Putting time and effort into building a great sales team benefits your entire business.
The right sales team helps you as a sales leader to meet your objectives and lets your reps fulfill their potential.
Building a sales team isn’t all about hiring, though.
After finding the right people, you need to train them for success and scale up to support your organization’s growth.
In this article, you’ll learn how to build a high-performing sales team from the ground up. Find out where to hire the perfect candidates, ways to help them win and how to repeat the process for sustainable success.
Key takeaways from how to build a sales team
A sales team is a group of professionals working together to generate leads, close deals and grow revenue across the sales process.
Building an effective sales team improves performance, strengthens customer relationships and helps a business scale smoothly.
The biggest challenge is hiring and scaling without losing consistency, which you can solve with clear processes, strong training and defined KPIs.
Pipedrive centralizes data, tracks performance in real time and gives leaders the visibility they need to build and scale a high-performing team – sign up for a free 14-day trial.
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How to hire the best salespeople for your team
The sales team you recruit, whether they’re your first hire or your fiftieth, should be hardworking, skilled and ready to learn.
Here are some tips on finding the right salespeople at the right time.
Who to hire first
When growing a sales team, you’ll likely expand from the classic team structure of one sales manager and multiple reps.
In this situation, you’ll need to hire additional sales managers to oversee performance and more sales reps to handle increasing lead volume and close deals.
When hiring new sales leaders, look for someone who can manage successful teams.
These people will bring valuable insights to your operation, including wisdom from past successes that can help your business grow. They may even bring valuable contacts, including talent and leads.
The same goes for sales reps.
Look for candidates with a proven track record, strong communication skills and the ability to build client relationships. They’re responsible for prospecting the right leads and turning them into revenue, so it’s important they know how to do exactly that.
Note: If you’re a sales manager developing a new team, prioritizing experience is still helpful. An established rep can be a deputy, helping you write your sales playbook before the team expands.
Once your basic sales processes run smoothly and you have a solid team of sales reps in place, you can employ less experienced reps.
That way, they’ll have a more consistent on-the-job learning environment, and you can shape their skillset based on your target customers and business goals.
Consider roleplaying and shadowing to train new salespeople with your team’s approach.
Where to look for candidates
Use a mix of online and offline channels to reach both active and passive candidates.
If you focus on a single channel, you risk overlooking great applicants.
For example, you could put all your hiring hopes on one online job board. That job board only connects you with people who are actively seeking new roles. It’s a worthwhile target audience, but not the only valuable one.
Conversations can be just as effective. Reach out on social media (especially LinkedIn and Twitter) and industry communities (like Sales Assembly). Make it known you’re hiring and talk openly about:
The role or roles available
The sales qualities you’re looking for
Your business (and the value it offers employees)
Keep your inbox open and an email address visible. You never know who’s viewing or sharing your content. At any time, you could grab the attention of someone who’s ready for a change but isn’t actively job searching yet.
While it’s natural to head online first, offline networking can be just as important. Ask existing contacts for recommendations and let them know you’re looking. If a contact values your relationship, they’ll endorse people they know are a good fit.
How to find a perfect fit
Define what success looks like in your team so you can consistently hire people who match it.
Use past hires as templates for new ones. Start by asking yourself and some of your closest colleagues a few questions.
First, which team members, past and present, best embody the characteristics and soft skills you’re hoping to find?
Then, if that question hasn’t covered it already:
Who has regularly met their quotas and driven the most revenue?
Who has positively influenced the rest of their group?
Who has been the easiest to work with?
Consider how these recruitment success stories came about. Where did you find this talent? How did the hiring process go? What do these employees value most about their work and employer?
Use all your answers to build an “ideal hire” profile for scoring candidates. You might not hit every criterion every time, but it’ll help you envision what you’re looking for beyond a job title.
If you’re growing your sales team because your business is scaling, the best advice is to go slowly. Hiring too quickly often leads to poor fits and costly turnover, hindering your growth and making it hard for the rest of your sales team to perform consistently.
How to set your sales team up for success and growth
Set your sales team up for long-term wins by investing in continuous training, support and clear processes.
Building a high-achieving sales team is an ongoing process, not one that stops when you’ve recruited your ideal talent.
The next step after onboarding is sales development. Here are eight ways to train your sales team for success.
1. Build a culture of acceptance and engagement
Establish a culture that supports empathy, curiosity and growth, so team members can apply and hone their sales skills without worrying about feeling inadequate or making minor mistakes.
More specifically, it’s your responsibility to ensure all team members are comfortable:
Sharing concerns
Helping each other
Challenging existing sales processes
Achieve that openness by encouraging employee feedback during the hiring process, appraisals and sales meetings. Freedom of communication ensures everyone can confidently pull toward team and company goals.
Promoting empathy will also help with salesforce diversification by making people feel accepted, which is proven to boost team sales performance.
2. Establish clear expectations
Team members will have more purpose and confidence in their work if they know what’s expected of them.
Here are some of the best ways to create clear expectations for sales reps:
Make company objectives clear | What it means: Define what the business wants to achieve and the sales team’s role in reaching those outcomes. Why it’s important: Help the sales team focus on what actually drives business growth instead of working toward vague targets. Example: Build a more diverse customer base across new markets and regions. |
Translate business objectives into sales goals | What it means: Spell out specific, business-aligned sales outcomes that the team can measure and influence. Why it’s important: Help reps understand what success looks like in their day-to-day work. Example: Support business expansion by reducing lead qualification time so reps can close more first-time customers faster. |
Use sales objectives to inspire specific activities | What it means: Break sales goals into daily actions and habits that reps can consistently follow. Why it’s important: Give reps a direct way to contribute to bigger team and company goals. Example: Send 10 cold emails a day or complete a relationship-selling course to streamline outreach and boost sales. |
When expectations are transparent, team members know what they should be doing daily and why it matters: because it contributes to the company’s big-picture goals.
3. Set your key performance indicators (KPIs)
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are sales metrics that measure an individual’s or team’s success, helping you track performance, identify gaps and improve results over time.
Win rate, deals closed and revenue generated are good examples of KPIs.
Choose your KPIs based on what you, your team and your company want to achieve. These sales goals create accountability and keep you tracking toward growth.
If you have an annual revenue goal, you might track average order value to ensure reps are reaching your ideal target market. If you aim to reduce your customer acquisition costs (CAC), you could use average time to close (also known as average sales cycle length) as a KPI.
You’ll find many helpful sales metrics in Pipedrive’s performance dashboards and reports.
These sales dashboards make it easy to track KPIs in real time, so you can see how individual reps and the wider team are performing at a glance.
Here’s an example of a custom dashboard in Pipedrive:
Instead of pulling data from multiple tools, you get a clear view of win rates, pipeline activity and revenue progress in one place. As a result, it’s easier to spot issues early and adjust targets or sales coaching support where needed.
4. Ask for and give feedback
.Regular employee feedback is vital for reps to know what they’re doing right and wrong (beyond closing deals or losing them).
This awareness helps your team repeat successful patterns and address problems.
Holding one-to-one meetings is a great starting point. As well as allowing you to deliver feedback in a private setting, it gives team members the opportunity to offload their concerns, report on day-to-day achievements and pitch new ideas.
However you’re communicating, remember to:
Offer both positive and constructive feedback. A good balance of praise and guidance will stop morale from dropping while helping employees improve.
Be realistic. Your team members have limits. Asking them to take too much on can hinder motivation.
Give team members what they need to succeed. Sales reps need information and tools to perform. It’s on you to make sure they have both. For example, if you expect a rep to hit quarterly sales targets, ensure they know the exact figures before the quarter begins.
Encourage staff to give you feedback, too. Make them feel comfortable enough, and they’ll tell you how different aspects of your team management style work or don’t work for them.
Regularly prompting employees to share feedback should also help catch issues before they significantly impact individuals’ well-being, team morale or client sentiment.
5. Embrace sales enablement
Sales enablement involves creating and organizing the content and tools your sales team needs to do their job effectively.
This process includes guides, sales coaching materials, digital tools and presentation decks.
In the State of Sales Enablement Report 2025, operations, marketing and sales professionals said a unified enablement platform is 42% more likely to improve win rates.
If a dedicated enablement function isn’t feasible, your marketing team can help. Much of the content they already create, like blog posts and case studies, is ideal for moving prospects closer to purchase.
Pipedrive in action: For example, Accentuate uses Pipedrive to reassure customers that businesses like theirs have successfully improved pipeline visibility, increased efficiency and grown revenue by 1,000% using the platform.
“You need to be able to scale and manage your client base effectively if you want to be serious about competing in a modern business arena. And if you want to scale and manage your client base effectively you need a CRM, like Pipedrive, simple as that”. – Eden Brownlee, Director and Senior Digital Strategy Consultant, Accentuate Web Design & Marketing.
These results show potential customers what they could achieve with Pipedrive’s customer relationship management (CRM) software.
When creating case study content like this, ensure the information is accurate, relatable and easy to digest. Stick to a consistent format (e.g., background, challenge, solution, results) and build a library of customer stories targeting different products and industries.
6. Motivate with activity-based selling
Motivating your sales team keeps morale high, builds performance consistency and helps reps stay productive even when deals don’t close.
As a leader, it’s your responsibility to motivate your sales team. Do that in various ways, including through the openness, empathy and goal-setting discussed already.
Focusing on key sales activities rather than results alone also helps, as salespeople have more control over them.
For example, a skilled salesperson could do everything right and still lose a deal. By focusing on the buyer’s final decision, you might damage the sales reps motivation even though the outcome was beyond their control.
Instead, praise that rep for everything they did well. Perhaps they did a great job identifying the opportunity, sending a prompt follow-up email and providing customer value. The same positive activities could lead to better results next time.
Turn Maybe Into Yes With These Killer Follow Up Email Templates
7. Incentivize development and hard work
Sales incentives motivate reps to drive consistent performance and keep improving.
Consider giving top performers bonuses in a compensation plan, reduced pricing and time off for their effort. Use a broad definition of “top performer”, too. Beyond meeting quotas, you could also reward:
Creativity
Initiative
Development
By incentivizing sales growth and results, you help your team become more effective over time.
Note: Making rewards public can kick underperformers and coasters into gear and inspire early-career employees to keep learning. Don’t assume that all reps have the same motivations – use interviews and development meetings to understand what will work best for each individual.
8. Celebrate customer success stories
Celebrating customer success stories shows sales teams the real impact of their work beyond closing a sale.
Put yourself in the position of a sales rep. Moving from deal to deal without reflecting can make sales feel like a thankless grind.
Breaking that monotony by sharing the results of their hard work can boost motivation and morale.
For example, if a new client writes a glowing testimonial, ensure it gets back to anyone who worked on the deal. Get reps involved in case study creation, too, so they can learn what happens after they close deals.
Seeing the impact of your company’s products reminds salespeople that their work matters beyond the sales quota.
How to scale your sales team sustainably
Growing too fast can cause your team to become disjointed, confused and inefficient.
Here are three tips for growing your sales operation sustainably.
1. Create scalable processes
A scalable process allows your sales operations to grow without becoming harder to manage or less efficient.
When you’re developing any kind of sales workflow or process, consider how it would work with more team members or buyers (inputs) involved.
For example, you might have two salespeople storing all their contact data in separate spreadsheets. That works fine with a small team, but for every new team member and spreadsheet you add, you make your data pool:
More complex
Less consistent
Harder to access and audit
A CRM like Pipedrive is much more scalable. The software is a central database of lead and customer information that’s easy for reps to use – whether on a small team of two or a growing team of 200.
Here’s a quick breakdown of how to use Pipedrive’s CRM to create and manage sales processes:
When staff can quickly access the insights they need, they can spend more time delivering better customer experiences and closing deals.
Pipedrive in action: Combat Ready, a leadership and tactical training company, used Pipedrive to create a structured, centralized sales pipeline. Its sales team uses this pipeline visibility to spot winning patterns and optimize its work accordingly to close more deals.
2. Build a reliable tech stack
Sales technology helps your sales team work faster, make better business decisions and satisfy your customers.
When building a tech stack to support your team, make sure:
It has all the right sales tools. A great starter kit includes a CRM for storing contact data, email marketing software for generating leads and a project management tool for organizing tasks.
Everything works together. CRM integrations ensure consistent data across all your platforms. This functionality means that sales professionals have a single source of truth for better-informed decisions and interactions.
A well-built tech stack also makes it easier to scale without adding complexity.
New tools can plug into the same system instead of creating disconnected workflows. Over time, this gives your team a clearer view of performance, reduces manual work and helps everyone focus more on selling and less on admin.
3. Learn as you go
Every success and disappointment you experience as a sales manager is a learning opportunity to refine your sales strategy and improve future decisions.
When a new hire doesn’t work out, reflect on why so you can find a more suitable replacement.
Say you hire a well-established salesperson to work remotely, but they fail to bond with their colleagues and move on. In the future, you might invest in team-building to create a stronger, more cohesive group.
Pay close attention to the wins, too. For example, sales representatives with hospitality backgrounds may fit your company’s sales culture. Build that into your process with a sales training program for people from that sector.
Final thoughts
To build a successful sales team, define who you want to hire, foster a company culture of acceptance and encourage feedback from your existing staff.
These insights help you make better hiring decisions, improve team fit and continuously refine how your sales team operates as your business grows..
By centralizing your sales data, tracking performance and giving you clear visibility into what’s working, Pipedrive helps you refine your hiring, training and sales strategy to create a high-performing sales team.
Sign up for a free 14-day trial to see how Pipedrive can help you scale.
