Have you thought about part-time experienced sales people in your business?
As in life there are no guarantees and sales is no different. When you meet and interview sales people invariably they will claim that they will be able to sell for your company and most likely you will believe them. There is nothing underhand or sneaky about this, after all there are no reasons why they shouldn’t, and no reason why you should or shouldn’t believe them.
Sales people should interview well and be convincing as it is part of the noble art and a critical success factor of sales that they be likeable and appear trustworthy. How do you separate the great sales people from the chancers? It is very difficult but there are a number of ways that you can create more certainty. Get down to facts and figures, what they did where, what they sold, how much, to whom, why they bought, and ask for customer references. If it sounds too good to be true it probably is, and you may ask why they ever left the company or were allowed to do so. There are stellar performers and remember that previous success of course does not guarantee future success.
The fact is hiring a sales person is a neccesity for your business if it is to grow but it does carry risk. Hiring the wrong person can take up a lot of management time and cost, harm internal company relationships and culture, and potentially destroy client relationships.
If what you really need is some sales help to get a new product or service off the ground or you are a small/medium sized business that needs more senior sales expertise but can’t shell out for a full-time permanent sales person have you thought about part-time…
A part-time or interim sales person can work a number of days per week or month alongside you as a business owner/Director or an existing sales team and use their experience and expertise to get to decision-makers quicker and more effectively. In addition, the risk to your business is severely diminished as they can be disengaged immediately for any reason, do not get involved in office politics and usually hit the ground running.
Most importantly you get access to the level of sales person that would be very hard to attract to a full time permanent role at your company. No lengthy contracts, no concerns over unfair dismissal, no paperwork, only upside. Have you thought about part-time experienced sales people in your business?
Is telemarketing the best way to generate leads for SMBs?
The question of how you generate leads and whether you make someone responsible internally to make those calls or engage an outside agency or telemarketing firm is one I hear again and again from business owners.
Each business owner seems to have an opinion on this based upon past experience where it did or didn’t work to generate a number of leads. Sometimes it coincided with the launch of a new service or product but often it was a knee-jerk response to a lack of new business leads.
Rather than just dismissing telemarketing and saying that “cold calling is dead” my answer goes something along these lines, i.e. I tend to answer it with a number of pointed questions of my own:
- Can you sustain the costs of a telemarketing firm long-term?
- Is it cheaper outsourcing it than doing it yourself?
- How are you guaranteeing results or minimising any failure?
- Do you have control and what happens next?
- Is your sales proposition clear to those that are going to be picking up the phone to your prospects?
- Is it an effective way of generating leads for your business and how long should it be outsourced, what is your plan?
- Should you also be making sure that your website is attracting new clients and your current customers are making referrals?
- How should you be engaging with your buyers for the first time, a cold call or quality interaction?
- How can you follow up on any interest immediately?
Usually the business owner recognises that engaging a telemarketing agency is not going to get lead generation working on its own. It needs to be matched with other activities such as inbound marketing, targeted senior peer to peer engagement and developing a referral network. In addition, what do you then do with the leads to further qualify them and take them through the sales funnel. Who picks it up and how do you make this seamless?
You are going to need a sales person at some point to do something with the warm leads particularly if you’ve invested a lot of money in generating them in the first place.
That’s where Jefferson Sales comes in to help you convert them into customers.
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