Growing Your Offline Consulting Business By Expanding Your Sales Force
Many people in the internet marketing world are waking up to the significantly under-served opportunities available in the real world – selling online marketing services to offline brick and mortar businesses. Talk about turning bricks into gold! For those who have been engaged in this arena for some time however, many eventually find the growth of their offline consulting business limited by the constraints on their own personal time.
The obvious solution to this problem of course is to hire a salesperson. Unfortunately, while the solution may be obvious, the time spent, risks, and costs of actually hiring the right salesperson for your offline consulting business are not so obvious. Today we are going to take a look at three different options for expanding your sales force, what their advantages and disadvantages are, and which circumstances are best suited for each option.
The three options that we shall discuss for expanding your sales force are as follows:
1. Using commission only sales agents
2. Outsourcing your sales activity
3. Recruiting sales people
A commission only sales agent, or salesperson, is an independent contractor (not an employees) who usually represents or promotes more than one business/product. The big advantage to using a commission only sales agent is the low cost and low monetary risk, since you do not pay this salesperson any money at all until they actually close a sale for you. They only get paid when you make money, so there is no upfront cash outlay for your business. There is also no base salary or employment taxes to pay, nor benefits to provide, nor employment paperwork to file.
The downside though is that you can only influence these sales people, but you cannot control what they do. If they decide to focus their efforts on other products or businesses and make your services less of a priority, then there isn’t much you can do about it, so you may not want to rely solely on this kind of an arrangement for your sales force, but use it in connjuction with either or both of the other options below. Additionally, using a commission only sales agent most often works better for selling products rather than services, so you may need to spend some extra time training this kind of salesperson and familiarizing them with your offline consulting services.
Our second option of outsourcing your sales activity can really be done in one of two ways. You can choose to either outsource only certain functions (like cold-calling, telephone follow up, or managing a direct mailing campaign), or outsource the entire sales process. These may be good options for you if you need something done quickly, and the partial outsourcing option in particular may be ideal for complementing the efforts of your sales force.
However, with partial outsourcing, you still don’t have the whole job covered, so you may still need to hire a salesperson.
If you choose to outsource every part of the sales process, it will free up quite a bit of your management time. However, it is extremely difficult to do this on a commission-only basis (especially if you have a very long sales cycle). You will most likely need to agree to a shared-risk payment structure that includes both a day rate plus a commission payment. This means you have to pay for their work even if they never close a single sale!
Another significant disadvantage to outsourcing your entire sales process is that you lose the opportunity to build relationships with your customers, making this a poor long-term choice.
For maximum control of the sales process, the best option is undoubtedly to recruit your own sales people (i.e. hire your own employees). In this situation, you get to dictate where your sales people focus their efforts, and even how they should do their job.
The big problem with this of course is the risk, time and effort required, and the relatively high cost.
In this case, you do need to offer some base salary, pay employment taxes, consider providing employee benefits, and file all of the necessary employment paperwork – and all of this only after going through the whole recruiting process! And even then, you may find that you’ve hired someone who simply cannot deliver the increased sales to pay for their employment.
Most certainly there is no sure-fire solution to finding exactly the right salesperson for your offline consulting business. But if you’re currently a maxed-out, stressed-out, one-man sales force, then you should not let the potential pitfalls of hiring a salesperson stop you from doing just that. Simply think things through beforehand and make sure you’re choosing the right option for your particular situation. Keep realistic expectations of what can be accomplished when, and remember, if it does not work out, you can always make a change.
