#38: When Is The Right Time To Hire A Sales Coach (And Why)

Read time - 3.5 min

Today I wanted to discuss one of the most frequent questions we get asked.

“When is the right time to hire a sales coach?”

Unfortunately, no matter which way I slice it, my response here is going to seem biased, and I’m ok with that. I started this newsletter for two reasons. (1) I wanted to share and give back to the community. And (2) the majority of advice out there when it comes to customer acquisition and sales GTM is absolutely terrible, and oftentimes leads to disaster for early stage startups.

There are countless examples. I was ostracized for never allowing our clients to do free pilots. It went against the valley’s ethos of letting users use the tech for free. I didn’t care. I was “in the arena” for years selling, and I knew it was the fastest way to get users touching the product with skin in the game. As it turned out I was right. Paid POC’s became one of the single biggest needle movers for many of our clients and readers.

“Moving first is a tactic, not a goal.”

– Peter Thiel

Let’s take a closer look and unpack this question deeper.

As you cultivate your product idea the goal should be to build an MVP (minimum viable product) and sell it, before you continue to build. Why? Because you have no idea if there truly is a market for what it is you’ve built.

The fastest way to validate whether or not there are indications of PMF is by asking people to buy your product. If you do not have a well-defined process, it becomes difficult to extract the right information in order to (1) close revenue and (2) collect data on why people chose not to buy. By collecting this data, you can iterate on the product and determine the best direction to pivot. This allows you to make decisions early on as you build that are rooted in data, not speculation.

This is very difficult to do if you don’t understand customer acquisition channels and how to run a repeatable playbook to extract the information you need. This is why you hire a coach, to help you validate that there is a market, or not, and to keep your burn (amount of money you’re losing every month) at a minimum as you validate and build out your product.

The question you should ask yourself is, “What is the alternative to hiring a coach, and trying to figure it out on my own?”

The answer is, high burn rates on cash, less runway, high CAC (customer acquisition cost), high anxiety, and usually high churn.

The ROI on hiring the right person to help you do it correctly can be massive.


Here are a few things that you should consider prior to hiring a sales coach.

1. Make sure any coach you hire has done the thing you want to do successfully, and has credible case studies or testimonials to back up their work. There’s a lot of pretenders out there who have no business coaching and advising. Most sales coaches IMO are failed salespeople. Make sure you vet them.
   
   

2. If you have raised a pre-seed / seed round of funding, and have built an MVP, and are ready to go out and start testing, you’re in a good position to hire a coach.
   
   

3. If you have no lead generation, or are only generating calls through your friends, or your internal network, you’re in a good position to hire a coach.
   
   

4. If you are struggling to figure out who your ICP (ideal customer profile) is, you’re in a good position to hire a coach.
   
   

5. If you burning through leads that you feel you should’ve closed and ghosted, you’re in a good position to hire a coach.
   
   

6. If you’re going through an accelerator that focuses on helping you build and develop your product, you’re in a good position to hire a coach. Doing the two concurrently is incredibly powerful.

I can go on, but the simple answer to the question is this. How quickly do you want to validate that you have built something the market wants? Where you can come as close to definitively knowing you have something, that is not rooted in speculation, but in real user data.

Your answer to that question is when it’s time to hire a sales coach.

That’s it for today folks.

See you all next week!

Darren

P.S. If you’re interested in learning more you can book a call with me here.