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…

I found that the sales person couldn’t do any of this because they were not technical at all. I found that they were constantly trying to pull us in a different direction to where we wanted to go. They wanted to offer cheap websites in large number as they would be easy for them to sell.

our company has joined a JV with a larger marketing Company. Gun sales people. Sell millions of dollars of product a year. I developed a range of good webpackages as well as a full range of custom highend solutions.

After a year, they have only sold a few small cheap sites. I am leaving and will be dedicating “x” amount a week on business development a week and “x” amount on production.

However, i will always be on the lookout for the “right person” to manage the sales side to build the business

Dunno, I’m relating all of this second hand—it happened to an ex-collegue in England, I’m in Australia.

Hmm… Ok, that really doesn’t answer the question.

NDA/NC agreements would be the key barrier for such an attack. As for the value, it would be based on damages not realized value; which could included, but not be limited to, the lifetime value of the client relationship.

All depends on your NDA/NC… Did you have any with them?

Dunno, I’m relating all of this second hand – it happened to an ex-collegue in England, I’m in Australia.

Basically I run a small web development business and things are going very well. We are very busy and I feel that I am a bottleneck in the company as I do all sales, project management, running the business and still some coding.

I thought a sales person would be a great addition to our team, not because I didn’t want to sell myself, but to get another sales person to sell along side me to free my time up to run the business.

We did have a sales person join the company but it quickly became obvious it wasn’t working.

When I go to see a sales lead their requirements are always unique. They may have an existing system they want to link in to, they may have very specific ideas about what they want, they may have very unrealistic expectations about SEO results. I find that I usually build up a solution in my mind whilst I’m with the client and this leads me to ask appropriate questions based on this technical knowledge.

I found that the sales person couldn’t do any of this because they were not technical at all. I found that they were constantly trying to pull us in a different direction to where we wanted to go. They wanted to offer cheap websites in large number as they would be easy for them to sell.

Where they did manage to get a brief from a prospect they would invariably return to the office wanting me to intepret it and do the proposal for them. I was paying someone commission to go and write notes in a meeting on my behalf!

In the end we parted company and went our seperate ways. The frustrating thing is that if we could find the right person then it would be great. We need someone that is good at selling but has a good understanding of what can be done and what questions to ask.

Any advice would be much appreciated!

What can you get back? The salesman only got a percentage of the work that he redirected to “Company B” as far as IP’s concerned; as far as I know all he was doing was redirecting hot leads not stealing IP.

All depends on your NDA/NC… Did you have any with them?

Hince the end to go in house and have good intellectual property controls in place… As NDA/NC agreements, if there is proof offer a settlement and if they don’t bit take them to court.

What can you get back? The salesman only got a percentage of the work that he redirected to “Company B” as far as IP’s concerned; as far as I know all he was doing was redirecting hot leads not stealing IP. I doubt (unless you could prove that they incited the action) that company B could be targeted – even though they were the ones that benefited most.

As far as I’m concerned the moral of the story is be very careful as a nerd when you hire salespeople (I hear & understand you hdsol – what you are doing makes perfect sense given the extra information you provided) We understand the technical side much better than the sales side & understand how to motivate techies better than we know how to motivate salespeople so there’s the double problem of a) how do you find a good one? & b) how do you get the remuneration right? It’s a problem best delayed until you have the resources to “hire five & keep one”. This gives you the added advantage of understanding more about marketing & sales when you do get around to hiring.

I would feel skeptical about bringing in a person whom I did not know. What ever person deals the client will establish your business reputation. Once the deal is signed it is the quality of the work that will gain the happy client. As we all know a happy client will often refer.

I don’t envision removing myself totaly from the client but decreasing my work load per client so we can handle more clients. I feel that this is a needed step in my transition from a small group that can handle a few clients at a time to one that is constantly running. Right now my business runs in cycles. I do a few projects. when they are almost complete I start looking for the next projects. I think that by bringing in a sales/customer managent team member I can run more jobs concurently by not having to stop production to look for work.

My reason for not hiring another programer is simple. I realy enjoy that aspect of this business. My current life situation makes client contacts difficult at best. I have 4 kids and a wife in school. I can do computer work at home but who wants small children running around a board room. (not me) This is all about the growth and development of a business.

Long story short, the salesman pretty quickly landed a commission-only job with a competitor (simultaneously) & filtered all the best jobs that way because of the higher commission.

Hince the end to go in house and have good intellectual property controls in place… As NDA/NC agreements, if there is proof offer a settlement and if they don’t bit take them to court.

Pavel, if you’re good at sales & coding hire another developer – your better qualified to judge a coder so you’re more likely to end up with a good employee.

The same goes for you hdsol – what makes you think you’ll do a better job of getting a salesman than a programmer? I’ve done sales but I’m a good coder. I have NO idea how to select a salesperson but I can get a good coder 80% of the time (based on past experiences).

Nightmare story from a friends’ company. He decided to hire a salesman & found a decent person with extra graphic design skills valuable to his web company. They wanted to work from home which was allowed. I don’t know the exact remuneration package but it was base salary plus bonus.

Long story short, the salesman pretty quickly landed a commission-only job with a competitor (simultaneously) & filtered all the best jobs that way because of the higher commission.

You could sue but where would it get you?

Has anyone had much experience in outsourcing sales and marketing activities for their web business?

Yes, it can work short-term, but going in house is better due to the overhead of remote reporting and management… Why do you want to outsource?

Thanks in advance. another great post Andrew!

Site is up when I try it:

http://www.fastmarketingresults.com