Getting Sales Staff Can Lose You Wads of Money

And yet there are sales people who work on a commission only basis. So if they’re useless they don’t get paid.

The only problem with useless sales people is they squander the leads you provide. And worse they can badly affect your standing in your market. So commission only rubbish sales people are not a good thing.

Most amazingly of all there’s a way of getting the best sales people to work for you.

And what’s so incredible is that so few business people bother to try and get the best.

I wrote an article for offline business newspaper Good Company where I interviewed David Speakman.  In it he noted that he’d adopted a rule that a bouncer at one of his restaurants had. The rule was “If you don’t let them in you don’t have to throw them out.” Which meant if you don’t let the likely troublemakers in you wont need to wade into a fight to get them out.

Applying that to a sales situation is simple. Don’t employ average sales people, apart from getting average results, I can almost guarantee you’re leaving money on the table.

Have you heard any of these reasons why the average sales person doesn’t get business:

• We’re too expensive
• Our discounts weren’t enough
• It wasn’t the right time, they said come back in ‘x’ weeks/months/next year 
• They don’t have the budget
• We’ve features we need to add to get the business
• We just missed out to another company
• They already have a relationship with another company

Guess what?

Everyone of these is an excuse.

A super sales person will not use those excuses. They’ll go out and get the business, because that’s the way they’re built.

I’m currently in the process of interviewing 9 potential ultimate performance sales people for a client.

And it’s fun to meet these people. They often have an interesting life and their sales reflect their awesome ability, so choosing between them becomes a very interesting challenge.

In a future post I’ll explain how an ultimate sales warrior is made and how to recognise one. One thing you should know the companies that employ these people rarely realise and actually make them perform less than their capability.