I recently sent out the following paragraph to a few close connections as part of my outbound emails around sales coaching, and sales recruiting.
“Hi, Are you able to find Business Development Talent?
Finding the right people that you trust to send out to your clients to represent your brand and your offerings is hard to do.
Then you have to train them on your systems, teach them your sales and product systems and keep them motivated and reward them for good performance.
I know this is hard to do, and these are some of the hardest people to find and then to make sure they are effective as a multiplier to your revenue of their cost as soon as possible.”
one of the most interesting replies from this small group was from Kevin as below… (a small extract)
I haven’t responded because your mail made me question a whole lot of things in how we run our business.
My narrative has always been that I’m the sales guy, but that isn’t scaleable. At the same time we don’t really have much fat to employ a sales person.
But maybe there is something in between?
Now while Kevin and I have not caught up yet, I think the response and narrative is common across many good established businesses, especially when founder / owner managed.
And it’s quite rightly a common conundrum and challenge.
How do I as a founder, owner, managing director trust others to engage with key clients, run initial interactions, progress strategic deals to closure etc without putting us at risk?
Well the key word is right there.. trust.. and Trust is earned and established by working with current and new people with a set of skills across the sales life cycle that will ultimately do a better job as a team with a set of processes than one person or role can do. (Normally)
And yet for some reason sales is one of those functions that all too often seems to be lacking in enablement, coaching, product education, support etc. You would not bring in new finance, technical or customer support people without significant oversight, training etc but for some reason this does seem to happen to sales people.
Being sometimes, (by nature) the confident all knowing sellers that they claim to be, they can also create their own insular environment which says I’m good, I’ve got this.. ie the lone wolf syndrome.
So returning to Kevin’s dilemma, is there something in between? I would say absolutely! The short version is that if you diagnose the actual sales enablement life cycle and see the different roles and functions needed to reliably look after a customer from lead to invoice, it becomes hard to argue that expensive owner, director time is applied to all parts of this.
Some of the low hanging fruit I believe in this space is enabling contract or part time resources on sales admin, support, marketing etc, and there is a lot of capacity in this area that is very affordable. BUT, it comes with an investment in those people to set them up properly with tools, support, processes etc, and that is all too often what business owners find hard to do, and thus don’t get there.
And yes, sales coaching therefore is also a good step, which could be for any function in the life cycle from the CEO to the sales support team.
And to return to Kevin’s Dilemma, not enabling a sales team in some dimensions outside of the principal is non scaleable, and also not saleable! As per the eMyth blog, I do think it’s important that ultimately the purpose of most businesses at some point is to sell them! And if you are critical and key part of the business you are selling then you are working in the business not ON the business!
Need more info? drop me that elusive inbound email on craig@b2bs.co.za
and if you need some next level story telling, marketing and communications for your business please hit up Kevin from Actuate on his linked in below! (supplied with permission, coffee on me soon!)