Dr. Jim emphasizes the importance of building depth in the talent pipeline for startups. He advises founders to be proactive in sourcing potential salespeople and to focus on building a strong employer brand. Networking with other startup peers and leveraging referrals can also help in finding quality candidates. Dr. Jim suggests partnering with nontraditional organizations to find sales candidates from diverse backgrounds. Implementing the right technology infrastructure is crucial for streamlining the hiring process. The key takeaway is to start building a talent pipeline early and not wait until the startup is ready to grow.
Key Takeaways:
Startups should be proactive in sourcing potential salespeople and focus on building a strong employer brand.
Networking with other startup peers and leveraging referrals can help in finding quality candidates.
Partnering with nontraditional organizations can provide a funnel of sales candidates from diverse backgrounds.
Implementing the right technology infrastructure is crucial for streamlining the hiring process.
But this should be an area that you're constantly focused on so that you're actually positioned well when you're ready to make that move and really start scaling and accelerating your your growth. And if you haven't done the work of building out your network and building a talent funnel and doing some of the best practices ahead of time, it's gonna slow you down by the time you're ready.
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So first, you have to be proactive. So just because you're a founder led organization doesn't mean that you have to wait for some milestone to start sourcing potential people for your sales organization. That should be a key aspect of your day to day.
Always be recruiting.
Almost as important is that as you're growing your organization as a lean and mean team, you should have a strong focus on what your employer brand.
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One of the other things that you should be leveraging is, When you're at that early stage and you're in that early growth cycle, you should be networking across your startup peers at the founder level or at the senior leadership level and see who they know.
But both internally and externally, A referral motion is gonna be critical for you to get creative in building that talent pipeline.
A few other things that you should have on your radar. Oftentimes when you're building out sales organizations, many sales leaders want to replicate a, junior versions of themselves as who they want on the team.
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I've often hired people from hospitality or the service industry into B2B tech because they have done a exceptionally well when I've brought them into the team. So those are all practical things that you can do from a feet on the street perspective to fill your funnel.
One of the things that I would strongly encourage you to look at is if you want to get to the point where you're being as efficient as possible from a hiring operations perspective, make sure you're technology is in place so that you can keep track of candidates and streamline them through.
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The big takeaway is don't wait until you're ready to grow to start the process.
