A Tale of Two Conundrums
Final Sigma was imagined to sit at the intersection between burned-out enterprise sales reps and befuddled small-business owners. Two stressed out parties, each looking for the solution the other has to offer, but sometimes neither of them know it.
The Sales Rep Problem
In today’s marketplace, the B2B Account Executive has the opportunity to out-earn many, many other professions. Having attached himself to his companies top-line revenue, the more business he brings through the door, the greater his paycheck month after month.
However, with great responsibility comes great expectations. The best income is available working for some of the largest companies. In the largest companies, the sales professional (along with just about everyone else) is many degrees removed from the men and women who make the most important decisions related to his professional life and career. Some have found that they thrive in this environment, but there are others who long to use their hard-won skills in sales in a context with closer connection to one’s colleagues and clients.
The Business Owner Problem
You’ve probably heard it before, “The only thing sales people are good at selling is themselves!”
It’s true. A good sales professional has charisma coursing through his veins. He accidentally wins over the goodwill of others, especially his prospective clients, and it’s made him a lot of money over the years.
However, there’s a growing cadre of small-business owners who swear against employing such sales professionals inside their organizations. They seem to all have experienced a similar story arc. When they launched their business, the owner himself was the primary salesperson. He (or she!) leveraged his network and work ethic to obtain the first gaggle of clients to move his vision in the right direction. As his customer base grew, he found operations needed his attention and went looking for new angles to offload some of his sales responsibilities.
There are generally three approaches he might try:
Use a Third-Party Company
Anyone with “owner” or “chief” in their LinkedIn profile has experienced the deluge of emails, prospecting messages from companies who promise to deliver oodles of new customers if you’ll sign up for their service. Generally these are somewhat hit-or-miss with a large percentage landing in the “miss” category.
The biggest hurdle here is that a third-party company will never care about the business nearly as much as the owner does. They don’t have any cultural investment (or perhaps professional consequences) that would help them persevered when things get tough. There are (maybe) good months, and there are (certainly) bad months. In the end, these often end up as experiments in driving revenue, instead of the solution they were presented to be.
Incentivize the Operations Team
This approach seems to solve the “cultural investment” problem, by offering bonuses, commissions, and other financial reasons for the operations team inside the company to drum up more business. It seems that the people best suited to find clients for the business are the people currently serving the current clients of the business. Who knows the product and the value of that product better than the operations team?
After a while, this also flashes out. The operations team already has a focus for their day-to-day work: operations! Though this approach does reel in a few good clients on a more occasional basis, the business owner never truly offloads the work of “sales” onto anybody else. His team is a bit more vigilant, keeping an eye out for interested parties in personal and professional circles (when they’re not doing the work of their operations job). The owner himself is still burdened with being the sales guy for his business, and so he keeps looking for the next solution.