Set up a Sales Force

Is your refrain about a sales force,

"I have never been able to get a salesperson to perform for me. They just don’t walk to the same beat as everyone else."

Of course the first attempt at hiring a sales force did not work. That is to be expected. The first several times you tried to ride a bike you probably fell off.

In order to grow with any growth strategy other than to ride a few corporate clients (which has other business risk) you will need to create a sale team.

The way to make a sales force work is actually, to treat them like other employees or contractors. Develop systems for how you want them to work. This needs to be realistically based on meeting their needs and have realistic objectives. But, just letting a good talker run wild will never work.

One way we recommend you start is to develop a process based on your personal experience:

1. Write down exactly how you make prospect calls.
2. Write down how you do follow-up and tracking.
3. Write down how you close your sales and what the paperwork process is.
4. Write down expectations for salesperson. Specific criteria such as number of cold calls per day, number of appointments per week, etc.
5. Develop tracking method to record progress in each area
6. Find a salesperson who will work for commission or almost completely commission AND will follow your system
7. This person might start with small areas such as cold calling.
8. While part-time might be work, in most cases they must only be selling your product.
9. Plan on hiring 5 people to get one that really works for you. Set it up in the beginning that if the results are not met they will not stay. When you get the one that really works keep them happy. Usually it is not money that causes people to leave.

Fine-tune this process with input from your salespeople, experience, and others.