Are you the bottleneck in your business?

Are you the bottleneck in your business? Do you feel like as soon as you get the courage to finally delegate something in your business, everything comes crashing down? Or perhaps maybe you've taken those big important steps as the CEO and finally hired a sales team member just to find out that they're not converting like you can. So that's exactly what we're going to cover today. We're going to uncover exactly how to get yourself, the CEO, out of the bottleneck of your company and finally have success hiring your sales team. So. So, first of all, we need to identify how you find the bottlenecks in your business specifically geared towards client acquisition for this conversation. And perhaps you can relate to this situation. If you can, I would love to know in the comments section below. So, first of all, let's say for example, that if you turned on the lever tomorrow, you could take unlimited clients. You've spent so much time making your client onboarding process scalable, but now you're at the point where you need more clients. And if you're like most MSPs and IT service providers that I know you, the CEO are still doing most of the sales, if not all of it. And as a result, there's only so much you can do as the CEO. Run the business, vision for the business, finance for the business, operations for the business, and then you have sales. And let me tell you, the ultimate freedom is unlocked when someone else can sell your stuff. So, so how do you identify this bottleneck? You can take more clients, but you don't have time to get more clients. That is the number one sign that says it is time for you to start thinking about handing off sales to your first or next sales professional. The second bottleneck is, let's say for example, that you have taken that bold move to hire that salesperson. And what you believe during the interview process is that you're just able to hand over your glorious CRM all of those leads and that sales will know exactly what to do and how to close the same way that you do. But that doesn't happen, friends. So although sales professionals are super super skilled clearly at selling and closing, they are not mind readers. It is incredibly crucial to their success and your success that if you are going to take that bold move to hire your first or next sales professional, that you are preparing them to be successful by giving them the keys to the kingdom. Not just the leads, not just the CRM, but explaining to them exactly how operate. Meaning how do you make sales? What are the steps to your sales process? And how can they be an extension of you, the founder, the CEO, to be just as successful at selling as you are? All right, so now I know what the bottlenecks are, but now it's time to, of course, fix them. So step number one is to create a very comprehensive job description. Now, this might sound kind of basic, but it's really not. Because your job description is going to either help you hire the right person or the wrong person. So it is absolute critical that you don't just say someone to come and sell my stuff and hit this KPI. But also, what personality are you looking for? What background are you looking for? What specific strengths do you need someone to have to be successful using your sales process? Number two is fantastic. Now you have all these applicants, how are you going to sift through the right ones? So ensuring that you have a filtering system to make sure you're not wasting all of your precious CEO time going through every single, single application. So one thing that I love is to put a little bit of friction in the interview process by having them submit something like an interview video or a plan of what the first thing they would do if you did hire them. How would they find that first client or next client? Making them go the extra step so they don't just hit the apply button and give you the basics will really help you filter out the people who are not worthy of the position and isolate those and bring those in that are total rock stars. Great. So now step three is that it is absolutely critical that you have an onboarding sales training process in place so that that salesperson can see success quickly and that you're not stressed out once you make the hire. So what I recommend having in that onboarding process is not just, hey, here's our CRM and here's your login. Good luck, buddy. That doesn't work. What is absolutely critical for you to have is things like, for example, a competitive analysis, client success stories, sales scripts, sales presentations, anything that will help them understand exactly why all of your clients have chosen to work with you. Oh, and one bonus piece here. Please make sure that you have an SOP tied to your CRM so that you don't have your sales team come in and screw up all of the data that is inside your CRM, because your CRM is so critical to your success. So if there aren't consistencies and expectations for how you treat that data, it's going to become very, very hard for marketing to communicate and sell at a maximum level. And lastly, what is so absolutely critical to that sales team member's success is access to you over the next six to eight weeks. Make yourself available and ensure that they know you are available. They need your mentorship in the beginning so that they can be successful. So what you might be wondering is, they don't sound like me, they don't act like me, how can they close like me? And that's what I want to spend a little bit of extra time deep diving right now. So, first of all, what I think is absolutely critical during the hiring process is finding someone who's truly an extension of you. Now, what does that mean? It means kind of finding, like, a mini me. Right? And the reason why this is so important is that when founders and CEOs decide to exit the sales seat, their processes, their environment, their culture, their leads are used to a certain personality type. So the good news is, is that if you are aware of your strengths in selling, or for example, perhaps you make people feel motivated and inspired, or perhaps as an experienced IT service provider or msp, you are really great at showcasing the risk within a company and helping them understand why it's so important for them to invest in the right MSP that will protect them. So, depending on what your strengths are, make sure that you're hiring for someone who also has those strengths or could be taught how to sell like that. And it's incredibly critical so that you will see the success. All right, so we covered quite a bit, but the good news is that we have an upcoming webinar that is going to cover this in extreme detail and give you all the action steps that you need to take to be successful hiring your first or next sales team member. So make sure to register with the link below and I'll see you there.