In my research with dozens of clients, new hires who are “experienced” salespeople rarely outperform inexperienced ones who are enthusiastic and eager to learn and develop.
The value of experience is most often the relationships that seasoned salespeople come in with. But a huge problem often overwhelms this upside: most experienced salespeople are used to the phone ringing, and to taking orders. There is an inverse relationship between sales experience and proactivity. Think about your experienced colleagues right now: how many outbound, proactive phone calls do they make to prospects? Almost always, not many. (Which is why my revenue growth program is so powerful for clients: we infuse disciplined proactive communications, because the more that customers and prospects hear from us, the more they buy from us. When we increase outbound communication systematically, sales always go up.)
Therefore, when you hire salespeople, hire those with enthusiasm, open minds, and an interest in learning and developing. These are things we cannot teach. Everything else — techniques, language, technical details — is eminently teachable. But personality and outlook is innate. Bring in positive, enthusiastic people who are interested in developing themselves, and your odds are high to turn them into superstar salespeople relatively quickly and quite easily.
Book Your 2017 Sales Kickoff With Me
I’m offering a powerful new private 2017 sales kickoff workshop. This is for one company at a time, at your location, and is intended to teach your customer-facing staff — salespeople, customer service, technical people — how to sell dramatically more, quickly and easily. (For example, your typical customer only knows about 20% of what you can sell them — let me teach your staff how to significantly increase this awareness!)
This workshop is two to three hours in length, and is meant to be delivered early in the year. Optionally, we can include follow-up webinars, and accountability measures to ensure your people doing the simple work required to grow your sales.
If you want to kick off 2017 with a sales rocket boost, call me directly at 847-459-6322, or reply to this email to schedule a call with me in the next week.