Are the tasks of marketing, taking orders, updating websites, social networking, producing orders, billing orders and shipping bogging you down. With a small operation there just isn’t any additional time in the day to devote your time to sales. At one point in the business I’d have to imagine that more of your time went to sales, if you’re like me – you may miss those days of helping customers, but there are others things that need your attention now.
So the question is, how are you going to grow sales?
Sure, you can free yourself up to sell by hiring someone to run production and maybe you should, but before doing this consider what a professional sales person can bring to the table….
1. New Relationships – if you hire with a strategy, you can pull a talented individual with relationships that may extend beyond what you have established. For instance, your business may have been built to service sports teams if your kids played sports. So how about hiring a sales rep from a rental car company that most likely has relationships with local businesses to help grow sales in that area? Likewise, how about someone that worked for the visitors bureau or the local newspaper? Look for someone that has relationships established outside of your core customer group.
2. Fresh Perspective – if you hire a professional sales person, they may have insight into opportunities that you never thought of…its always fun to see a new employee learn the business and apply their experience to generate ideas on how to grow. You must allow for feedback and perspective, don’t impose your ideas and suppress any creativity on their part.
3. Rewards only after Results – when structuring a sales person’s pay, you can set it up in a way that they make the bulk of the money when they bring in new business. For this very reason a sales person poses limited risk compared to other hires that may be compensated based of hours worked and not results.
4. It Buys YOU Time – this one is simple, but having a sales person or sales team to manage client relationships allows you to manage the business. You’ll find yourself looking at the profit picture, coming up with sales programs, coordinating marketing, improving efficiency in production and the list goes on.
If you’ve been down the salesperson path before and had a bad experience, look in the mirror.
A lot of businesses have tried and failed at hiring a sales person. Some reasons why…your expectation, your management style, the pay structure, the hiring selection. So yes, as brash as it may sound….I’m asking you to look in the mirror.
Its tough because as an entrepreneur, you built your client base and hold a lot of the personal relationships with your clients, therefore passing the sales torch is not easy. If you want to facilitate growth it may be necessary. My former manager, always told me that a good sales person pays for themselves. I firmly believe this.
Here’s a quick video from Grant Cardone on hiring top sales talent from Entrepreneur.com: http://www.entrepreneur.com/video/220061
I’d encourage you to comment below about your experience with sales people. Do you have any on staff? Did you before? Any success stories of how a sales person or team helped to grow your business? Any failed attempts with sales people that you can share? Additional tips for hiring? Let’s get some dialogue going….
