Here are some great tips on putting a winning sales team together from USA Trade Tasting  speaker Josh Wand, Founder & Motivator in Chief of boutique recruiting and staffing agency BevForce.

Whether you are acting as your beverage company's sales manager or have a full sales department, your leadership team must be your company's best asset.  Building a sales team equipped to take on the competitive US beverage industry starts with understanding that that your sales department is just one of the many departments that makes up your business. When you are preparing for growth inside your company you should be thinking about how you can put together a synergistic business plan that incorporates every department (marketing, sales, finance, operations, human resources) as your scale each part of your business. One of the most important steps is assessing your personal entrepreneurial strengths and those of your leadership team.  If you are not prepared or cannot identify your weaknesses (and strengths) from an operational perspective then you aren't ready to expand your company.

Some good questions you should ask before you start hiring are

• What are you and your team leaders' personal entrepreneurial strengths?

• What are you and your team leaders' vulnerabilities and weaknesses?

• Where does your company need to drastically improve and why?

• What resources can you realistically designate to your new team?

• Can we use the strengths of current employees to cover gaps in other departments (promotions, jobs shifts, etc.)?

Some things you definitely should NOT do

• Over hire too early;

• Start hiring before you prepare your budget for your organizational growth;

• Fall victim to the college roommate syndrome (Hiring friends and colleagues that might not be a good fit because of personal reasons).

Remember that your Sales Team Manager can only be as good as the structural framework of your company allows them to be.  These are just a few of the questions you should be looking at before you start your hiring process.  Once you've identified where to focus your efforts it's time to start looking at what type of profiles will work inside the organizational design of your company.

Event Producer

Beverage Trade Network

USA Trade Tasting is brought to you by Beverage Trade Network, the leading online platform dedicated to connecting the global beverage industry. Beverage Trade Network (BTN) successfully connects wineries, breweries, distilleries and brand owners with international importers, distributors, brokers and beverage industry professionals on a daily basis. Strong partnerships with international and US organizations have helped BTN establish USA Trade Tasting as a premiere sales and marketing event committed to connecting the beverage industry.