Can anyone help me please?

Mike22

here is the story, i have a wonderful product/service for our potential clients, i sell at least 10 sales per week i have been doing sales for 4 years which i know isnt that long but i am very successfull with everything i put my heart into, i am having a problem hiring sales reps to do the job, let me rephrase that, experienced sales reps and area managers to work with me and push the service, my own clients tell me that they would have to be stupid to not use our service, i am not streatching the trueth here, why can i not find good reps i pay commissions and 25% residuals which if equals if a rep where to make 16 sales per month would end up giving the rep 75k/year in commissions and residuals i am lost here and dont have an answer? and we live in north dakota where thats really good money? we have a great reputation and have alot of larger companies using us including a inc 5000 company here

any advice would be much appreciated thank you?

also i have to say i am new here, but this site is by far the most benificial site for sales that i have ever read, its nice to be in a community like this

thanks again guys

Mike

Skip Anderson

Hi Mike, welcome to the SalesPractice community.

I have a couple questions:

1. Would you mind sharing what your product/service is?

2. Is your challenge that you're not getting good sales candidates? Or is it that you are finding good sales candidates that but they aren't accepting the job you're offering to them? Or is it that candidates are accepting the job offer but then are not meeting your sales production expectations?

Skip Anderson

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Selling to Consumers
B2C Sales Training

Wonderboy

It's a simple matter of proper training, Mike. You can take any rep and train him or her to be successful. So it's a question on whether you want to put the time and effort into doing this?

Mike22

thanks for the response guys, well what our company does is we work with contractors and construction companies, we get them work for the season, we list thier business on tv, on our website, we advertise all over like local news papers, radio stations, tv, direct mailing, phone books, ect. to attract work for these companies. we only take on 6 contractors/companies per category the reason for that is we need to be able to take care of those guys that are with our service before we even think of taking on anymore clients, trust me its a full time job alone just in itself. the service works great and we keep our clients pretty happy, we do all this and all that we charge for our service is , you guys are probably going to laugh at me for this, $99/month. as you can see im not greedy and i truley want to help these companies, otherwise i would be charging more.

as far as the finding sales reps, i hired one guy that had no experience, i worked with him for about 2 weeks and coached him after that and he was doing really well until the rail road recruited him, i recruited an insurance sales guy, i have been working with him for a week and he doesnt want to really listen to my sales training, he is quite a bit older than me which i think may be the case, i know if he would listen to my advice he would be a heavy hitter with our company, the other reps dont really produce anything, i guess the big thing is do i hire experience or new blood, i hope these questions arnt to dumb, but i am looking at it and i think to myself "i have an awesome service, its easy to sell or for me it is, why cant these guys sell it? its a win win for everyone who joins our business family i dont get it." maybe i am looking for reps in the wrong places. but it is a simple service to sell and we arent asking a whole lot for it, does that answer your questions?

SpeedRacer

Recruiting, Training and Retaining employees is a bit more complex Wonderboy.

Good question and one that many managers have to consider. May I ask, what is your recruiting plan?

Mike22

just to be honest speed racer, i am only a little fish in big shoes, i had no idea this business was going to take off like this, i really dont have a recruiting plan other than the paper and referrals and the paper is running non-stop i have some national companies wanting me to expand and fast because we save them large sums of money and time and in turn they give us all their work to give to our cocntractors thats why im in this bind the one company we have has sent us a little over 800k in work to us for our clients this season. the only sales training or mentoring i have had has been by authors of the books i have read and still read, and by trial and error, that is on the sales end, on the business end i have 2 mentors that help me with the nuts and bolts of the operation.
my primary goal is to get a rock solid sales team put together as quickly as i can, and in return for the reps that help me i compensate them as much as i possibly can financially

SpeedRacer

Have you considered formulating an ideal employee profile to benchmark each candidate against? This is like an ideal customer profile but for employees. If you don't know what you want how will you know when you've found it?

Skip Anderson

Excellent, Speed, that is exactly what I was going to recommend and then I noticed you already posted this response.

Skip Anderson

Joe Closer

That's a terrific suggestion.

I personally have felt that the biggest trait I would look for in a prospective sales employee (or any category) is the abilty to follow instructions. One of the things I've inserted into the recruiting/interview process is to the subtle inclusion of an "assignment". An example would be some paperwork to be filled out with very specific instructions, and ones that I would verbally discuss before they completed it.

The reasoning is simple. If you have a selling format that is working for your company, you need new people to follow that format.

BossMan

Mike22 what are the three biggest challenges your new hires face to becoming successful selling your service?