Corporate Growth Conference 2025: How to build an effective sales strategy

The only constant in building a sales team is there’s no one-size-fits-all approach.

A diverse panel of operators shared their experiences cultivating new business at the 2025 Corporate Growth Conference Nov. 13 in Chicago.

“It all really starts with finding the right person with the right attitude and the right energy,” said Christian Gorino, chief revenue officer at Coastal Waste & Recycling, based in Largo, Florida. “Training and onboarding are critical to combating that turnover trend. We do see some turnover in our sales team, that’s all kind of standard.”

To address that, Gorino said Coastal pairs an experienced sales professional with a new industrial sales rep that includes a commission share to try to accelerate their book of business and teach them closing skills. “It gets them to an attractive compensation level a bit faster. And then we don’t cap commissions.”

Star Waste CEO Patsy Sperduto said while it’s important to have benchmarks and goals, it’s just as important to remember that every sales rep is different. The Boston-based firm has a goal for each of its reps to hit 100 cold calls per week, but he added that if a rep hits the targeted growth for his or her accounbt at only 50 cold calls, Star Waste will adapt

“Cold calls have always been super important to us,” he said. “[I]f you have a rep that’s selling $10,000 a month, and out there making 50 cold calls a week, that’s fantastic. We let that person keep on going.”

Gorino added that Coastal Waste also notes how much milage its sales reps are racking up, agreeing that time in market generally is the common denominator for success.

“We track mileage and activity within w an app,” Gorino said. “[I]f you see that start to slip or consistently a rep [is] not in market in front of their customers, knowing the competitive landscape and engaging with their customers, all the other kinds of things start to inevitably slip as well, and it’s pretty highly correlated in my experience.”

Stanley Lomangino, CEO of Maggio Environmental, that company tracks its metrics through Salesforce, allowing it to see the volume each rep produces. One metric that seems to correlate strongly with its best reps is mileage. The reps that are out in the field, learning their territory and making connections, usually have the biggest mileage checks and the strongest results.

“I get very cranky if I’m in the office and I see sales reps in the office in the middle of the day,” Lomangino said. “I tend not to be their best friend that day because that’s not where the money is. The money is out on the street. We do have one inside sales rep that will field calls if customer service can’t close a lead that comes in. ... But, more importantly, is the support that you give to your sales reps when they’re on the road. We have one designated person in the office as an admin that will get that sales rep whatever they need when they’re on the road.”

Sperduto added that one inside salesperson can handle pretty much everything, while the rest of the team should be focused on being in their territories, growing new business and retaining current customers.

Gorino said the profile of an effective commercial sales rep is different from that of an industrial rep largely because the sales cycle is longer on the commercial side.

One thing that helped Coastal’s sales team is merging its small inside sales team into customer service and training the combined team to take inbound sales leads.

“We definitely try to put the right people ... in the right spots, and then we do separate them into territories by geographies.” He adds that those structures depend on whetehr there are franchise agreements, Gorino said.

Companies also should focus on generating leads beyond their sales teams. Sperduto said one of the most interesting way Star Waste generates leads is through its truck drivers.

“When I wake up in the morning, I usually have four or five text messages from drivers taking pictures of stuff with little notes that I have to screenshot and then forward on to the sales department,” he said, adding that drives get rewarded if the team ends up closing a lead they generated.

Sometimes the right impression can generate a sales lead. Lomangino said a lot of times people will call about pricing and mention that they found the company through Google, or a similar search engine, and it was highly rated. The company took a long look as to where it fell in the rankings and how it could get to a spot where people would find it and easily navigate its website to connect with a representative.

Lomangino added that the New York-based firm also generated leads simply by having clean equipment.

“We service about 13,000 homes in the Hamptons,” he said. “You can’t have ratty-looking trucks leaking and nasty-looking cans floating around out there. So that’s another thing that I see when we have people call in: How did you hear about us? And they say, ‘I saw your truck. It looked nice and clean.’”