Hiring, Coaching and Scaling: A US Commercial Playbook
Alexander Siegel has over fifteen years of experience leading commercial teams and managing B2B event portfolios across numerous industries, largely in finance and tech. He most recently held the role of Head of Business Development at Money20/20 in New York, leading a team focused on new revenue and logo acquisition across the company’s US portfolio. Considering Alex’s experience, we asked him about what it takes to build a commercial team that performs over the long term, from who you hire through to how you scale a culture as you grow.
When asked what instincts are sought out when hiring salespeople in the US market, Alex made a clear distinction between the ideal behaviours in US salespeople and those in other markets, “the market tends to reward a more aggressive commercial instinct than I’ve typically seen in other geographies.”
Diving deeper into this commercial instinct, Alex presented it as something that should drive initiative, “we’re all looking for hunters who can consistently open doors, navigate complex enterprise environments and land the big, strategic accounts. That’s table stakes.” But for Alex, that’s only the baseline. What really sets someone apart is what happens once the deal is closed.
“The best salespeople don’t just win business; they know how to nurture it. They stay focused on delivering the right experience, building long-term relationships and creating value that keeps clients coming back year after year.”
That focus on relationships is something Alex treats as a genuine test of capability. If a salesperson can walk him through how they grow an account rather than simply how they win one, that’s how he knows they can build something lasting:
“If you can show me how you scale your accounts, uncover new opportunities and build referral networks in the process, I know we have someone who can build a business, not just a book of business.”
Alex has been both a top individual contributor and a team leader at different points in his career. When asked to reflect on the shift from being the person who closes the deal to being the person who builds that capability in others, Alex spoke on the growth of responsibility:
“The biggest shift is realizing that your success is no longer measured by the deals you close, but by the deals your team closes. You lead a unit now, individual instinct doesn’t scale like it does as an IC, you have to be able to explain why something works.”
That need to explain, rather than simply instinct his way through, is what shapes how Alex actually coaches. It starts with a problem he sees across the industry: “Sales coaching leans on scripts and objection handling too often. I think that’s backwards.”
Alex takes a different approach when coaching his teams, spending time helping his salespeople with visualisation, working through questions like “What’s the person on the other side of the table bringing to the conversation? What are they trying to achieve and what of our events/services will resonate with them, and earn you the credibility to be the person they trust to execute on their decisions?”
By flipping the script, Alex explains what a more organic client conversation actually looks like:
“If you know your audience, their aims, and can make a logical commercial case by establishing genuine credibility, the whole discussion will have a much more natural arc and objections get handled in the course of conversation and discovery, rather than during negotiation. Flipping (or ditching) the script and getting your team focused on frameworks rather than rote learning, that’s how you build a team that will consistently grow and outperform.”
Coaching is not the only factor worth considering when building a strong sales team. Producing talented salespeople isn’t enough, you must then keep them engaged and performing at their best.
Alex was quick to note that motivation does not tend to be a struggle faced by top salespeople, instead it’s the environment around them that needs building:
“The strongest salespeople tend to have a streak of self-motivation already, so I don’t spend as much time trying to inspire them. Instead, I’m creating an environment where they are always moving and improving. Progress beats motivation, every day.”
That movement isn’t always the obvious next step up the ladder, but the smaller, day-to-day chances to grow. Alex spoke on the significance of small improvements in sustaining high performers:
“There are daily opportunities to make small but meaningful improvements: sharpening a pitch, a new angle to your value proposition, a new sector to develop, whatever it may be. Those incremental gains will compound in time and keep engagement growing alongside sales performance.”
For Alex, that everyday progress is what ultimately sustains performance over the long run:
“Ultimately, sustained success comes from combining continuous improvement with genuine accountability. When one can see their own progress and feel a sense of responsibility for outcomes, motivation tends to see to itself.”
Alex is well-versed in building strong commercial teams, and has also seen first hand what scaling into the US actually takes. When asked about the most common mistake B2B events companies make when scaling their sales teams, Alex pointed to culture: “the biggest mistake I see is a lack of clarity around culture.”
Leaders often assume the easiest path is adapting a new team to fit an existing culture; Alex sees this as a missed opportunity:
“Leaders often think in terms of adapting a new team to an existing culture, when the real opportunity is to define the culture you’re trying to build and deliberately incorporate the strongest qualities of the people you’re bringing in, especially when hiring across geographies.”
Photocopying a successful commercial model and team is not the answer, and success in one market does not automatically equal prosperity in another. What’s needed is adaptability:
“The best businesses don’t simply replicate what worked elsewhere; they evolve. That evolution can get lost in the day to day of running a team or business.”
Get culture right, and it sets up commercial organisations for everything else that follows:
“A clear and cohesive culture feeds into everything else that, over time, separates good commercial organizations from great ones.”
Across every stage, from who you hire to how you scale, Alex’s approach comes back to the same idea: build for the long term, not just the close.
Visit Jackson Barnes Recruitment’s website www.jbrecruitment.co.uk to learn more about how we connect top commercial talent with world-class media and events organisations.
About Jackson Barnes Recruitment
Jackson Barnes Recruitment delivers international recruitment solutions within the events, media, and publishing sectors. Jackson Barnes recruits Graduate to MD level in the following positions:
• Sales – delegate, sponsorship & Business Development
• Editor
We recruit for organisations in the UK and overseas, with success in London, Dubai, New York, Singapore and Australia.