How You Can Recruit Sales Super Stars - Part I - Recognising Sales Sheep

How You Can Recruit Sales Super Stars - Part I - Recognising Sales Sheep And Wolves They waste the opportunities that marketing provides by using salespeople that have one, or more, of these traits: If the owner is the company’s sales channel they’re probably also their own tiffany jewelry bookkeeper, administrative clerk, VAT returns clerk, receptionist and general “muck in and get the thing finished or delivered” guy too. We all know about Michael Gerber’s mantra about “Working on the business, rather than in it”. We all agree that’s a very laudable aim. But we’re all tiffany set so busy doing, doing that we can’t quite bear to tear ourselves away from working in the business. I’ve been a consultant for Rolex replica over 20 years and I’ve rarely met a business owner or director who’s felt able to step back and consider the strategic aims of the business as it grows. It’s all down to the perceived urgent need for sales. Because often management have no visibility of sales beyond the next one or two months. Ultimately your business reaches a point where you and your current staff are working all the hours there are to simply stand still. Growing the organisation is just another item that stays on the “to do” list. Before you reach that point you need to recruit a salesman. I’ll use the term salesman rather than salesperson to indicate a man or woman who sells because it’s seems less clumsy than salesperson. It all comes down to recruiting the right salesman to take the company to the next level – and tied to good marketing too of course. Broadly you can break salesmen into sales sheep, sales wolves and sales tiffany ring super stars. Let me explain what that means to you as the business owner. They wait for customer to come to them, or the phone to ring to take an order. Or they wait in a shop and sell purely because the customer wants to buy something from anyone who wants to take their money. They think the customer is always right even if it means that they’ll lose money on an issue that the customer created themselves. Or they’ll give the customer some stock they had lying around. What about the salesman who drops by and entertains their contacts to “touch base”, “to see if there’s anything for me today” and who “nearly gets a sales but doesn’t quite?” Sales sheep cost you money. Let’s count the ways: Sales wolves cost you money. Let’s see how: When you recruit a salesman you need to aim for the star salesman. Don’t be put off because you think can’t afford them. The star salesman psychological profile is formed during their early childhood and you may catch one before they realise they’re great. Or you may find one who was burnt out and is ready to join the fray again. Either one doesn’t require vast amounts of money. Remember even if you paid them 5 times what you pay yourself and they brought in 20 times tiffany bangle more in profit would their salary even matter? According to psychological research a star salesman is driven by two factors: Ego and empathy. Too much ego and they get the sales but at a huge cost to you in terms of customer and internal relationships bruised or destroyed by the ego-driven salesman. Also known as a Sales Wolf. Too much empathy and they end up discounting so deeply and being so completely on their customer’s side that you’ll lose money on deals that would normally be profitable. Also known as a Sales Sheep. Now you know how to tell sales sheep from sales wolves you want to find out how to get sales superstars. Check the next article in this two part series.