Why You Shouldn't Hire A Sales Person For Your Video Business In 2025

What's going on, guys? In this video, we're going to be talking about why most people hire a salesperson way too early and the big mistakes that they make that end up costing them a ton of money. And if you're wondering, Eric, why are you allowed to speak about this? Well, it's because I currently have a sales team of 10 people, and each one of my sales reps, on average, generates between 70 and $150,000 per month in revenue. So I've built a sales team over the past three years for my business, and I've learned a lot of things in the meantime, and I want to share those learnings with you. So then hopefully you can get some value from it and not make the same mistakes that I made. And the mistakes that I see a lot of videographers and video business owners making, that cost them a ton of money. So let's go ahead and dive into it. Also, if you don't know me, my name is Eric Diren, and I run Master Filmmaker. And to date, We've helped over 500 video business owners scale their business, hire sales teams, get more leads, get more clients, get more retainers in place so that they could actually grow their business and make more money. So let's go ahead and dive in. So a couple of things that you're gonna need. There's three main things you're gonna need. Number one, you're gonna. Is you need a standard operating procedure. So this is gonna be something where you have to actually have a validated process for closing deals yourself. And one of the biggest mistakes I see is people are like, I'm just gonna hire a salesperson and they're gonna save my business. And that is not the case. And what they do is they hire some sort of sales rep here, right? And then they basically just make that sales rep, do a bunch of outbound and do a bunch of cold calling. So outbound and cold calling. And. And they just think that having a salesperson is gonna end up saving their business, when in reality it absolutely does not. And the salesperson's super sad because they don't make any money because you're setting them up to fail. If you have never closed deals or you haven't closed at least 20 deals for your own offer for your own business, you have no business hiring any sort of salesperson. You just don't. Because it's like trying to teach someone how to ride a bike when you don't even know how to ride a bike yourself. So if you don't Have a validated process for closing deals. There's literally no way you're gonna hire a and it's gonna be successful because you don't have a way of teaching them. And also, like, they won't respect you because you don't know what you're doing. Right? So you have to learn how to close first. And that's something we help our clients with, is how do you actually close first? And then you can hire somebody and teach them how to do it. Right? But it's like, you can't. Like you can't teach someone something you don't know how to do yourself, Right? So that's a huge problem. I see. And you need to have a way of closing the deals and have a standard operating procedure where it's like, you know, step one, you do this. Step two, you do this. Step three, you do this. Step four, you do this. And that's something we help our clients build out. So then they can simply give this script to their salesperson and then their salesperson can be successful and they are happy. Right? So that's number one. Number two, second thing you need is validated lead flow. Now what is validated lead flow mean? So like I said before, what a lot of people are doing is they're simply having their sales reps cold call and like cold DM and just like, go out there, hey, find me new business. And they literally give them no way to be successful. And then the sales rep comes back to them, they aren't performing, and then they end up leaving after a month. I see this so many times. Like, we've. We've talked to thousands and thousands of video business owners and they all think, sometimes, like not all of them, but a lot of them think that they can just hire somebody to magically save their business when they don't have a way of getting leads and calls. Like, that is your job as the business owner is to get calls, get leads, and then those leads then get fed to the person, right? So think about it this way. Think about if you had a brick and mortar shop here, right? And so my drawing is not the best, but let's pretend you have a brick and mortar shop. If you have people coming into that shop and looking around and taking a look at products and like, seeing what you have to sell. And then you have a salesperson. You plop a salesperson in the store, they're gonna be successful because people are coming inbound to them. They're already interested, they're looking around the store, they wanna buy Stuff, right? But a lot of you guys are doing is you're having the salesperson stand out on the street here and basically, like, go and like, try to grab people from the street and say, like, hey, you come here. Like, come into the shop. Come over here. It just doesn't work because there's no intent with those people. With the people who walk into your store, they're already interested to some level, and then your salesperson is just kind of taking them the rest of the way. Whereas what a lot of you guys are doing is like, you're just hiring somebody. You give them no leads, and you're like, here's a cold calling list or here's a list I got off Apollo I.O. or some, you know, whatever. And then they're just not successful because, like, those people don't know, like, or trust you and they're not interested in working with you. So, like, what did you expect, right? And then as far as, like, what you need, every single month, you need 100 to 400 new leads per month per sales rep. I know that sounds like a lot, but for them to make money, and we're gonna go over the comp structure in a second, you need to have a decent amount of leads coming in every single month. And this allows the salesperson to be successful, you to make money, them to make money, and everybody is happy. And if you're not quite there, that's fine. And if you're like, well, I don't know how to get leads, then obviously book a call down below and talk with us and we can help you set up a system so you have validated lead flow coming through your business, and we can help you with that. Right? But 100 to 400 new leads per month is typically what you are looking at. That's number two. Number three is you need ongoing training and management. This is a huge thing a lot of people don't do. Key word here, ongoing. Like, you have to keep doing it. And people are like, oh, I'm just going to hire a sales rep and then never talk to them and check in with them once a month. That is never going to work. You're going to be unsuccessful and they're going to need your help and you won't be able there to help them. Right? So, like, what we do, and we give our clients this entire SOP of how to hire, train, and ramp these guys up to KPI, we do a daily sales meeting every single morning at 8am every single morning with our entire sales team, and we go over Role plays? Objection. Handling training. And we just help them with anything they need for about 30 minutes to 45 minutes every single day, I make a 30 to 45 minute time investment into them and then they're able to go out, go about their day and close deals and make the business money. Right. Second thing is you need a KPI tracking sheet. So like you need a way to track your show rate. So show percentage and your close percentage, and those are gonna be the top two. So show rate should be about 60, 60% or more. Close rate should be between 20 and 30%. Right. So you need a way to track these two metrics so then you can actually know if they're doing their job. If you either need to off board the rep or get a new rep or, you know, you just need a way of figuring out how they're doing because if you're not measuring it, you have no way of knowing if they're performing well or not. And we give our clients a KPI tracking sheet obviously of like that they can use to track this and, and know whether or not their salespeople are being successful. And then the last thing is you need to be able to train them on product knowledge. Right? If they're selling something but they don't know how it actually works, it's not going to be successful. They're not going to be successful because they don't actually know what it is they're selling. So like on these daily sales meetings, we go over product knowledge or questions, we go over anything they have as far as like what they should do or, you know, if they have a certain situation, we help them with that. Right? And so like ongoing training and management is a huge part of having someone who is successful as a sales rep and you get them to actually make your business money every single month. Now this is exactly how we helped one of our clients, Ryan, hire his first sales rep here. And that's actually how he went from, I believe it was up 325% from the year before. And this is because he got off of the phones, he started delegating, buying his time back. So then he had time to do the shooting and the editing and oversee his teams there as opposed to always having to be on sales calls. And he had someone who was literally just making him money even while, like he went on vacation and the sales rep was closing deals while he was on vacation, which, like, I know this may seem like a lot you have to do, but I promise you it is 100% worth it because like you can get to a point where you have people who are just automatically doing stuff for you. Right? So I promise you it's worth it. Now, let's talk about compensation. So there's two different types of sales reps. There's SDR, so setters, and then there's closers. Right? So SDRs are basically people who outbound leads. And I want to be very clear, this is not cold calling. This means if somebody opts into your funnel or ops into your system and they express interest, these people call them. It's not that they're calling outbound people who have never heard of you before. Typically, for that, it's going to be a 5% commission. So if you had a 10k deal, they would make $500 on that deal. And then for closers, it's typically they're going to be hopping on the zoom call, just like you would, diagnosing their client's problem, pitching them, and then closing them right here. And so for a 10k deal, they're going to make 10% commission, which is about $1,000 per 10k. Now, there's other ways to structure this, like salary and commission, and there's. You could do like a base plus a smaller percentage, and there's a lot of ways to get creative with it, but that's just typically what we do, and that's typically how it works. Now, let's talk about the. Let's just recap real quick. Right? So number one, if you don't have consistent leads, you need to get consistent leads, and that's something we help our clients with. So if you need help with that, go down below, schedule a call, we're happy to help, and we can actually help you set up a system so you can get consistent leads. That's number one. Right. And that's typically by sending an ad to a value video page. People opt in, they book a call, they close a deal, and then the way the setters fit into this is you have an SDR call people who come in, see this video, but don't book a call. And then the closers are people who are taking the call and then turning that into money and cash for the business. Now, number two is you need to build an SOP like we said before. So that means you need to take 20 calls and close 20 calls for your business. You put that into a training vault on Google Drive, and then we train the closer on how to close, just like you. Now, number three is when you're actually ready to hire. So this is the exciting part. You can hire somebody, you can get this stuff off your plate, and then you don't have to worry about it any more. And then you just do ongoing training and management with them. So if hopefully this was helpful for you guys. So if you want to learn more about, like, what we actually do at Master Filmmaker, you can click the link below, schedule a demo with our team. We'll be happy to check out your business, see if we can actually help you. And if not, that's totally cool. Keep enjoying the free YouTube videos and we will see you in the next one.