In many small businesses, when it comes to spreading the word and persuading people to part with their cash, 99% of the time, the person doing the selling is the business owner themselves.
This is perfectly normal – and absolutely OK – for an organisation that’s just starting out. However, as a business grows, a major problem soon rears its head: If it’s just you doing the selling, you’re severely limiting the amount of sales you can make.
Pretty quickly you become the bottle-neck to growth, right? Especially if you’re also the one doing all the work to fulfil the sales as well.
What’s the solution?
Well, it’s obvious: draft in some help.
Get yourself someone on the team who can bring in the orders.
You see, the great thing about good salespeople is that they become ‘self-financing’ really quickly. Like, within weeks. So, your investment or ‘risk’ is only a few weeks’ salary – typically just two or three grand.
And if you do it well you might just hire someone who’s actually better at selling you than you are. (This is really important if you provide any kind of service – because it really is much easier to sell someone else as opposed to selling yourself. Makes a big difference, I promise).
So, they quickly become better at the selling than you were.
Result: significant growth. All of it ‘self-funded’.
But how do you find someone who’s good?
You look in the right places.
Good salespeople are easy to find – cos they’ll already be selling really well somewhere else.
Go get one for your business.
Why not? I mean it’s not that other businesses are more deserving is it?
And don’t be put off by what seem like big pay packages. These guys have to become self-funding quickly and a frank conversation before you hire ensures that they know the score. They simply have to perform – and if/when they do you can afford to pay them what they’re worth.
Good salespeople are like centre forwards. They’re the goal scorers. You can’t win matches without them.
And for many business owners often all that stands between mediocrity and super-success is a good centre forward. Del Boy, it seems, wasn’t always completely wrong!
So here’s something for you to think on today: What would your business (and your life!) look like this time next year if, by then, you’d had a high performing sales person working for you for 12 months – taking all those leads you’re already generating and converting them properly, letting nothing slip through the cracks, AND generating more leads and sales of their own?
If the answer is ‘a much better place than where we are right now’ then any sane, sensible business owner would be giving high priority to finding that person.
Why aren’t you?