Rove president and CEO Rob Woodbridge. (Darren Brown, OBJ)

So you've got a sales team in place, and the revenues are rolling in slowly but surely. What's your next step, and what do you need to consider if you're creating a brand-new sales executive role? The OBJ talked with Rob Woodbridge, CEO of mobile software maker Rove, to find out what to look at if your company is thinking of hiring someone to lead your sales department.

OBJ: Why are you hiring a sales VP at this particular moment?

WOODBRIDGE: It's all about sales; the company's been around for a number of years and it's about accelerating growth. Certainly the products are stable and the company is stable, and now what we need to do is hire somebody who can actually hit specific targets, and then grow a team that can hit specific targets.

At some point you really need to mature your sales team and a VP brings that to the table, or at least they should. They bring the management expertise, the experience and the ability to grow a team, manage the team and actually accelerate sales through coaching, and that's one of the key pieces. You've got a sales team that is selling ... they're face-down, doing their work, and it's a total benefit to the company obviously when they sell, but what ends up happening is you're not thinking about next quarter or the quarter after, or the next year and the year after that. That's where a VP steps in and becomes more of a strategic role, starts to think about long term, partnering, OEM deals. It happens as a company matures.

OBJ: So what was in the specific job description for this position?

WOODBRIDGE: First and foremost, there's an old adage that people say that you can't be a sales guy and a sales manager, and that's a challenge when you're a smaller company and everybody has to contribute to the bottom line. We were looking for somebody who would come in and help close deals ... Now, they don't have to close deals but they have to be able to help their team close deals and if you can help the team close deals, you're one step closer to actually increasing revenue and leveraging that person's knowledge across the organization.

Certainly, the ability to lead a team in order to be able to grow sales is very significant, (as well as) the ability to bring relationships with them into the key areas we're trying to sell into. And I like a little bit of diversity, I like people who think a little outside of the norm when it comes to approaches for selling and marketing. At Rove we emphasize enthusiasm as well, so there's a good combination of skill, desire and enthusiasm.

OBJ: And how did you actually set about finding your sales VP?

WOODBRIDGE: Well, we tried it on our own for a while and there's marginal success there, but ultimately we went through and used a recruiter who specializes in getting these positions into your company, and that's when we really saw some gains. So instead of interviewing 30 people, I interviewed five and chose one, and the process was simpler than we've ever had to deal with in hiring.

The key thing that (the recruiter) did was look at our organization and they spent a number of hours consulting with me to extract what it was that we were looking for, where the company was going and making sure they understood that key position that we needed to fill. There were a number of interviews that we went through for them to actually assemble what was, on paper, the perfect VP, and then their task was to go out and find that perfect VP based on our requirements. We started the process in November '07 and we had an agreement in principle with a VP by mid-January, which is very quick.

OBJ: Why did you choose an external candidate, rather than an internal person who would already know your product?

WOODBRIDGE: The challenge with hiring internally is then you're looking for a good salesperson, and often times a good salesperson is not the same as a good VP of sales. You don't want to take a very good salesperson and reward them by putting them in the VP position, and then having a vacant spot where you once had great sales. Often times, you cannot transition a good salesperson – or even a great salesperson – into that VP role because their DNA is such that they're hunters and closers as opposed to managers and mentors, and I think that's the distinction between the two roles.

OBJ: How did you pick your specific VP of sales, why did he fit in?

WOODBRIDGE: When we went through the recruiting process they presented me with a number of candidates, and ... the energy that I got from this guy was very different, it was palpable and I could feel his excitement, he had a genuine interest in what we were doing, he came to the table with ideas, you could tell that he'd done this before and his list of references was a mile long. The negotiation process wasn't bogged down, it was easy, it was conversational. We spent very little time talking about what it's going to cost to bring him on as opposed to what he could do when he gets there. He embraced the company very quickly and was very keen to get in here to effect change.

OBJ: What sort of tips do you have for companies looking to create this role?

WOODBRIDGE: If you don't have those sales guys generating revenues you don't need a VP. But there comes an inflection point inside of a company when you need to make sure that there's a mentor or teacher helping your sales professionals elevate their game, and that's when you know you need somebody in that VP role. Forking over a lot of cash too early in this process doesn't do you any good, because what you need are people who are skilled sales craftsmen, and then you need somebody who can come in and hone that craft for them a little bit more, and then grow the team.

The challenge is to know when to do that, and in my opinion, I should have been much faster to bring this position into the company than I was ... and when it comes to bringing this person on, if you have not hired a VP of sales before, as a small company, you need help. You definitely need help to do this. Because ultimately salespeople are salespeople, and the good salespeople can convince you to buy anything, but that might not be the appropriate person for you to have in the position of VP, it's a different type of person. It's too important a position to make a mistake. n

THE EXPERTS SAY

Understand that there are different requirements based on the different phases that (a company is) in. If you begin to look at a company that's pre-commercialization to, let's say, about $10 million, they're looking for ... somebody who's willing to pull out the Rolodex of people and to be able to help create that forward momentum with their solution into some of those key accounts, and it's very much an evangelistic one. As they start to grow the business they get those first customers, turn it into repeatable business. And then obviously as you start to look down the phase, once somebody goes from, let's say, $10 million on, you're much more into the coach-type of scenario, whereas in the beginning you'll be more of what we deem as a player-coach, somebody that actually carries the bag and goes out and makes sales happen. Once you hit a certain threshold, they then need transition into more of a management role or a peer-coach role, worrying about processes, making sure that you're focusing on market share, how to compete.

Randy Whitcroft, director of leadership recruiting, Peak Sales Recruiting

When a company gets to a certain size and you end up with a proper sales team, sometimes you've got channel sales involved, sometimes you've got resellers or distributors, then it gets to the point where you really need someone to manage the sales process and to manage the sales team. The role of the VP of sales is ... to make sure that sales processes are in place, that salespeople are given the tools that they need, so that they can correctly and effectively forecast the revenue to the CEO and the CFO.

If you're really hiring a VP, you've got six or eight people on the sales team, you do not have a formalized process, you do not have perhaps an effective customer relationship management solution, this is what you're looking for the VP to do. You're not looking for the VP to come in and close the big sales. I think the best piece of advice that I have is: understand the kind of VP you're looking for, whether you're looking for a VP who's actually going to go out and sell stuff, or whether you're going to look for a VP who's going to manage your sales process, sales team and be serious about forecasting, because that kind of VP lives in spreadsheets, lives in key performance indicators ... not face-to-face meetings with the customer.

Bruce Lazenby, president, Global Virtual Software Company Advisors