SYNOPSIS IN POINT FORM

• Good salespersons are very hard to find
• It is often best to engage a junior and to mould them to your desired manner
• Never disregard or neglect the sales function in your business
• An in-depth induction course is imperative with new salespersons
• Make sure they are closely mentored by yourself and by others in your business
• They must always be positive, motivated and inspired – negativity spells defeat
• In the initial phases they must attend a short motivational meeting every single day
• Achievable targets must always be given, then slowly incremented in time
• They should always be paid accordingly – not too little and not too much
• Even on a long term ongoing basis, continue giving them as much training and chance for discussion as possible

FULL ARTICLE

Finding good sales people just barely falls short of a miracle. To be properly qualified, a sales person truly needs to be smart, confident, outgoing, a perfect communicator, persuasive, tenacious, organised and hardworking. These are not fancy buzzwords, but really very basic requirements for anyone in this field.

Our stock of such talented personnel is extremely low, and what employers usually find is that either they have to poach some big shot who will earn three times what they do, or else resort to individuals who very much fall short of the necessary personal skills.

The very worst thing you could do however, is to ignore the sales function, and try to operate with few or no salespersons whatsoever.

Your business is like a vehicle with its different corresponding parts. Operations could be say the body, administration the chassis and accounts the wheels, but sales is definitely the engine and therefore the main driving force of your business. Without it you will be simply freewheeling in neutral and will never go anywhere fast. So putting sales on the back burner is a very big mistake for any business.

If I really had to choose, I would rather be making lots of money while still having to update my operations, catch up on my admin and improve on my accounts, rather then have everything perfectly oiled and functional, while remaining stationery.

So give sales the priority it deserves. Put it first and foremost at the forefront of your business, and then, in function of your sales levels and results, all other processed should follow. Businesses that are set up operationally, administratively and accounting wise in the same manner as one which turns over €5M annually, but which only achieve a small fraction of these sales, have obviously been focusing on the wrong functions and priorities.

The front end of any business venture is sales! First start selling, sell as much as you can, then sell a bit more, and only then do you need to start worrying about the rest. For if you don’t sell, everything else is totally superfluous.

Having hopefully clarified the incomparable importance of sales, let us discuss how best to go about it. First of all, as the owner of your business, stop reasoning that nobody can do it as well as you can. That applies to most aspects of your business and is therefore besides the point. If you cannot afford, or rightfully do not wish to employ, someone who will drain your business dry, then it is probably best to go for a junior and to train them thoroughly and effectively all along the way. In the end even an experienced and seasoned sales veteran will have to be trained and moulded to your particular business’s specific requirements, a task which can prove to be infinitely harder than with a novice. The trick is to select the right novice and more so to conduct the right intensive and continuous training as you go along.

If you leave such green salespersons to their own resources, you might as well tell them to stay at home and send them their wages there, without even seeing them. You need first of all to give them an in-depth insight into your business, in the form of an initial induction period, which will take many days, upon their engagement. They need to understand you, to feel you and to identify with you, before they can hope to sell you. Do not be afraid of passing them through a school type exam at the end of their induction period. This will only encourage them to focus more on their attention and learning.

Allow them to sit around and learn and watch and listen, and then do not throw them out on the street alone, even when they think they are ready. Do not have them facing or calling clients before they have seen or heard you, and others in your organisation, do it over and over again. And if you consider that the senior person/s you have at hand are not very good at it, this really doesn’t matter, we often learn much more from others what not to do, rather than what we should be doing. So provided that you indicate to them that this is a negative learning experience, then it will still be a fruitful one.

The most important thing of all is that they are truly inspired. Salesperson must be inspired by the company, by its products and most importantly of all, by themselves. They must above all believe in themselves, how good they are and how talented. If you manage to put them on a high, then the sky’s the limit, they will even surprise themselves at what they can achieve. If on the other hand they fall into that deadly negative spiral, it is going to be very hard to pull them out of it and for them to survive.

So whatever happens, good or bad, you must always encourage them. You must always tell them that they will soon succeed, even if you don’t really believe it. For this is the only way they might have the slimmest chance of success. If you really don’t think that they will make it, it is even worse to scold them and put them down. Just terminate their employment and save both you and them a lot of useless time and hassle.

One of the golden rules in the beginning, is to have a meeting with them every single day. Don’t even dream of the once every fortnight or even once a week. You have to sit down with them every single day, even for just a few minutes, to discuss what went right and what went wrong yesterday and to plan and motivate them for tomorrow. Salespersons thrive on small tips, hints and ideas. Often it only takes a new, short, witty reply which they can start to use with clients, to turn the balance into a positive one.

You cannot manage salespersons without targets. It would otherwise be like a race without an end. And targets should always be relatively easy to achieve, otherwise they will be counterproductive. The trick however is to make the targets themselves incremental, so once one is being repeatedly achieved, it is then replaced by a higher one.

Always remunerate them accordingly, not too little but not too much either. Both extremes are wrong and believe it or not, an overpaid salesperson will become lazy, complacent, big-headed and nonproductive. Similarly to the products and services you are selling, people should be paid what they are worth, no more and no less.

The more ongoing time, effort and training is given to them, the better they will become. You cannot expect them to improve on their own as it will not happen. Make sure they are exposed to as many different internal and also extraneous experts and savants as possible, as they go along. Build into their routines as much time which is perceived as training as possible. Time they can reflect, discuss, query, analyse, adapt and improve their sales techniques, until they get it right.

It might be a long and tedious road, but like most other things, if it is done properly, it will eventually bear its benefits.