High End Local SEO - Where Can I Find Sales People?

If you want to hire good salespeople you have to approach it just like you would any prospect. You're doing a sales job to get them to spend their time working on your business. Sure others will tell you just get on craigslist or other complete BS dreams of theirs, but ask them how many salespeople have you actually had work longer than six months in your business that brought you in 5-10-50x what you paid them.

First off, you have to be a real business. You can't be a part-time hobby. The quality salespeople I got when I rented office space downtown, and a secretary and all that more than paid for itself. When I was working from home, I got a lot of crap. People didn't "buy" that I was a real business, and that I would actually write them a paycheck that wouldn't bounce, etc. Think about it, who wants to take their time and energy when their not even sure you can pay the bills. I'm not saying you can't make it happen working from home, but you have to have a credibility factor. If you're working from home, you have to have a pretty significant client list, and you have to be a better salesperson yourself to sell them on the "opportunity". Just renting a $700-1,000 office and having a part-time assistant can be a huge credibility booster. It's all about selling yourself and your "real" business.No one wants to waste their time on something you're not committed to, and is just a dream.

Second, don't be cheap. Most sales jobs aren't commission only. They just aren't(outside of craigslist scams). So do your research on what other jobs that they might be looking for are paying. In my area it was around $50,000-70,000. So you need to get there with some mixture of base pay, commission and bonuses. Also don't be stupid and offer the moon, if you say pay up to $200k that just signals scam to most people. I don't care if I'm going to make $100k off this sale, I'm still only going to pay you a normal sized commission. Usually 3-10% is enough to make anyone very happy.

Third, offer value that matters to salespeople. Think it through their thinking process. What do they want? Generally it's not just money. What they want, what their dream job is, is a stream of prospects being generated by the business. I created dream sales jobs by putting a funnel in place to where the only thing the salesperson had to do was close the sale. We're talking direct mail, telemarketing, appointment setting, white papers, etc. I didn't require them to cold call, or even warm call, they only got the really hot calls that were almost ready to buy. I might have 3-4 staff in place to generate enough hot calls for a closer. What can you do to make that happen?

Fourth, have some systems in place. I talked about a funnel up above. Have a complete sales system in place. How do you get people in the funnel? How do you communicate with them while they are in the funnel? What are the multiple ways you attempt to move people further in your funnel? Do you have follow up systems, referral systems, customer satsifaction systems, etc? Do you have a functional CRM?

The problem is most people are going to miss most of these steps and they are going to waste a lot of time, energy and money on people that aren't going to treat it like a job. But if you want to be taken seriously then take the time to design it like a serious enterprise. Again I find it highly doubtful that anyone working this part-time, and not fully committed will hire and retain any salesperson longer than six months.

If you aren't to the point where you can do these things, and the main reason why you're hiring a salesperson is because you're ineffective as a salesperson or you just don't want to do it. Then I'd recommend just partnering with a salesperson. You probably don't have a real business yet if you're not actively pitching in the marketplace. So find a way to get a partner that can close the businesses for you. Or even a partner that can help put in place the sales systems for a cut of the business, etc. Or listen to the Kan man(Kanigan), he'll train you up in sales. Get out there and prove your system yourself first and then you'll know when you're ready to hire your first sales person.

Good Luck.