Charisma Alone Cannot Sustain Your Company. Follow 3 Steps for a Business that Outlives You.
You have built your business around your uncanny ability to sell, and you have perfected the art of relationship building. Your sales superpowers have been astonishingly impactful in the formative stage of your business.
In fact, it is precisely because your business development efforts have been so effective that your business is no longer small or formative. As a result, you can no longer shoulder the volume of relationships and sales activity on your own.
For your company to continue to grow, sales must grow. For sales to grow, you must put infrastructure in place that allows others to do what you do. Win business.
Relinquishing sales is difficult. Do it anyway.
You’re not alone if the thought of ceding control of sales terrifies you. Most entrepreneurs share your fear. Still, unless you’ve discovered an elixir that will safeguard your youthful exuberance forevermore, there will come a time when you are going to need, or want, to do something else. Even if that time is far off, you will have to retire someday, so you must think of the future of the business you’ve worked tirelessly to build.
There’s simply no future for your business if you are its only sales engine. If all of the relationships rest in your rolodex and all of your business development knowledge lives in your head, your company is, frankly, unsellable. Regardless of whether you actually want to sell or not is beside the point; a sellable business is a healthy one.
3 pillars for a healthy organization — with or without you at the business development helm
You may not be in this position for lack of trying to hire sales talent. You’ve likely brought people onboard to fulfill sales functions, but you’ve been quickly disappointed in them. So you’ve let them go. Another common behavior pattern we see in entrepreneurs is hiring salespeople who aren’t high performers. As a result, you become accustomed to lackluster output.
You do not have to settle for mediocre performers. Nor can you expect someone to join your team and instantly fill your sales shoes. Despite what you may think, and despite your past hiring experiences, standing up an effective sales team is possible when you heed the three pillars that follow.
1. Internalize a hard truth: You are excellent but not unique
What you do, while impressive, is learnable. No matter how much sales prowess you possess, when given the proper tools and space to learn, others are also capable of being impactful business developers.
You simply must slow down. That is understandably difficult for someone who’s been successfully — and intuitively — selling for decades. However, in order for others to grasp how to do what you do, you must deconstruct your process. Then, teach it to your team step by step.
Begin deconstructing your sales process by putting a figurative GPS on yourself. Track how you handle important relationships, from initiating the connection to deepening the relationship to developing business.
Again, sales has been intuitive for you for a long time, so you’re probably unaware of the moves you make to close deals. They’re second nature. Consequently, you may need to enlist a coach to observe you and deconstruct your process on your behalf. An outside expert can record the choreography of a sale so others can pick up your dance, too.
Mo Bunnell is an extraordinary teacher and a fantastic deconstructor of business development processes. Consider his book, The Snowball System, an indispensable resource.
In addition to defining your culture, you should ruthlessly examine your general hiring practices, because most people are, to be blunt, abysmal at hiring.
2. Define your company’s business development and sales culture
To hire salespeople who will be able to follow your deconstructed process, you must ensure they mesh with your company’s culture. Start by defining that culture.
Is your business highly relational or highly transactional? A highly transactional business tends to focus on one-and-done engagements. We most often see product companies behave transactionally. Companies selling services are usually relational. They focus on deep, long-term connections to drum up lasting business.
Use your understanding of your culture to inform your hiring decisions. That is to say, if your business is highly relational, look for people who are also highly relational.
Your grasp of your culture will also help you set realistic expectations for new staff. For example, if your company is relational, you know it takes about 18 months to nurture a meaningful relationship with a green contact. Therefore, you can’t measure a new hire’s success based on closed business — at least not during that critical first year and a half.
Instead, put appropriate success indicators in place based on your culture. Is a new salesperson taking a lot of meetings with their contacts to water the relationship, so to speak, and to foster trust? Do they genuinely care about the people with whom they interact? Those are good signs that the relationships they’re forging will be harvestable in good time.
These appropriate success indicators have the added benefit of stopping you from firing someone prematurely, giving them a chance to mature into a great salesperson for your business.
In addition to defining your culture, you should ruthlessly examine your general hiring practices, because most people are, to be blunt, abysmal at hiring.
3. Teach and practice marketing for your business
If you’re like many phenomenal sales entrepreneurs, your knack for generating leads through your human connections means you’re not very good at actually marketing your business.
This has to change if you want to continue generating leads. Prospects today conduct most — if not all — of the research about your company before they seek you (or another salesperson) out to validate their impression of your business and, hopefully, close the deal. Marketing is a must-have for top-of-funnel lead generation that reels these researchers in. Posting on social media once in a blue moon is decidedly insufficient. You need an entire marketing system in place that prequalifies, or weeds out, leads for you.
Once this system is established, your role will change. You should become a champion of sales talent and a business development mentor, deliberately doling out funds to tried-and-true marketing partners to support sales.