When sales decline, real demand begins
Many entrepreneurs don’t figure out they need someone until it’s already too late. Applications decline, the market changes, and the reflex is: we need a commercial heavyweight.
But before you can determine the right profile, you need to know what that person actually needs to change, solve or build.
Made big without sales
And that doesn’t start with a profile. It starts with insight. Insight into your sales process, your customers, your bottlenecks. Without that foundation, you’re building on quicksand and running the risk of hiring the wrong person for a question you haven’t yet formulated sharply enough.
It’s a pattern I see more often in technical SMEs. Because the orders came in naturally for years, there was never a reason to really build sales. Until the market changed, competition increased and requests slowly declined.
At that point, an organization is empty-handed – no sales process, no data, no idea where to start. What’s going on is not visible. And what’s not visible, you can’t manage.
The question behind the question
The question entrepreneurs often come to us with is: can you find us someone who can handle sales? But during the intake it often turns out that the organization does not yet have a clear picture of what exactly is going on – let alone what profile fits that profile. There is no clear picture of which customers are the most profitable. Nobody knows where offers get stuck in the process. CRM data and financial data are not linked. There is no clear picture of the ideal customer.
So the real first question is not who should fix this, but what’s actually going on.
That’s not a reproach. It’s a pattern I see more often. Companies that have grown on inflows have never had the need to understand their sales process. But imagine what that means for a new commercial hire: someone who comes from outside, doesn’t know your customers, doesn’t know your margins and doesn’t know your process. How is that person supposed to set the course when the organization itself has no answers to those basic questions? That person starts with two hands behind their back.
What you need to know first
It starts with yourself as an entrepreneur: where do I want to be in five years? From that answer, you can calculate backwards. What does that mean for sales? What phase does a customer go through in my company – from prospect to order – and where is the bottleneck? Are we losing too many deals in the proposal phase because we are not following up properly? Are we getting the most sales from one specific industry, and do we know it?
If you do not yet have that insight, then data is your starting point. Not as an end in itself, but as a mirror. Look at margin by customer type, not just total sales. Look at lead time by stage, not just number of deals. Look at where activity does not lead to results. Answering those questions takes time, but they provide something that gut feeling cannot provide: predictability.
Data as a foundation, not an afterthought
Many entrepreneurs steer by feel. This is understandable – they started from a profession or a passion, not from a business model. But feelings don’t scale. What I see with clients is that systems and data only really work when you know on the front end what you want to get out of them. The pitfall is not too little data – it is too much data without direction. You can drown in numbers if you don’t determine in advance which key figures really matter. Think about your margin by customer type, the sources of your best sales, where you are losing deals in the sales process and which KPIs tell you whether you are on the right track. Only when you have those key numbers in order do you know what your dashboard should show.
One more practical point: make sure your systems can talk to each other. A CRM separate from your accounting will always give you an incomplete picture. Insight only emerges when the pieces of the puzzle fit together.
The power of forward thinking
Not every entrepreneur waits until the need is great. Sometimes I talk to directors who are already thinking ahead while things are still going well. Requests are coming in fine, but they already have the foresight: this is going to slow down at some point. They then already want someone who knows everything about their sales. That way of thinking makes all the difference.
An initial commercial hire can then grow with the organization – not as an emergency intervention, but as an investment. What sets such entrepreneurs apart is not that they have better people. It is that they know what they have, what is missing and where they want to go. That insight enables them to make the right choice at the right time.
The profile follows from the understanding
You cannot determine a strong commercial profile until you know what problem that person has to solve. Someone who has to build the entire sales team from scratch requires different qualities than someone who has to further develop an existing team. Someone who also has to set up data and systems is a different type than someone who purely manages customer relations. You can only make that nuance if you have your own house in order first. Therefore, don’t start with the search for a person, but walk your sales process step by step and start with the right questions:
- Where do I want my company to be in five years – and what does that mean for sales?
- What stage does a customer go through with us, from first contact to order, and where do I lose them?
- Which customers generate the most margin – and why?
- What data do I already have available, and what is still missing to make good choices?
- Specifically, what needs to change or improve – and does that require an implementer, a strategist, or both?
After all, a strong commercial profile does not follow from urgency, but from insight. The real question is not who you need, but whether you have clarity on what needs to change.
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