Ye Olde Bell pub
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Finding and keeping an outstanding sales producer isn’t easy. My experience is that many technology companies, perhaps most, don’t set about hiring a salesperson in an effective way. You are going to need the right strategies and, be warned, they may clash with the ideas you hold now. Have you have tried hiring salespeople in the past and failed to get a good one? Then you’ll know the cost and frustrations of getting it wrong. Perhaps you have never needed to hire a salesperson before, but want to now.
Much of the first part of this manual is about the problems you may face if you give the wrong person the job. But if they are already sickeningly familiar, you’ll find the later sections describe steps you can take to improve your chances. It’s worth doing properly, there’s a big pay-back.
In a hurry? If you need to hire a technical sales person quickly, go straight to the section: Hiring Checklist for a step-by-step process.
Are you wondering, ‘Can I be confident that your advice is right?’ It’s based on my 27+ years of selling and recruiting and managing salespeople for my own businesses and the experience of sales managers and company owners I’ve met. In the last 13 years I’ve trained sales teams for technology companies large and small worldwide. During that time I’ve had the opportunity of meeting some excellent sales-people and seeing which companies are able to recruit them and how, and which businesses fail to and why. I think you’ll agree once you see the reasoning behind the process that it’s common sense and it leads to predictably good results.
Read this manual, with an open mind, and you’ll get an understanding of what it takes to find your own champion salesperson.
• You’ll get a strong flow of profitable orders
• Leads are turned into business, not wasted
• Your company grows
• You don’t have to invest much of your own time, which frees you up to develop other parts of your business
• It inspires your other employees by demonstrating that excellent sales results are possible. • By the same token they render invalid the usual excuses.
You don’t need me to tell you that having a team of energetic, capable and motivated salespeople is going to be good for your business. An effective sales force is a huge competitive advantage. You may make great products or provide fine professional services but without enough customers, your company won’t last long.
If you are reading this because your sales team’s performance is disappointing, that’s usually a symptom of weak leadership or inadequate support. And be aware that for the company, firing the sales manager might look like a quick solution.
As business owner or sales manager it’s your responsibility to maintain and increase sales volume, motivating the sales people is one of the main methods of achieving this. Money is the conventionally assumed to be the key stimulant – but there’s less of it around right now and it’s not the only, or even the best way to incentivise to produce a really strong sales force. As long as pay is sufficient for normal needs, appealing to and satisfying each individual’s internal drives is a more effective motivator. That’s mostly what this manual is about, understanding and creating the conditions which catalyse strongly positive motivation.
To succeed at motivating your sales team, you need to possess appropriate personal characteristics and your own efforts must also be supported by people with other roles in your organisation. The extent to which that will occur depends very much on the style of the company and the personalities of those who direct it. Achieving change in this area may involve you in some challenging negotiations.
Since effective salespeople tend to be independently-minded, strong characters – they have to be or they wouldn’t put up with the harder parts of sales work for long – they don’t take kindly to being told what to do. Unlike the army, you can’t issue an order and get unquestioning compliance. If only!
No, you have to employ carrot, stick and a good deal of psychology to lead a squad of big, tough egos. On the way you’ll need an open mind, self-discipline and persistence.
Got those ingredients in stock? Then read on.
Sales-led companies use prospecting as their standard way of winning business because it is simple and has been proven effective over decades. But very few technical organisations have followed this example. That’s a shame because the method works for any activity and it can deal with some otherwise difficult problems:
• If your business has times when there’s too much work and others when there isn’t enough, prospecting can regulate the workflow and make it more manageable
• It can improve the profitability of the jobs you win and increase the proportion of quotes that turn into orders
• If you are in a competitive market, competent prospecting gives you a potent advantage.
The reason ‘techie’ companies don’t do much prospecting is mostly because they don’t realise its potential and they are deterred by an inaccurate view of what it entails. If you have been reluctant to start prospecting, I sympathise. There was a time when the idea had little appeal for me, but after having done a lot of it, I’ve changed my mind completely. It really does work extremely well and if you go about it professionally, it’s not hard.
I won’t wish you good luck, because if ever there was a field where it’s true, in prospecting, you make your own. This manual explains how.