The top sales team
Monday, 30 April 2007
Last Updated: Monday, 13 August 2007
In this section:
By Colin Benjamin
Consumer confidence is at record high levels and business confidence is almost as high, as fuel prices come down and the pressure comes off interest rates.
All that is left to do now is to find the right sales and marketing team to capture a share of the good times.
But how do you find the best people to take up the challenge of growing the business and reaching out to new sales territory while the market is waiting for you to call?
It’s hard to put your hand in your pocket to build your sales team, but don’t procrastinate.
People in small and medium enterprise tend to seek like-minded individuals who clone their own path to success rather than take the key step of defining the skills and resources that best complement their own style.
Building a better sales and marketing team is like building a top sporting team: the selection committee has to find players who can work together to take up the challenges, do the hard yards of training and be competitive on the day.
As they say, a star team will usually beat a team of stars that has not learned to work together as a high performance team. The SME owner has to be a captain/coach combination to look for talented and motivated sales force team members who have three fundamental attributes.
- Top sales team members place relationships with family and friends, relationships with customers and relationships with their customer’s customers as the key measures of their performance.
- Outstanding individual sales representatives plan every step of their daily contact plan to ensure that they meet the needs of current customers of the business and add new prospects into their marketing program.
- Committed salesforce members work with the founder and key SME decision-makers to generate a good base income and a share of the profit or commissions or bonuses that come from growing the business in the early days, and the possibility of some equity in the business as it expands into new territories.
As a first step towards attracting these talented players, it is vital to have done the homework on the business and marketing plans rather than expecting a newcomer to write it when they join. Later they can add to or modify these start-up documents in the light of their experience.
Next it is vital to distinguish your sales and marketing plans because marketing means aligning the entire business to the needs, wants, hopes and expectations of the market. Selling is the process of creating a personal relationship with the delivery chain and creating sales presentations that show customers why they should buy from you.
The increasing pressures and complexity confronted by a growing business mean you need a combination of new eyes and ears, and you need these more than a new pair of hands.
Understanding the competitive environment, the daily lives of the customers and the requirements of the distribution chain of intermediaries sets the terms and conditions for the hire of new sales and marketing team members.
There are three options open at this point:
- Encourage a family member or friend with the right skills to join the enterprise for a limited period to test the market and see what sells and what stays on the shelf despite the extra members of the sales team.
- Take on a short-term contract with a sales and marketing consultant on a performance fee basis or sales commission or a part-time sales person who frees up the owner to do the marketing to find new business
- Advertise on the web or engage an employment agency to take on a sales and marketing manager who assumes the responsibility for the direction of a sales force including setting policies on incentives, bonus and performance-based rewards.
Each of these options has costs and benefits. Alone or in combination they allow the business to find partners and associates who will be with you for the long haul and willing to share the hard times as well as the rewards of the best of times.
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