After 25 years in sales and eight years as a consultant and trainer, I've learned that overhauling a sales culture is not for the faint of heart.

If you're a CEO considering this type of endeavor, you need to understand one thing upfront: this is a commitment that requires nerves of steel, decisive leadership, and most importantly, the courage to face significant team turnover.

Are you looking to expand your sales force across the nation? Scaling a distributed sales team comes with unique challenges. At Pitch Lab, we've learned valuable lessons about fast growing sales teams from both our successes and mistakes.

Here are five critical tips to help you grow your remote sales organization effectively:

Let's be honest - hiring great salespeople is one of the toughest challenges founders and sales leaders face. The difficulty isn't just in spotting raw talent; it's in the fact that salespeople are, well, really good at selling themselves. This makes it incredibly tricky to distinguish between a potential sales superstar and someone who's just really good at telling you what you want to hear.

So, how can you increase your chances of hiring top-performing salespeople and avoid these costly missteps? Don't worry, Pitch Lab has got you covered.

A salesperson recently came up to me after a training session and asked, “What does a perfect first sales meeting look like?”

While the word perfect is both subjective and elusive, this is the basic framework I gave her to ensure a great first meeting.

As a founder, CEO, or sales leader in the B2B space, one of your biggest challenges is fostering accountability within your sales team. This is especially true in today's increasingly distributed work environments.

Here are five key strategies to help you build a culture of accountability and drive results.

I ❤️ a Robot Named Claude.

This post will show you how to use Claude.AI to write sales processes and create a playbook 90% faster.

One of the biggest sales frustrations I hear from CEOs is:  “Most of the salespeople we hire don’t work out because they don’t live up to expectations.”

Hiring high-performing salespeople is hard. You’re right. I get it. 

However, if your sales growth plan is dependent on hiring a bunch of A+ salespeople who can just “figure it out,” I highly recommend you rethink this strategy.

The Wolf of Wall Street stigma stays inside people's heads.

And then when I enter an organization as a sales consultant, you find these really talented people (whether they're subject matter experts, tech architects, SEO specialists, UX designers) who are fantastic at sales, but they flat out don't want to sell.

“I can't sell!” They say as soon as you call what they're doing sales. They finally get in front of a prospect, they shut down.

What my message to them is, you're actually the best salesperson of all.

Imagine I dump a pile of Legos on your desk and ask you to build the Millennium Falcon without the instructions.

Even the best builders will struggle.

This is effectively what you’re doing when you hire a salesperson, hand them a stack of business cards, and say “double our revenue."

Great comedians say standup skills are like muscles. They’ll atrophy if you don’t use them. If an athlete wants to win the gold medal in swimming, they get in the pool every day. Want to win “the gold” at standup? Get in the pool.

Welp, I hadn’t been in the proverbial pool since 2019. This was my biggest in person crowd since pre-covid – roughly 125 folks in the room. At the last minute I got hit with a bit of stage fright that came in the form of dry mouth. I couldn’t help but smile while thinking my lips are so dry, I could do an amazing Fire Marshall Bill impression right now.