The first misconception is that ‘Accidental salespeople’ are salespeople who couldn’t cut it as say, an accountant. Accidental salespeople actually means entrepreneurs and founders who start a business and then end up having to do their own sales, despite having no interest.
When you start your business you often have to become the salesperson. There is no magic course or book that really helps, and 8/10 businesses that fail is because of bad sales assumptions and misconceptions. This is a list of those landmines that founders doing their own sales should at least be aware of.
There is then a second level of assumptions around sales when hiring your first salesperson. The third layer comes when hiring a sales manager.
Level one: the accidental salesperson doing it yourself
Effort = Reward. You need to qualify out all the trash, otherwise you will spend all day dialling wrong numbers or pitching people without purchasing authority, wasting time and money on meetings and proposals for people who will never become revenue. It’s really easy to waste time and money on sales effort that will never convert.
All sales are good. Sales do not necessarily equal profit.
Sales equals instant revenue. The sales work you do now (maybe) shows up in three months. Salesforce the larger sales company in the world Spends $10 for every $1 of new business. They make a profit AFTER 10 years of account ownership.
A good pitch or sales process means a sale. There are so many variables that a good playbook is only ever a guide.
One sale opens the floodgates. Statistically twenty happy customers equals one referral. Treat referrals as a bonus on top of your pipeline, never as the pipeline itself.
A CRM fixes everything. It just organises the mess faster. If you don’t use it correctly day-tp-day you just make more work.
More leads fixes a slow quarter. Bad leads just make more sales activity qualifying junk, which will reduce your bottom line.
Volume is the key. More calls, more appointments is a rough guide at best. Volume on its own is just busy work.
All leads are equal. A bad lead wastes time and effort, a good lead does the opposite.
A good product sells itself. Most potential customers have no idea you exist, or that they have the problem you think you solve. In most cases start sales before product development.
Sales should cover the cost of the whole business. Even the best sales rep can’t cover the costs for hundreds of employees. if you have hundreds of employees you probably need dozens of salespeople.
Sales is about being pushy. Sometimes it is, but mostly sales is about educating and informing.
You’re good at meetings and closing. In reality most people have little clue what they are doing, beyond a social visit.
You just need a few leads. A good lead can be ninety five percent of the sales work. Don’t underestimate sales effort.
You can copy a competitor’s sales approach. This rarely works out, mainly because your competitor already took the low hanging fruit using that route to market. Don’t run the same play 6 months behind them.
Sales is just talking to people. Sales is talking to the right people, in the right order, about the right thing, at the right time. Talking to the wrong people confidently all day is just a very social way of producing nothing.
Discounting. Bad salespeople discount. A discount tells a hesitant buyer their hesitation was justified. If someone’s unsure of the value, the fix is making the value clearer, not making the price smaller.
Word of mouth. Referrals usually dry up after a few months. A solid brand perception and reputation takes a lifetime.
ABC, always be closing. ABC is a tired expression from sales factories. The fastest way to make someone feel hunted instead of helped. Try giving before you ask.
No objections is a good thing. No objections is usually the worst thing, it means they’ve checked out.
Rejection of your pitch is a rejection of your character. Don’t take it personal. Our businesses are like children, this is tough on founders.
The customer is always right. No, sometimes they are wildly wrong and your job is to correct them.
A website is lead generation. It can be, but the first seven years of my business I didn’t get a single web enquiry.
Get the product perfect first, sales will follow. Be comfortable with 80%. Sell the imperfect version and let real feedback shape the build.
Just until we hire someone. Nobody sells the business the way the founder does, so hiring gets permanently backburnered. There’s never enough revenue to hire a salesperson, and when there is, it’s deprioritised again. Most founder led sales gets stuck permenantly in mediocrity.
I’m bad at sales. Usually it’s not skill, it’s bandwidth.
I don’t have time to explain the sales process. The lack of a repeatable process is exactly why it’s stuck with the founder, nobody else can run it from your head.
Sales is a distraction from building the business. Sales is the business.
Sales is being likeable. Being able to empathise helps, but in many cases disagreeable salespeople are best. Most founders struggle with the tough conversations that need to come out of a salespersons mouth.
Sheer volume. You may need five thousand prospects, with email address and mobile phone number, in a CRM, because at fifty calls a day this is only one hundred days of work. This may be your entire market.
Level two: hiring your first salesperson
Salespeople magically know who to call. Prospecting involves a heap of profiling and prospect research. Finding lists of new people is laborious and can take up half a reps time easily.
Industry experience. In nearly all cases it is far easier to train product knowledge than to train sales skill. Additionally industries tend to move as a flock, going down the same routes and making the same mistakes. Hire for sales skill and coachability first, and worry about teaching the product. Industry knowledge is nearly always far easier to transfer.
Salespeople have a black book of prospects. It doesn’t happen. Prior lists stay in the last employer’s CRM and aren’t transferable to a new company.
Hiring a salesperson will fix this. Most reps have zero formal training, expecting them to design a sales workflow, pitches, meeting presentations, set targets, hold themselves accountable, and smash the phones with enthusiasm every day is flat out false.
Putting a rep on OTE or straight commission just works. Base pay needs to cover the ramp period before targets kick in. Asking someone to bet their income on a pipeline you haven’t proven yet is a hard sell to a good candidate. A salesperson worth their salt will know the numbers better than you.
Hiring a sales rep is like hiring for any other role. A normal CV and interview process won’t show you whether someone can actually take fifty hard rejections day after day and keep getting up for battle. All recruitment agreed knowledge dsoes not work with sales.
Your company culture is valued. Google equally want the same quality salesperson as your business, but they pay $150K and give free gourmet meals, sleep pods, the Google logo on the candidates CV, training programs, and a list of benefits. Your ping pong table is not worth $40K in salary.
Every other business wants good salespeople too. Sales recruitment is very competitive. Every business with a revenue target is chasing the same small pool of decent reps.
Level three: hiring your first sales manager
Sales managers are revenue making. Some sales managers work from the trenches and have targets, but most contribute as a support function. If a sales manager is on 150K its roughly an additional $600K to the sales teams target.
Promoting your best salesperson to sales manager. Selling and managing are different skills, promoting the best rep often costs you the rep and hands you back a bad manager. (see the Peter principal)
Sales targets should always go up. A target set with no regard for headcount or ramp time isn’t a target, it’s a wish. In many cases constant moving goalposts in favour of the company will tear a sales team apart.
More of this kind of thing lives at www.outsold.com.au/blogs.
