Hello everyone,
My name is Lisa Gerbe, Program Manager of the Incubateur HEC Paris at Station F.
I am with of Maxime Pari, CEO of MyBizDev and one of the experts from our programs.
Today we are going to talk to you about the recruitment of the first business developer in start-up - how to recruit your first A-players?
Thank you Maxime for agreeing to answer all my questions.
I will let you introduce yourself.
With pleasure Lisa! Thank you for the invitation.
I am Maxime Pari, founder of Mybizdev, through which we are building sales teams. We put business developers at the disposal of companies (junior, confirmed, senior […] freelance, CDI) in order to make the sales teams explode.
Personally, I have been a business developer since I was 19 years old 👴🏼, so I will be able to share good practices with you. In the world of HR, recruiting a business developer can't be the same process as recruiting another profile (going through CVs, job interviews and cover letters doesn't make sense for this population).
What is the first thing to do when you want to recruit your first business developer?
Understand your needs.
Hiring a first business developer is a key moment when founders will have to delegate the job of revenue generation. That often happens during fundraising phases which can take up to a third of their time.
The business developer need will have to be defined according to a founder’s objectives:
Do they need to generate revenue? In this case they will have to move towards a confirmed, autonomous, and responsible profile.
Do they need lead generation? In this case we can start on the SDR (Sales Development Representative) or junior profile.
What do you do when these two needs coexist?
Easy! We can create two teams!
At Mybizdev, we started with 2 business developers to meet both needs, but also to create a dynamic between them (competition, mutual incentivizing, etc.).
Which channel do you prefer to find good business developer profiles?
At Mybizdev we receive 500 CVs per week. The best sources for prospection are job boards! 🔍 I have 15 ads on about 15 job boards. That probably brings me 80% of my CVs.
You shouldn't neglect your employer brand to create organic awareness. I advise young start-ups to solicit their network, which can be a very good source of profiles. However, be careful with their objectivity.
How do you differentiate yourself from other start-ups on a job board, to attract the right CVs, the right profiles?
When you look at the job boards, you realize that all the ads are always the same. So you have to do it differently from the others :)
How can we be different ? For the job of business developer, it is necessary to be very factual on the daily roles, and to define a clear job description:
How much time is devoted to prospecting
How much time is devoted to customer meetings
Then we can add the perks of a business developer job: annual package, benefits, flexible schedule, and work environment.
And just what is a good package?
It depends on the profiles:
Junior: fixed between 26k€ and 35k€, we can add 10k€ of capped variable.
Confirmed: between 25k€ and 45k€, and 20k€ of variable.
Often, a young start-up wants to have a fixed salary as aggressive as possible and a bigger variable.
Beware, this can be counter-intuitive because on the market it is the opposite: as a young start-up, there is little sales history.
Conversely, those who have the most aggressive fixed salaries are the scale-up ones.
Above all, you have to differentiate between two types of business developers:
1/ Those who arrive at the beginning of the adventure and who are not there just for the money, but to participate in the project, the mission, the set-up of the processes.
2/ In a second phase only, you have to find the sharks, those who are driven by money.
How do you gain the loyalty of the first business developers?
It's interesting to let them know how they are going to develop their skills because when they arrive, they entrust you with their career, at least for 1 or 2 years. Their experience must be valued.
How long does a business developer stay in a start-up?
For a junior: 1 year or 1.5 years - it's a job with a high turnover. With this mindset what is interesting is that you can immediately define your annual global cost and define your objectives.
And then your real objective becomes "what do I have to do to make this hire as efficient and profitable as possible, as fast as possible?".
Is there any risk of dependency on your first business developer?
Only if they leave with their know-how (like any other collaborator) and the knowledge is not shared.
We have infallible methods to remove that risk:
The writing of a playbook (the sales bible). In which you will find the whole process: the sales cycle, roles, objectives, arguments, toolboxes, email templates, etc. which changes every quarter. It is a knowledge base.
Master your CRM! When you are a start-up, you quickly get into bad habits. You have to get organized right away. As a CEO, I'm always on my CRM.
It's important to make your CRM very simple at the beginning. Start with the minimum, it will grow later.
What do you take into account during the job interview?
You can't judge people during a job interview.
The best I can do, in the time allotted, is to judge their motivations, what they want to learn and to do.
We test all our candidates on commercial challenges - which must be in line with the job description.
Our sales challenges at Mybizdev can be such as: “you have to find 40 prospects, you make 40 phone calls: get me one meeting”.
For confirmed profiles, I ask them for their pay slips and dashboards.
How many steps are they in your job interviews?
In the ideal scenario, the business developer should arrive immediately, otherwise your revenue will hurt.
The process at Mybizdev is that you can't judge a salesman on his CV. So here is our process:
We start with video interviews: this format shows their motivation and their willingness.
What I get is the following info:
- If tomorrow I send you in front of a client, will you dare to introduce yourself or not?
- Can you speak clearly and in a coherent fashion?Then I ask them for recommendations, their pay slips and dashboards. I want them to be proactive in giving me these different elements.
Once I have them in hand, we will discuss the figures and define commercial challenges.A last interview with the HR department in which we discuss softskills and career projections.
And what about soft skills - what are those of a business developer?
You can hear everything and anything!
In my opinion, his main soft skill will be his ability to integrate into the team.
When a client asks me for an "extroverted" business developer I make sure that they are not placed in a team with 5 "introverted" devs.
Depending on the profile of the team, we choose the business developer with the right soft skills.
How do you manage your on-boarding?
This is the key step.
The founder has to take some time with the new hire, quite thoroughly at least for the first 5 days. And then set goals for the first 4 weeks.