Hiring For Sales, Avoiding The Fails
Apr 12, 2024Hiring your first sales rep is:
- Really hard to do,
- Will lead to a constant source of frustration particularly around compensation, and
- Truly “ends” with my favorite entrepreneurial experience: the first time you get a new client that you've never met. It's like magic. Whole new level of entrepreneurship.
I’m by no means an expert on building large sales teams. But as someone who’s gone through the process of bringing in someone to lead business development a few times at our small agency, here’s a few things to think about the first time you hire a business development rep for your business:
Get your household in order
Sure, the idea of a sales rep sounds nice. It just prints money, right?
Wrong. There’s a lot of preparation involved to make sure your first hire hits the ground running. Before you even post the job application, make sure you have:
- A complete list of services, with those services actually defined
- A set way to price new potential clients.
- A list of tasks you want delegated that you’re currently working on, and equally important a list of tasks you want to keep to yourself.
- Thoughts on what you can expect a person to take on. For example:
- Knowing how link-building is related to content-marketing can be learned by the typical sales person.
- Understanding how to implement Schema on a Joomla site probably should not be learned by the typical sales person.
Money, money, money
Sales-people, even more so than the rest of your staff (and let’s be real here: they care about money a lot) are driven by $$$. So you want to set an appropriate structure for business compensation, that’s likely a mix of base salary + commissions on sales.
This is so hard to do.
Ideally, you’re aiming for anywhere between 50% - 90% salary, which would leave 50-10% commission (though every case is unique). I recommend not doing many people’s initial instinct of all-commission, all the time. While that can be enticing (if they don’t make money, you don’t pay them), it doesn’t lead to good long-term relationships, and will cause friction between them and the rest of your team.
Do your best to get your new biz revenues the last three years, then properly figure out how you'll scale the next three years. Assess appropriately when you might need to reevaluate commission structures, particularly if you're growing like crazy.
Set realistic expectations
While a salesperson might come in with some initial leads (which is great,) in reality they’re going to need to learn your business first. It’s a good idea for them to sit in on lots of clients' calls their first month to get a sense of what clients like/hate about your agency, so they know what to sell.
I promise: it’s better to wait 30 days so you can sell appropriate packages to your new business development person’s pre-existing leads, than getting those dollars in the door immediately.
And that’s it! Follow all these steps, and get ready for the magic of money just appearing in your accounts - after you finish all the prep work, that is.
Flynn Zaiger is the Founder and CEO of Online Optimism. He previously worked at The Ehrhardt Group as a PR Intern. Flynn Zaiger attended The A. B. Freeman School of Business at Tulane University and The University of Melbourne.
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