Uh Oh… Thinking of hiring a salesperson?
Posted on | April 22, 2010 | No Comments
If you are thinking about adding to your team, hiring your first one or just trying to figure out how to find “more customers” and “more revenue” this is something you should read. If you do not come from a sales background and you are now responsible for sales, starting your own business or have changed roles during these tough times then it is no surprise that you might default to hiring more sales people to get more sales. The old adage of spend money to make money comes to mind. Except for most people it goes more like this… “Spend money, hope to make more money, fire the new person and start all over”.
This ties-in to the last discussion about “design thinking”. When you approach your selling effort as a product development process you can learn much more about what is happening. If you elicit feedback from your market & employees and understand your competition there is a much higher succes rate in building something that is sustainable and repeatable other than a continuous cycle of hiring and firing salespeople. If you were to step back from the day-to-day and really examine what you are doing, you might find things are very different than they seem.
Here are a list of things to look for:
1. Do you know who you are selling too? Do you have clean data for them? Do you have a process to manage data collection, cleaning and communication? Do you have a collaborative technology platform for the data?
2. Do you know how to be “useful” in the selling process? Do you know what “job” you do for your clients?
3. Do you have a big idea? (For instance if you sell services you probably say something like this… “We have a methodology, we hire the best people, we have lots of customer references, etc…) WHO CARES? Everybody says this. Come up with a big idea!
4. Does everyone on your sales team operate at 100% of quota or more?
5. Have you tried to buy “appointments” or “leads” with little or no success?
6. Do you print a lot of “brochures” and create lots of PPT’s?
7. Do you ask your sales team members to do too many jobs? Prospect, Help Marketing, Find Data, Cold Call, Trade-Shows, Write Proposals, Manage Partnerships, Close Deals, Support Delivery, Account Manage, Grow the Account, Pick-Up Donuts for the office, etc…
8. Do you execute “something” every month or better yet every week as part of your demand generation process?
9. Do you use the web as part of your demand generation process? Not just a request form but strategically using your site, social media, SEO, useful content, video and other things to drive the demand generation engine.
10. Is finding more customers and more revenue really important to you? What if you stayed flat? What would happen then? What if you hire and fire in a six month cycle again?
IF you can ask and begin to answer these questions you can start designing an efficient, scalable and repeatable sales process. You can also begin to understand the roles of the people in the process and start hiring the right people for the right job with the highest likelihood of success.
Don’t hire this guy if you can help it! Even if he is family…
Tags: Ask Questions > Leadership > sales > Sales & Marketing Alignment > selling > Strategy
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About Coley
Coley Perry is a 15 year veteran of the sales and marketing grind. Most of his experience is in and around the intersection of sales, marketing, change management, technology and business process helping clients solve business problems through innovative solutions and consulting. He has built sales teams, go-to-market strategies, demand generation engines and sustainable revenue streams. Currently his passion is focused on the convergence of sales, marketing and technology. He wrote a lot of checks to Columbia College and Northwestern University but learned the most from The “Second City” Training Center in Chicago where he studied the Art of Improv.
