sales team that actually delivers.

Let’s break it down.

Start With Sales-Led Strategy, Not Just Hiring

Before recruiting a single salesperson, you need clarity on two things: your sales model and your ideal customer journey.

Ask yourself:

• Are you high-volume, low-ticket or high-ticket with longer cycles?
  
  
• Is your offer best suited to outbound, inbound, or channel-led sales?
  
  
• How do leads become customers, and what are the key drop-off points?
  
  

Define Your Sales Model

Your sales model determines the kind of team you’ll need. For example:

• A product-led SaaS company might rely heavily on inbound SDRs supported by a content engine.
  
  
• A consulting firm or business accelerator hub might need senior closers with credibility and long-cycle follow-up experience.
  
  

Define:

• Deal size
  
  
• Sales cycle length
  
  
• Key buyer personas
  
  
• Win rate targets
  
  
• Average touchpoints required to close
  
  

Build A Scalable Sales Process First

Your first hires will struggle if they’re walking into a blank slate. Create a basic playbook that outlines:

• Prospecting guidelines
  
  
• Objection-handling scripts
  
  
• Discovery call flow
  
  
• Proposal templates
  
  
• CRM pipeline stages
  
  

It doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to give direction.

Hire For Stage Fit, Not Just Experience

Salespeople who thrive in corporate machines often fail in startups and growing businesses. Why? They’re used to brand equity, established processes, and cushy inbound leads.

What To Look For Instead:

• Resilience: They can handle rejection and self-motivate.
  
  
• Curiosity: They ask smart questions and seek to understand the product deeply.
  
  
• Coachability: They respond to feedback, not defend their habits.
  
  
• Ownership mindset: They don’t wait for leads, they generate them.
  
  

Build Your Initial Team Around Roles Like:

• Founder-led sales: Essential in the beginning. No one can sell your product like you can.
  
  
• Sales Development Representative (SDR): Focused on lead qualification and booking meetings.
  
  
• Account Executive (AE): Closes deals, especially for B2B.
  
  
• Customer Success/Sales Hybrid: Ideal for subscription models or hospitality leadership program alumni who understand guest-centric selling.
  
  

Case Study: Cognism

B2B scaleup Cognism started with founder-led outbound before gradually building a team of SDRs and AEs. They used tight feedback loops to refine messaging and ramp performance, now employing over 300 people with a repeatable model. (Source: Cognism Blog)

Onboard With Intent And Intensity

Many sales teams fail before they’ve even started due to rushed or vague onboarding. You need a structured plan that gets new hires productive fast.

30-60-90 Day Onboarding Framework:

Days 1–30

• Deep product immersion
  
  
• Shadowing top performers (or founders)
  
  
• Basic CRM training
  
  
• Live call roleplay
  
  
• Intro to ICPs and buyer journeys
  
  

Days 31–60

• Handle live calls with supervision
  
  
• Own parts of the funnel (e.g. prospecting or closing)
  
  
• Weekly feedback sessions
  
  
• Test messaging variations
  
  

Days 61–90

• Full quota ownership
  
  
• Weekly reporting to manager
  
  
• Monthly performance review
  
  

Every hire should have clear KPIs tied to revenue outcomes or pipeline contribution. Tools like Notion or Trainual can structure onboarding efficiently, especially in hybrid or remote setups.

Build Culture Before Commission

In early-stage teams, culture trumps commission. A high-pressure comp plan won’t fix unclear goals or poor leadership.

Instead, create a culture around:

• Daily visibility: Stand-ups or Slack updates
  
  
• Radical transparency: Share wins and losses in public
  
  
• Shared language: Use defined sales stages and objection types
  
  
• Recognition: Celebrate inputs (calls made, meetings booked) as much as outcomes
  
  

This is especially crucial in sales teams spun out of business accelerator programmes, where culture must evolve from founder-driven to peer-led.

Use Sales Scorecards

Scorecards give your team clarity without micromanagement. Include metrics like:

• Outreach volume
  
  
• Qualified meetings
  
  
• Pipeline size
  
  
• Conversion rates
  
  

And qualitative ones:

• Product knowledge
  
  
• Team contribution
  
  
• Feedback implementation
  
  

Invest In Coaching, Not Just Tools

Sales tech is a force multiplier, but only if the fundamentals are solid. The best ROI often comes from live coaching, call reviews, and performance conversations.

What Coaching Looks Like Weekly:

• 1:1 call reviews with the team lead
  
  
• Objection-handling workshops
  
  
• Roleplays using real deals
  
  
• ‘Win/loss’ retrospectives
  
  

Case Study: Juro

The legaltech startup Juro embedded sales coaching into their growth plan early. They prioritised peer reviews and customer empathy over scripts, scaling to 50+ countries with a lean team. (Source: TechCrunch)

If you’re running a hospitality leadership programme or business accelerator hub, coaching frameworks can be repurposed from internal learning and development (L&D) materials.

Create A Compensation Plan That Scales

Money matters. But structure matters more. Your compensation plan should reward the behaviours you want to scale.

Good Sales Comp Plans:

• Combine base salary + performance-based bonus
  
  
• Include accelerators for exceeding targets
  
  
• Avoid cliff commissions that discourage effort
  
  
• Are tied to team and individual targets
  
  

Example: A fast-growing B2B SaaS company may offer 60/40 (base/commission) split, with bonuses for hitting 120% of quota, plus team-wide incentives for ARR milestones.

Don’t forget non-monetary rewards: days off, public shout-outs, or access to a business accelerator program or leadership retreat.

Make Metrics Matter

What you track shapes what your team prioritises. But not every metric is useful. Focus on the few that tell the real story.

Metrics That Drive Insight:

• Activity Metrics: Calls, emails, meetings booked
  
  
• Pipeline Metrics: Total value, deal velocity, stage conversion rates
  
  
• Outcome Metrics: Revenue closed, average deal size, churn rate
  
  

Visual dashboards in tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, or even Google Sheets can keep things simple and focused.

Fire Fast, But Fair

Hiring mistakes are inevitable. What matters is how fast you address them. A low-performing salesperson can drain morale and ruin leads.

Set Clear Checkpoints:

• 30-day: Are they engaged and coachable?
  
  
• 60-day: Are they generating pipeline?
  
  
• 90-day: Are they closing or advancing deals?
  
  

Document feedback, be direct, and offer coaching. But don’t hesitate to part ways if the fundamentals aren’t there.

Case Study: Segment

Segment’s founding team famously adopted a ‘no brilliant jerks’ rule. They prioritised culture fit and growth mindset, ensuring performance didn’t come at the cost of trust. (Source: First Round Review)

Enable Cross-Functional Feedback Loops

Your sales team sits on the frontlines of customer truth. Make sure that insight flows upstream.

Connect Sales With:

• Marketing: Feedback on lead quality and messaging
  
  
• Product: Insights into user needs and feature requests
  
  
• Customer Success: Smooth handovers and account growth
  
  

Weekly or bi-weekly syncs with other departments help refine strategy in real time.

A business accelerator hub, for example, may rotate team members across disciplines temporarily to increase empathy and improve team alignment.

Prepare To Lead, Not Just Manage

The best sales leaders aren't spreadsheet warriors. They're coaches, strategists, and motivators.

If you’re the founder or sales lead:

• Get on calls with your team weekly
  
  
• Celebrate small wins daily
  
  
• Walk the walk with pipeline updates and follow-through
  
  
• Shield your team from chaos while driving urgency
  
  

When the team sees you care, they care more too.

Final Thought

Building a high-performing sales team from scratch is one of the most critical and rewarding growth moves you can make. It’s not about cloning closers or stacking bodies. It’s about culture, process, and leadership.

The best founders and business owners build revenue engines that reflect their values and customer needs. Whether you're scaling a SaaS platform, growing a consultancy, or evolving a hospitality leadership programme, the same truth applies: sales doesn’t just close deals — it drives direction.

5 Actionable Next Steps

1. Audit Your Current Sales Process: Map out your funnel stages, conversion rates, and lead sources. Find gaps before hiring.
   
   
2. Write A Sales Playbook: Start small. A Google Doc covering ICPs, call flows, and objections is enough.
   
   
3. Create A 90-Day Onboarding Plan: Even if you haven’t hired yet, this will force you to define what success looks like.
   
   
4. Pick 3 Metrics To Track Weekly: Keep it simple — pipeline size, meetings booked, and close rate.
   
   
5. Run A Weekly Sales Review: Share wins, losses, and lessons. Make it a ritual your team values.

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