How should I pay my sales people?

Does that sound good to you? How long does it take you to make one such site? Is $100 worth you spending that time making one website?


In my case, the answer is no.


How much you pay, determines to a large extent who's going to agree to sell for you, the more you pay, the more options you have. On the other hand, you need to make sure you're covering you.


What are your expenses? How much do you think you should earn for an hour of work? How much do you want your profit to be?


(Consider that some of the people will want you to make changes or will call you to ask questions, complain... and that's work too.)


As just mathematics, I think you getting one third only is no good... Should be the other way around, in my opinion....

Why are you lowballing?

Would Walmart buy a $299 website?

Give yourself some more room to work with, for gosh sake.

Of course Walmart isn't going to hire a freelancer designer. But consider a decent family-owned company, or even a strip mall mattress store. Do you think they want the
"cheapest" outcome... or the "best" or "most effective" outcome?

I know who I'd rather work with.

Now as to the salesperson.

It seems so easy, the idea of "I'll just hire a salesperson". Well good luck.

The good salespeople are working. They're out there making money, because they know how to sell.

The people you're likely to attract with a CL ad or whatever are the rejected parts.

Never make your business out of rejected parts.

No matter what direction you go in, you're going to need the following three systems (and I've been talking about this here on the forum since 2011):

1. Lead generation
2. Qualification
3. Closing.

You're thinking of #3 only, I'll bet. But number one question of that salesperson you want to hire is going to be: "Where are the leads coming from, and how good are they?"

I'll share something with you: closers do not like to prospect.

Two different skill sets.

So you'd better have all that figured out and in place before you go looking for a salesperson.

The Truth is that it is very, very challenging to find and keep commission-based salespeople. Especially at this low level.

Someone who has the confidence, the skill, and the ability to go say 6 weeks before seeing any income as they learn the business is rare. Ask other people in this subforum. They know.

Over the years I have literally given away my sales training, including my personal time, to people I found here who came to me and said they wanted to work on commission. I gave them the tools. But within a couple weeks, as soon as another opportunity opened up, even to make minimum wage, they jumped back into the certainty of a paycheck.

It has been 5 years at least since I did this, but I'll bet if I tried again the same result would happen today.

Every so often I get messaged by someone who says, "Hey Jason, you're great at sales...and I have a great product. We should team up!" No, I'm not interested. I have my own focus, my own dreams, and yours will always be a distant tenth or twelfth.

Maybe you can luck out and find someone who can stick the grind out and work for for nothing for awhile. I doubt it. I haven't seen success stories about it here or elsewhere in 10 years.

Pay them by the hour and you'll attract freeloaders who you might be afraid to fire because of having to go through the crap of rehiring and starting over from scratch. Until you have a proven consistent sales process I would not do this.

As DABK said, if you must do this make sure your math makes sense first. Do you think your salesperson is going to sell five a day? One a day? Not likely. Certainly not at first. That's a lot of dialing. And remember, closers don't like to dial.

IMO you should go to work for a successful agency, maybe one that's not too big, say six or seven people, and see what they did and do to be where they're at. Get paid to learn instead of getting punched in the face.

When I worked in an outbound call centre I sold listings in no-named directories for more than $299. People would happily pull out their credit cards on the spot if you made it sound good. Point is, to a business with actual revenue this amount of money is trivial, and it might be helpful to have the same outlook.

Think what one client paying you $2,000 a month would do for you.

Or you could just skip all the selling part, and build your own 5 page website...selling 5 page websites for $99.

Don't hire a salesperson. How would you be able to train them? Paying a salary would be like throwing money down a black hole. And why would someone want to sell your website services? Where would they get the leads? Who will close the sales? Who will prospect?

Why not practice what you preach. If you know anything about building a website that actually sells something, build a string of websites selling your service to different types of businesses.

Buy PPC ads or create Youtube videos that talk about how a website can sell their offers.



An alternative is to simply contract with others that sell similar services, and be their website builder. Or just advertise on Fiverr or related sites. Here's a link to a list.
https://www.websitehostingrating.com...-alternatives/

Do the sales yourself. Lots of web designers do, especially in the beginning. Learning to sell is a great life skill to have. It follows you, even if you stop doing websites.

It bleeds into other parts of your life.

My grandfather had 40 years in sales. Old school. When I was about 12, I wanted to make $$$.

So I went knocking on doors. Without a lawn mower. Asking people if I could mow their lawn. And if they said yes, I then had to ask if I could use their mower too. Haha.

And made like $ 100 to $ 200 a week.

And my grandfather would ask, how much did you make this week? And I'd say something like $ 140.

And he'd light up. Because he knew. I was learning.

I had no sales experience and no lawn mower. And still made good $$$ in 1993 for a 12 yr old kid ... by mowing lawns.

Life experience is the best sales training system there is. The No's are better than the Yes's.

Go get a bunch of No's. That's what makes you learn.

P.S. My grandfather taught me both nothing and everything about sales. If he had sat me down and got me to create a script? I wouldn't have learned. I would have memorized his script.

Instead, he let me go knock on doors with no knowledge of how to sell. And that's how I learned to sell. Some doors? No answer. Some doors? No thank you. Some doors? Get outta here! Some doors? $$$

That's a life metaphor that most don't learn. Like deep in their bones. 12 yr old me learned that and sometimes I forget.

But then I remember -- okay, next door please.

Go knock on some doors. Make some phone calls. Get that learning. It's more valuable than someone handing you their script, their box, their paradigm.

If you believe you need a salesperson?

Then you will need a salesperson. Meaning, your whole business will rely on them. Rely on yourself first. Go sell.