Have you ever had trouble finding good salespeople for your business?
In my market research company, I used to churn through salespeople. I could never understand why they struggled so much. They did a good enough job arranging meetings but they would freeze when they met customers, asking only a rote set of novice questions or wasting time discussing sports.
Inevitably, they would come back to the office missing a critical piece of information needed to write a proposal.
Most struggled to hit whatever measly quota I gave them despite hours of coaching and plenty of incentives for success. I could never understand how smart people could be so clueless when it came to selling.
By contrast, I was able to sell our services with relative ease. I met with customers, tried to listen to their needs and came back to them with ideas to fix whatever ailed them. It seemed so natural, making it all the more frustrating that I couldn't hire salespeople to replace me.
In retrospect, it wasn't that I was some superstar salesperson and my team was made up of underperformers. I had simply invested more time learning the market research profession than they had.
Like most business owners, in the early days I did both the selling and the doing, so I had executed all kinds of research projects and I had made so many mistakes that I had built a base of understanding around what works and what doesn't. When I did the selling, I was subconsciously relying on seven years of experience in market research. Before starting the company, I spent three years producing a radio feature in which I interviewed a different entrepreneur every day for three years. This allowed me to hone my experience crafting the open-ended questions necessary for qualitative market research.
By the time I started hiring salespeople, I had probably invested 10,000 hours or so in conducting research, which Malcolm Gladwell argues in his book Outliers is the amount of time one must invest to truly master something.
Mr. Gladwell points out the Beatles had been together as a band playing in local pubs for about 10,000 hours before they broke through. Likewise, Bill Gates had been programming computers for about 10,000 hours before Microsoft popped.
My salespeople were being asked to talk intelligently about such a wide variety of research services they couldn't possibly know everything about. Meanwhile, I was thrashing around grasping for revenue anywhere I could find it and tailoring our services for every customer who asked. All of that zigzagging and customization undermined my salespeople; they tried to follow me like a police officer trailing a drunk driver. It was not until we stopped selling 90 per cent of what we were offering in favour of a single subscription of reports and events that we were actually able to get salespeople to start making sales.
With less to sell, our salespeople were able to master one kind of market research. Again, it wasn't that they all of a sudden became knowledgeable researchers, they simply got a chance to practise a single pitch a lot.
In my experience, I've found that salespeople thrive on repetition whereas entrepreneurs love variety. Salespeople like mastering a pitch; entrepreneurs like problem solving.
If you want to build a valuable business — one you can sell — you need to get other people to do the selling. Your salespeople need practice, which means picking one service, packaging it and giving your sales staff time to master the pitch before you go changing it on them.
Special to the Globe and Mail
John Warrillow is the author of Built To Sell : Turn Your Business Into One You Can Sell. Throughout his career as an entrepreneur, Mr. Warrillow has started and exited four companies. Most recently he transformed Warrillow & Co. from a boutique consultancy into a recurring revenue model subscription business, which he sold to The Corporate Executive Board in 2008. He is the author of Drilling for Gold and in 2008 was recognized by BtoB Magazine's "Who's Who" list as one of America's most influential business-to-business marketers.