Ben Wright says the biggest mistake growing sales leaders make is holding onto direct selling too long instead of hiring help. Overwhelm tanks service quality and close rates. Hire when time pressure keeps you from core tasks, start new salespeople on low-risk work like onboarding, then gradually move them to primary deals.
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In this episode you will learn the biggest growth mistake sales and business leaders make. Welcome to Sales Process Made simple the show helping seven to eight figure industry construction and trade. Sales and business leaders finally end the stress of inconsistent sales by simplifying your sales systems so your team can close more deals and grow faster. I'm your host Ben Wright, a leader who has been building businesses and sales teams just like you for the last 20 years. In this episode you will learn the biggest mistake that sales and business leaders make when trying to grow their business when it normally happens, and how you can stop it happening to you. So for a lens around today's episode, the growth mistake we're talking about here is going to typically apply to businesses that are earlier on in their sales team growth cycles. What I mean by that is a business that has predominantly the founder or one sales member selling at the moment and you are looking to really expand out that growth of your team. However, it doesn't only apply to them. So if you're a sales leader who has a few in your team, hang in there because there'll be some little nuggets for you out of this episode. So what's the big mistake? Well, I don't want to draw this out because what's really important here is how we go about correcting or stopping that mistake happening. But the biggest mistake I see is that sales or business leaders who are particularly in small teams is that they hang on to direct selling for far too long. And they hang on to it until they get to the point where they are so overloaded that they are not effectively calling leads, visiting customers, following up leads, quoting, closing them out, getting involved in their post sales experience. And what happens is that what was previously a really high quality of service from these people drops back to being a very mediocre level. And combined with that, we have a very overwhelmed salesperson or sales leader or business leader which in the end can often result to other parts of the business suffering or that person leaving the business. So the key mistake here is hanging onto direct selling for far too long. And often this is not because they simply don't want to hire someone else, but it's because they believe A no one else is going to be able to do it as well as they are, or B they're trying to save costs for as long as possible so that the business can preserve some cash or build up some cash before they grow. Now the key issue here is that by holding on too long, the quality of service actually drops. And in the end, the close rate also drops or something else within that business or team breaks. So what happens when these leaders hang on for too long is that their business suffers. So they go from having a business that is really thriving on a very small scale with them as the key sales maker, through to a business that is struggling through overwhelm or blockages throughout all parts of their system. And this is an issue I have seen time and time again. And when I say hang on too long, what I mean here is that it's not necessarily that they hang on too long to just selling. They actually may hang on too long to delivery or operations or customer service or something else. And what happens is that their time gets more and more and more compressed so that each part of their business or their role gets less and less and less face time, creating pressure and blockages across the whole business. So when is the time as a sales or business leader to stop doing all the direct selling and to bring someone on? Well, for me, that time is when you start to feel those pressure points that you simply cannot get everything done in the day. And the first thing to do at this point in time is generally to try and offload your least core valuable so your least core valuable activities that you're doing. So if sales is an integral part of your business, which in these type of businesses it often is, we start to let go of operational delivery or some customer service requirements or other parts of the business that you can. But most importantly is hiring a salesperson. Once you recognize that the amount of customers you have to serve, you simply cannot do it well enough yourself. So at that point of recognition, that's the time when we need to move on this. It sounds very straightforward in principle. However, what I see happening with many leaders is that they recognise that it needs to happen and then they put it off for a period of months. I'll wait until the new year. I'll wait until after summer. It's getting close to end of financial year. Let's do it in the new financial year. It's cold. I'm worried leads aren't going to be as high during the winter period. Let's wait until summer. Oh, and then all of a sudden we're back around. Let's wait until the new year. Very, very common that we see leaders holding on and wanting to just squeeze the lemon for a little bit longer. The downside here is that inevitably these businesses end up having lower close rates, as I said, and their sales suffer. So the time to do it is when you first recognise it's a Problem. The question is, how do you do it without simply handing over your entire sales pipeline to a new salesperson and risk having the results of your business simply fall off a cliff very, very quickly? Well, there's a nice structured way you can go about rolling in a new person and it goes something like this. Build your pipeline to the point where you recognise that you shouldn't be doing this on your own any longer. That's step one. Step two is bleed in a new person. So hire someone and bleed them slowly into your business by having them onboard new customers, or deal with existing customers, or take small tasks in the sales funnel that will allow you to get a read around how they are going to perform in your business. Next step from there is to start co sharing deals with them. So you'll start to go out to customers, do quotes, do follow up, do everything that's associated with the experience together with the two of you. However, this new salesperson is second in charge in this instance, so you're still leading, however they're contributing. And then the last stage here is to follow that same process where you're co sharing out with customers. However, you get them to take over the process, so you're there simply for support while they go out. Roll out the full process and you provide any additional information or support as necessary. So that's the way to roll in new salespeople, particularly when you're in an earlier team and you're not sure how to do it. Get them on board, get them doing more or less intensive tasks, less critical tasks such as onboarding new customers or looking after old customers, that is, what else can we do for you? Then start to co share with them as Robin, right, the secondary star of the show. And then the last piece there is to also co share, but get them to be Batman, right? So they become the star of the show. So to recap this, the biggest mistake I see business and sales leaders making is that they keep selling for too long, the quality of their interactions with customers drop and then the pressure points across the whole business start to rise. So the time when it's most appropriate to hand over sales to a new person is when you recognize that you are rapidly running out of time and not delaying it by 3, 4, 5, 6 months to try and hang in there a little bit longer. And then the way to do that is to hire a new person and to slowly bleed them in, get them doing onboarding tasks or something similar, then start to co share with them, running as the secondary salesperson. And then lastly start to also co share with them running as the primary person. So that's the biggest growth mistake I see sales and business leaders make. As you're leaving this episode, the thoughts that I hope are running through your head is, are you in that position? So am I someone that has held on to something within my business for too long and I need to bring someone else in to do it? If the answer is yes, get busy because the way to go about it we've just stepped through and that should give you a real step forward. We're dropping episodes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I'm very grateful for you listening. I hope you're getting some really true value out of this and if nothing else, that you're focusing on how you can be 1% better each and every day. Because when you do so, it does move the dial on sales results and can make all the difference. That's it for today. See you next time. Bye for now. Are you struggling to grow your monthly sales numbers? Feel like you've reached a sales ceiling, are involved in every deal, or have no real sales system in place to help you grow? And is that causing a level of worry or stress about how you can get more sales in the future? If that's you, that's exactly, exactly why we created the Sold Out Sales Teams program to help you get month on month sales growth with less stress. In just the first week, we will lock down your quoting process to grow sales by 25 to 30%. And that's just week one. And for the first three podcast listeners that we speak to this week, we'll offer you a bonus one on one strategy session with me to make sure you can pay off your investment even faster. Which by the way, for most businesses is only one or two extra sales. To book in, click the link in our Show Notes. It's a direct calendar link so you can instantly confirm your meeting time.
