An article in Inc Magazine stated, “For most growing businesses, quality salespeople are a must. But most business models won’t achieve exponential growth riding on the backs of the sales team. Even the best salesperson can’t sell something that customers don’t value. Furthermore, most high-growth companies don’t achieve their successes by hiring the best salespeople. If they did, good salespeople would be too expensive for small companies to afford.”
Only George Steinbrenner could afford a payroll of superstars to try to win the World Series several years in a row. And it didn’t even work much of the time. Trying to build your business platform on a foundation of superstar sales people likely won’t scale, and even if it does, it’s exceedingly expensive.
The solution, as I wrote about in my book, The Secret to Selling More, is about making sure you have a real value proposition and making sure your sales people know what it is, and not expecting them to figure it out for themselves.
Do you KNOW what customers can buy from your company they don’t believe (or actually can’t) buy from anyone else? If your answer is “nothing,” you will sell on price. If your answer is “I don’t know” you’ll need superstar sales people to try to make up for it.
Mitch
