How To Be Properly Prepared When Hiring Your First Sales Rep
When it’s time to hire your first sales rep as a business owner, although it can be a daunting prospect, it’s also a time of great excitement, especially when you consider how pivotal the right salesperson can be for a company.
With this in mind, it’s crucial that you take the time to properly prepare for the process of hiring a sales rep, both to avoid employee turnover, and to ensure that your company doesn’t miss out on any opportunities to sell your products or services, and ultimately, get some money coming in!
Here are a few simple things to give careful consideration to, when you hire your first sales rep:
Where most of your leads are coming from
Are you finding that sales leads are coming into your business organically, or are you networking and spending a lot of time trying to generate new business? Once you know the answer to this, you’ll be able to determine what type of sales rep you need, such as one who will be responsible for closing sales incoming to the business and building client relationships, or one who needs to actively pursue sales leads. Different skillsets are needed for both, so it’s important to determine this early on in the recruitment phase.
Your sales process
Before you even contemplate hiring your first sales rep, it’s imperative that you have a defined and systematic sales process laid out, from beginning to end. There are several different stages to a sale, and you should have a clear idea of who will be doing what, at exactly which stage, irrespective of how many sales reps you hire. You should also try to customize your sales system according to the needs of your specific business, and with best practices firmly at the fore.
Your marketing efforts
A sales rep is only ever as good as the company’s marketing methods, and without placing a lot of focus on this aspect of the business, it’s unlikely that even the best sales rep in the land could turn you a profit. So, give careful consideration to your marketing efforts, and ask yourself whether you could be doing more to generate leads. It’s worth remembering that the majority of today’s consumers carry out online research before buying anything from a company, and certainly before communicating with a sales rep.
Your process for training a sales rep
It’s often poor sales leadership that causes sales reps to underperform in their roles, so to give your new rep the very best shot at success, make sure that your onboarding, training, and subsequent supervision, are adequate. Hiring your first sales rep and expecting them to do well without having been given any kind of direction or coaching, is both unrealistic, and unfair.
If you’re not in a position to train your sales teams personally, you could always consider enlisting help from a professional business consultancy, who will help put new systems in place if required, and train your sales reps to become a well-oiled machine that helps your business grown and prosper.
Hiring your first sales rep can mark a turning point for you and your business, but without due diligence and careful consideration to all of the points above, it can just as easily mark the beginning of your company’s downfall.
Recognizing those areas of your business, such as sales, in which you might need help to achieve success, is just as important as finding the right sales rep. So don’t rule out seeking expert guidance from a third party – it might be just what’s needed to help your first sales rep seal their first deal, and many more thereafter.
