Why you shouldn’t hire a salesperson

In this article I’ll explain why, and how to become an amazing salesperson.

Introduction

In order to grow your entrepreneurial skills, business and wealth, you need to be able to sell. It doesn’t matter if you have your own sales team, or your business isn’t sales focused in the traditional sense, you still need to be able to sell. In this article I’m going to tell you why you shouldn’t hire a salesperson.

People buy more than products and services. Your team, clients and investors buy your vision, dream and aspirations. They buy into you, and your confidence, since confidence is a sign of success. Everyone wants to be associated with successful people, after all, they too want to be a part of success.

why you shouldn’t hire a salesperson

Most people hate the idea of being a salesperson, my former self included. When I started to grow my business I realised that my objections to selling were based around the idea of a stereotypical salesperson that I had formed in my head.

I imagined a guy from the 1980s with slick-back hair, shoulder pads that threw business cards at everyone he met after an intrusive announcement of his name. I call him Brad Steel. He’s the antithesis of who I want to be. I’m really not sure where I got this image from, perhaps there is some collective archetype of a salesperson, proliferated throughout the media and society. In either case, the idea of being a sales guy did not a appeal to me in the slightest.

This psychological hang-up, wherever it was formed, left me avoiding sales conversations, and inexperienced in the art of salesmanship and negotiation. Sales was a dirty word I was keen to avoid and I proudly told clients “I don’t do sales!” I realise now this was nonsense. This inexperience meant I lacked the confidence to fight my corner when it came to difficult questions from prospective clients, meaning I would often cave in to their requests and demands. Whilst this might sound good for my clients, it also meant I agreed to things I couldn’t deliver, ultimately leaving them disappointed.

In contrast, those clients I did pick up only hired me because I was the cheapest, a race to the bottom. Meanwhile, my competitors would say anything to secure a job and at the highest rate, and as a result my business suffered as potential clients gravitated to the reassurance of these more savvy and confident businesses.

It doesn’t have to be that way, and I realise now that there is a middle ground, a way of selling that is not only good for us, it helps our clients get what they want too.

Our perception of sales

Sales is the business function within your agency or business that allows you to help people. Sales is just as important as the other amazing work you do, and it requires as much focus on developing and improving. As you grow your business your relationship with sales will change. When your business is small you will be responsible for most, if not all of the sales. As you grow you may bring in more people to help you, and eventually you may find yourself in a position whereby you aren’t doing any of the sales, instead focusing on the overall business strategy. That said, unless your business is huge, i.e a 50 person, 7-figure agency, this is unlikely to be the case. I know plenty of agency owners that have over a dozen staff and yet still do most, if not all of the sales themselves, simply because they are best at it. I personally do a lot of the larger sales meetings and nurturing, although I also have staff that handle a lot of the smaller clients as well as help with upselling and cross selling and this arrangement works well for us.

One of the worst things you can do early on is bring in a sales person in an effort to avoid being part of the sales process. I know, as I made the same mistake. Back when my business was just me and a freelance designer, I decided to hire a salesperson. He was a nice, personable guy with a background in selling cars for BMW. He didn’t have any agency experience, but was pretty IT literate and could talk with some authority to clients after I had given him some basic training. He dressed sharp, spoke in a compelling, authoritative voice and was far more confident than I was.

When I hired him I thought he would be generating sales for me, but it turns out many salespeople expect to be spoon fed leads that they then convert into sales, getting a fat commission for each time. Sales requires marketing, and what most sales people really want to do is just convert warm leads.

Back then I relied on inbound leads which were plentiful, although generally confined to local, low paying clients. This suited my sales guy perfectly as he could drive out to see them, and they weren’t too big or sophisticated and were relatively easy to convert. He was active with every lead I sent him, working hard to do whatever he needed in order to impress the prospect and convert them into a client, and I thought at the time he did a pretty good job of converting about 1 in 5 of the leads I sent him whilst I was able to focus on building websites with my designer with the time he freed up.

It seemed like a good deal to me and we started to get quite busy. So much business in fact that I wanted to ramp things up and get an office in our local city in order to meet more clients and further boost sales. I asked my sales guy to report to the office as it would look a bit odd just me in there alone – my designer worked overseas. I knew at the time that this office was the natural next step for my business which had a growing local client base, and it would surely help build the sales pipeline.

The night before we had agreed to move into the new office, my sales guy sent me an email, telling me he wouldn’t be there to help me anymore and was seeking employment elsewhere. I had already promoted the new office online and had started to receive enquiries and had a number of meetings booked, but no sales guy to convert them. Knowing that it would just look plain weird to clients meeting one guy in this new office, I paid a friend to sit in on some meetings with me so it looked like I had a team, albeit a small one.

That January was an absolutely crazy time. I had over 20 sales meetings and instead of converting about 20% of them, my strike rate was closer to 90%. Nearly every single person that walked through those doors became a paying client and I was able to hire my friend on a full time position and then hire a Studio Manager to help free up some more of my time to best focus on sales and driving the business forward. By the end of that year we had doubled our sales, we did the same again the following year resulting in a need to hire a total of 8 staff and a much bigger office. I’m so glad my sales person walked out on me, otherwise none of this stuff would have happened.

When I have a sales meeting with a client, I’m not really selling anything. I simply talk to them, get to know them, and speak about some of the amazing work we do and people we have helped. There’s no hard-sales or pressure from us, we are there to help people who are a good fit for us. When I think of sales, selling and salespeople, I think of conversations and getting to know people in order to help them.

Don’t hire a salesperson!

Back when I made the mistake of hiring that salesperson, I thought perhaps I had just got unlucky and even considered hiring another to again avoid doing the selling. At some point I started working with a mentor who told me that this was a common problem with young agencies, and that really I should be doing the sales myself. My mentor was still partially responsible for the sales by the time he grew it to over 25 people and around $3m in revenue.

I also started to network with other agency owners, and over time found out that in every case, unless the agency was large enough for the founder to almost completely step back from the business, then they would still be responsible for doing the sales. In fact, I know an agency owner that is fully in charge of his sales in his $5m agency. He knows that no one can do sales better than him because no one cares as much about the sale than he does.

Below I’ve listed the reasons why the business owner is nearly always better at sales

  • No one cares as much as you

    It’s a simple fact that no employee is going to care as much about the sale as you do.

  • You know your stuff

    Many salespeople have generic sales knowledge, they are unlikely to be experts in what you do.

  • You are authentic and real

    Salespeople can sometimes come across as lacking authenticity.

  • Only you have real authority

    Clients want to buy from decision makers, not sales staff.

  • You can work out a good client fit

    Sales staff are motivated to take on any and all work, even when it’s not good for you.

Your sales superpower

If you are thinking “but I suck at sales!” or “I’m too shy to sell!” then you aren’t alone.

If I’m totally honest, the reason I tried to do everything I could to avoid being a salesperson was because at my core I’m a nerd. Nerds don’t make good salespeople, right? I think its important to remember there are many great successful leaders out there that are not the archetypical salesperson, fellow nerds.

Bill Gates and Elon Musk have both been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. Richard Brandson and Gary Vaynerchuk have both been diagnosed with ADHD. Neither of these conditions are particularly associated with sales skills, and yet their success speaks for itself.

It turns out that us introverted nerds usually have a combination of traits that together make for an absolute stellar sales combination.

Empathy + Knowledge + Authenticity

Knowledge and effective use of empathy is absolutely key in the world of business. Combine that with authenticity then you have all of the ingredients needed for persuasive selling.

An abundance of empathy can be an incredibly powerful tool in terms of connecting with people. It can be a superpower when it comes to connecting people as well as sales meetings. Tapping into a collective shared understanding allows you not only to understand others better, but also the people you are talking to pick up on this interconnectedness on a subconscious level. When you are truly empathetic with someone, the other person will read your micro-gestures and interpret your actions and intentions as genuine and authentic – to be trusted. This creates a bridge of trust between two people, the foundation of all relationships and business. When you open yourself to a full sense of empathy you are essentially hacking into the source code that evolved over millions of years to allow humans to understand who can be trusted and who should be feared. Our emotions are shortcuts to thinking, chemical and hormonal influences to decision making that can be tapped into using empathy.

Doing so is not easy and can take a lot of practice. It can also make you feel vulnerable and off guard, and as you open up as a person you will make mistakes and sometimes be too open. This is all part of the trade-off and it’s not for everyone.

I’m personally a highly empathic person. I’m one of those people that will cry (at least on the inside) if I see another person in tears, especially if it is someone that does not usually convey their feelings so openly. In an important business meeting or pitch, sometimes when I feel I’m really connected to the people I’m talking to I will get goosebumps on my head and neck. This is referred to as autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) which sometimes has sexual connotations to it, however for me there is nothing sexual about it at all, just a feeling of complete connectedness with another person or people. My understanding is that this feeling is some kind of chemical reward mechanism evolved in our brains in order to encourage positive social interactions. A nudge from our source code to encourage societal altruism as this will benefit the race and therefore the “selfish” genes responsible.

“When you show deep empathy toward others, their defensive energy goes down, and positive energy replaces it. That’s when you can get more creative in solving problems.”

Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Using your natural empathy can be a key component to success in sales and any awareness and enhancement can only be a good thing for your sales pipeline and for you as a human being. Contrary to what many may believe, the vast majority of entrepreneurs and indeed business owners big and small are highly empathic. Businesses are built on people and there is real truth to the old adage it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. Developing soft skills that allow you to effectively communicate and work with people is an absolute must.

If you want to boost your empathy levels the first thing to do is simply be aware of your own empathy, and lack of it. When you are talking with other people, take note of how you feel, how connected you are and try to empathise with their point of view. Listen to others and put yourself in their place, imagine being them and facing the challenges they face and seeing things from their perspective. As with all skills, practice makes perfect and this is not something you will develop within yourself over night, but you will certainly get better at it once to start.

Confidence

How can you sell more of your products or services? By increasing your confidence. Easy to say, harder to do, especially if you are introverted like many entrepreneurs I know, myself included.

Without a doubt confidence is one of the biggest drivers of how successful someone is at selling something, be it a product, service or even an idea. One of the best salesmen I’ve ever met is my foster brother, Mike Rutherford. Mike is the son of my foster father, the people that took me when I was 15 years old. This amazing family showed me what wealth, ambition and pride looked like, and I see them as the initial catalyst that helped me turn my life around. Just a year older than me, he was a great big brother to have around. It surprised no one to see Mike become an amazing salesman, oozing charm and confidence, able to sell snow to an Eskimo.

But, I was never as confident, and some of the trouble I experienced in my early childhood left me with a host of issues including a lack of assertiveness and confidence. So, for a long time, I avoided sales entirely. That obviously had to change when I decided to grow my business.

The good news is confidence in sales and therefore, business and even life is far easier to achieve than I realised back then. Indeed, confidence is known as one of the self-fulling prophecies. Start acting confident, and you will start to genuinely feel it. All you have to do is put yourself into those situations that make you a little uneasy. Then, the next time it’s easier! How simple is that? If only someone had told me that earlier! Think about it, remember the first time you did something totally new such as a driving lesson, or got on a plane. A mixture of feeling terrified and excited, right? How did you feel the next time? As the saying goes, there is nothing to fear but fear itself, and the trick is to try and tap into that excitement as much as you can whilst you remind yourself it will become much easier over time. You might be surprised to find you eventually enjoy sales! Believe me, I was!

“Mentally strong people overcome setbacks with confidence because adversity only makes them better.”

Amy Morin, author of 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do

You can start in a small way, perhaps by controlling the situation to make yourself more comfortable. When I first started out I was so scared of selling that I would sometimes be too nervous to even pick up the phone. If a potential client called I could feel my heart racing and I tried my best not to mess it up. Today, as I write these words on a plane flying over the South of Portugal, I genuinely believe I’d be confident trying to sell to Bill Gates, Elon Musk, or any hot shot you can think of. I don’t think I’d break a sweat. So, how did I go from nervous wreck to confident salesman?

First, I started by forcing myself to face my biggest fear – the telephone. It was horrible at first, and every ring brought panic, but I knew it was only temporary. Within about a week I was actually looking forward to it ringing, and rightly so, each call was a potential sale getting me closer to where I wanted to be.

Next I had to face my fear of selling in person. I always used to make the clients meet me at my office so I could get everything ready how I wanted it, and I just felt safer and more secure in a familiar setting. I had everything planned out and organised to minimise my own stress. Over time I started to ramp things up, first meeting clients off-site, and eventually hosting events and happily talking to anyone. The confidence is something very much perceived by others, which is why even with his asbestos like personality, Brad Steel is a great salesman. Imagine what someone can do with a decent personality, enthusiasm, a genuine passion for their work combined with deep, authentic empathy.

Conclusion

You sales skills are something you will keep with you for the rest of your life, beyond the business you are building now, or the job you have. You will use your sales skills in all aspects of everything you do, they are as vital as learning to read and write. Developing your sales skills is something that will help maximise your life to it’s full potential.

If you would like any sales tips or advice, get in touch with me on the Slack group, or if you are a current mentee of mine, let me know you would be interested in developing this aspect of your skillset.

Further reading

  • Sales and Marketing category
  • To Sell Is Human by Daniel H. Pink
  • Introvert’s Edge by Matthew Pollard
  • Fanatical Prospecting by Jeb Blount
  • Spin Selling by Neil Rackham
  • The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon