I’ve been on both sides of the exchange; as a salesperson wanting to be hired and as an employer looking for a capable representative. I know you can fake the apearance of being skilled and keen.

Drawing from these experiences I wrote a manual on the ways you can minimize the problems of finding a salesperson who doesn’t disappoint, How to Hire a Good Technical Salesman

Unless you personally know the sales person and how they work, and even if you do, you need to have a system in place for you to be able to track their progress and problems they are having selling so that you can tweak it and give them the tools and improve your sales process. Sales is more than just selling and it should be given due respect.

Bottom line is that you have to work on the sales process too, even if you are not physically out doing all of the sales. It’s very irresponsible to hire a salespersona and let them run ammuck but if you do it correctly you can seriously grow your business.

I’m learning a lot about sales myself and do expect to do some also, but not all because I’m a one-woman show for now and due to the nature of my business, a lot of the time is spent managing and promoting my client’s busineses. If I’m out all day drumming up business where do I have time to promote their business, which is my business. So yes I will probably hire a sales person but will definetly be involved in the planning, marketing, management of the entire process. Oh and of course you pay the sales person after the funds are secure from the client. I couldn’t even afford to pay them before hand.

Managing a sales person is no different that managing any other employee IF you hire the right people. If you don’t want to grow, don’t hire a sales person or anyone else (and that is a very valid option). If your only skill set is programming, maybe partnering with someone else is a better option for you, and that’s ok too.

Sales is an art – if you aren’t good at sales partner with someone who is. Chances are the person you are selling your services to IS a sales person and they might just take you to the cleaners. Ask yourself: am I getting the prices for my services that I could/should?

The funny thing is that I’m in just the opposite situation as most of you. I’ve got some ideas that I want to sell and am teaching myself PHP and MySQL to build it. Hand coding HTML was a piece of cake to learn and XHTML/CSS isn’t much tougher.

If you think coding skills are the only ones necessary in the world of internet business, you’re misinformed. You may hate sales and sales people, but in each transaction someone gets sold: is it you or them?

A salesperson isn’t going to care about your business as much as you do. If you can get over nervousness, and realize that you’re doing the prospects a favour just by being there (You’re trying to make them more money afterall), then sales will become easy.

Nobody is going to be as enthusiastic about making you more money than you.

To the end of the second year, I found that there is a big problem.
First of all, my saleswoman was running the side business right from our office. But the worst thing was the fact that she forged the documents in order to get her commissions when she was not able to get more contracts.
When she felt that there is no way to hide it from us, with $24K that I paid her in commissions for the contracts (she did show them to me with signatures) she has disappeared claiming additionally the commissions on the sales that never actually happened (as I found later). At this moment I overpaid her about $25K + provided the preliminary work for the clients at about another $70K not knowing that the contracts itself were forged with customer’s signatures and those “paper” customers did not exist! When, after investigation, I refused to pay any commissions to her she send the claim to the Credit Bureau. How do you like this turn?
Moral?
• NEVER TRUST 100%
• Always control the timing
• Contact/meet your potential clients personally right after the received lead or signed contract.
• Never pay money in advance, only upon the customer paid for the contract (even if your salesperson is not happy about it)

Best in your business! I hope this story will help you.

Suggest you go and read the link as posted above as it fully addresses the two assumptions which are relatively complex and goes to your response which is an oversimplification – and one that experienced managers make repeatedly.

NOT ALL PEOPLE should be selling. Some people hate it, and/or will never be good at it.

Why would you say that? Everyone should be selling all the time. If they cannot, they don’t belong anywhere…

@ febwa

Assumption #1: The new person has been successful in the past, therefore he or she will be successful in the future.

Yes & No – it depends on how you define “successful in the past” – If it is by purely being successful, then yes, that is true and is called luck. If you mean that they defined and created success, then no, since this is not something that can be learned and is a very good “bet”…

Assumption #2: We won’t have to train the experienced salesperson – they are already trained.”

Everyone is training all the time, this is just silly…

Improving the Success Rate of New Hires – Two Logical Assumptions and How to Challenge Them

He maintains that there are two assumptions that should be challenged when hiring sales people and goes on to describe some helpful management tools for challenging these assumptions.

Assumption #1: The new person has been successful in the past, therefore he or she will be successful in the future.

Assumption #2: We won’t have to train the experienced salesperson – they are already trained.”

I know a guy who’s a great programmer and developer, but he couldn’t sell his way out of a wet paper bag. He has the interesting personal characteristic of making some people want to kill him within the first few minutes of meeting him.

For these kind of ‘geeky’ / ‘unsociable’ people — it’s far better to keep them in the back office where they can deliver the goods. NOT ALL PEOPLE should be selling. Some people hate it, and/or will never be good at it.

Marty R. Milette — Custom Toolbars

Anyone had any experience using bulk posting for commission only sales or franchising web services? If so, what was your approach…