You know how frustrating and stressful and overwhelming it is when you leave every sales meeting wondering if your sales team knows how to sell because they are not selling, and all you ever hear from them are excuses…
Few things are harder for a business than hiring good salespeople. Hiring in general is difficult these days and then it takes time to know whether or not your new hire is going to become a revenue-generating rockstar or someone that wastes a lot of management time and energy and produces very little.
The Harvard Business Review found that the rate of turnover for sales teams is 27% higher than in the general labor force. And, companies in the United States spend more than $15 billion every year to train new salespeople to replace the ones that have left. Add in projected revenue these salespeople would have generated (after all, that is why you hired them) and that is a big hit on the bottom line.
In addition, Hire Velocity estimates that it will cost 1.5 to 2 times that employee’s annual salary to replace them. Another hit on the bottom line.
So, let’s jump ahead and assume you have hired a new salesperson. You have high hopes and your fingers are crossed. Wouldn’t it be nice to have an easy way to make that new salesperson revenue-generating quickly and to also know whether your new hire has rockstar potential or is a dud?
Actually, there is.
What too many companies do when they hire a new salesperson is to teach that new salesperson every last thing they need to know about what they are selling. That can take a long time. We have clients that routinely spend close to a year on this. This is an expensive proposition if that new hire does not ultimately work out.
Some companies also invest in sales training for their new hires. It can take a long time to teach a new salesperson all of the skills that they need to successfully close sales. And, at the end of the training, there’s no guarantee they will actually be able to successfully close sales. This is an expensive proposition if that new hire does not ultimately work out.
The answer to making a newly hired sales person productive and revenue generating quickly is much simpler. Your new sales hire does not need to understand every detail of your offering and they do not yet need to know how to close. What they need to know first is how to prospect and set up qualified appointments so that they can build a pipeline of opportunities for someone on the team that has experience and knows how to close.
If you have the right process and training in place, it’s possible to teach someone with no background in sales or your offering to set up qualified appointments in a matter of weeks. By setting up qualified appointments for more experienced team members they become revenue-generating quickly. They can also start to learn about your offering and how to sell it by observing their more experienced team members. And if they can build a pipeline for someone else… why then, they’ll be able to build a pipeline for themselves.
And, if you have inadvertently hired someone that is unwilling or unable to prospect, you will find this out quickly, in a matter of weeks. If your new hire cannot or will not prospect, they are unlikely to be highly effective and/or revenue-generating. If that is the case, you can cut your losses right there and then.
If you’d like to learn more about getting new hires to prospect and build a pipeline of qualified opportunities faster, more easily and more profitably, I invite you to watch this demonstration of the Salesology® Prospecting Model: A Simple, 3-Step Method That, On Average, Increases Qualified Appointments & Sales By 73%.
