Priority List for a VP Sales
Carry Out Sales Strategy
Recruit & Develop Sales Team
Create Repeatable Processes
Report Into Stakeholders
Close Business
The top priority for a VP Sales leader should be to carry out the sales vision outlined by the CEO and Board. 20% of a VP’s time, or an entire day of each work week, should be invested into searching for potential hires via LinkedIn, taking candidates to coffee, asking their network for leads, interviewing, and hiring. To scale, you’ll need lots of human-power. Your VP needs to acquire this for you.
Their next function is helping their reps win business. That means reviewing their pipelines, pointing out obstacles, identifying opportunities, etc. In third place, the VP should be tweaking the sales process: creating sales scripts, email templates, and reusable demo agendas; perfecting the stages of the sales process; understanding which features speak to which prospects; writing the product roadmap with engineering, and more.
Next, the VP must focus on the big picture. How can the company upsell and cross-sell its existing customers? Which vertical industries should it target next? What’s the most effective way to spend the company’s budget? They must also be able to continuously gather clear, concise and accurate data used to report into Stakeholders.
And in very last place, meaning it should demand the smallest amount of their time, attention, and resources: Closing deals. If you're trying to land a whale, yes, it might be a good idea for your VP to jump in the car with you and meet with the prospect. The exception is a Series-A start-up VP Sales should take on a quota in the beginning to get revenue >$1M. They should never be closing more than a fraction of your deals, because it's simply more important for them to hire and train sellers than sell themselves.
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