With spring in the air, the Mole has been busy looking at the best way forward for 2013. Like most other business owners, I am always thinking of ways to increase business, generate more sales and ultimately improve the bottom line at the end of the year.?I gave thought to all the normal business generating suspects, including the revamp of our website and throwing lots of money at Google Adwords, through to employing a PR company to increase exposure in key markets. All great ideas I thought, but then it got to the staff discussion: “But if we are generating more enquiries and sales opportunities then we are going to need a sales person”.?
At this point, the whole business plan is put on hold for another month as the idea of employing a sales person is met with laughter and deep concern by all that have worked at the Mole’s business for more than five years. There was ‘that guy Dave’ who talked about ‘cracks in the floorboards’ when we discussed wasted sales enquiries. Someone remembered Martin, who had come to us on recommendation as a great sales guy. It turned out that his only skill was to persuade us to give him one more week to convert those big deals he was working on. Laughter filled the room as someone remembered Brian, who managed to bring in just one job each week, and would always walk through the door with a PO and artwork at 4pm on a Friday afternoon and tell everyone that it needed to be with the customer on Monday morning. Great!??
The talk went on for another 15 minutes, until we had exhausted all of our previous sales guys and concluded that I can’t be put in charge of sales people recruitment anymore!??But what are the other options? Pay a recruitment company loads of money to find somebody that’s no better. Employ a sales trainee. Take our print operator with loads of chat and put him in a suit? I think the conclusion is that finding somebody who can work on sales in a professional and efficient manner is pretty hard to do in this industry. They need sales expertise, coupled with technical product knowledge. They need to be reliable, honest and in the current climate hard working too. The problem is that anybody that ticks all of these boxes is probably running his own business already.??So, the Mole is still trying to work out the sales person conundrum. If you have the answer, please let me know!