How to Increase Payroll Sales | Where to Start and How to Approach Building your Sales Engine
Matt Vaadi explains how early-stage payroll founders can build sales from scratch. Start by becoming the primary salesperson, build referral partnerships with CPAs and HR consultants, and run a 10-touch campaign mixing mailers, video emails, and LinkedIn outreach. Use a simple CRM to track prospects and dedicate 80% of your time to sales activities.
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Hey everybody, and welcome to another episode of Payrollin'. I am Matt Vadie, and today we're going to do something a little bit different than normal in that I'm going to answer a question from one of our current marketing clients, of which you will hear a commercial for here at some point during this episode. But, uh, the question is one that I think a ton of people listening to this can relate to, and I told her I would answer this on the air, if you will, so that I could go more long form instead of coming in over an email. But Here's the question. So I don't have my own salesperson on staff because I'm just starting out, but I really need to push on getting new clients as we all do when we're first getting going. Right? So any tips or tricks you can share, even if I need to outsource the sales portion, I don't have a leads listing, et cetera. All of my clients have come by referrals, which is great. But now that we are fixing to go live with our new platform, I've hired some new employees. I need to uptick sales and I'm lost. So if this topic is, is of interest to you, whether you're just getting started, whether you're just trying to accelerate sales, whether you're a sales professional, I'll try to weave some of that in as well. Stay tuned. I'm gonna cover that and a ton more in just a moment. All right. So first of all, let's address this thing head on because one of the things that most people don't wanna do when they're when they start a business is become a salesperson. It's like if somebody came to you and asked, "Matt, what's the secret? How do you stay in such good shape?" And for the record, nobody asked me that question, but the answer is almost always pretty simple, right? Well, I've got this secret formula I use to stay in great shape. No, no, no, no, no. The answer is I eat well and I exercise every day. That's it, right? So if we're looking for sales, The first thing we have to look at is our diet and our exercise. Are we taking the actions necessary every day to get new business, or are we hoping somebody else is going to do it for us? So let's talk more about what some of those actions can look like. But the first thing that you have to get in the mindset of is, and understand, is that you as the CEO founder in the early stages are the best and only person that should be doing sales unless you have a co-founder who is focused on business development. You've got the passion, you've got the vision, you've got the knowledge and understanding of what your company does that is going to just be hard to transfer to somebody else in the early days unless you've got a sales blueprint created. Uh, but most importantly, the biggest mistake I see people make is they try to hire somebody early on, uh, or they try to hire an outsourced agency, or they try to hire, you know, somebody to, to do cold email or whatever it might be. But the problem is that they aren't going to create processes for you. So you can't hire a seasoned sales professional with industry experience and that you expect them to create the actual framework for how things get sold, create the assets, all that stuff. It just doesn't work that way, right? So for a little while, you've got to hammer things out, start to get the flow, start to understand what the sales process looks like, start to put together some of those resources and assets so that you can be a good guide for when you do bring somebody on. So the first part of that is getting comfortable with understanding the sales cycle of your target market. And so if I'm selling small businesses, the best thing about selling into small businesses is that they can make a decision on a dime, right? So if I go out and start prospecting today, if I go out and start hammering on doors and I'm aggressive and I'm persistent, I could maybe flip somebody to sign a deal with me in the next couple days. Uh, there's, you know, that's what a small business rep does at ADP, Paychex, whomever. They're literally going out and hammering on doors in the first 30 days, and they're saying, hey, can I look at your current invoice? Love to see if we can save you a couple bucks on what you're doing, you know. And they're just, they're getting aggressively in people's business to try to close deals. Now, if your target market is between 50 and 150 employees or up above from that, it's not going to work. So example being yesterday, I'm on a call with a 75-person prospect. There were 6, 7 people on the phone from their team, all with different interests related to the systems and what they can do for them. People from HR, people from finance, uh, you know, multiple people from finance and, and some sort of tangential executive level folks also on the call. So it's going to be a group decision-making process. And they don't close quickly unless they just have a massive issue that they can't get figured out right now. So start to get comfortable with that sales process and the extended amount of time that's going to take and adjust some of these things that I'm going to go through here in just a moment based on that. So, so early stages, let's talk about if you're just getting started, either just getting started on getting more aggressive in your sales or literally just getting started with your business. And I'm going to talk directly to this, this, this fake client. We will call her Jennifer, uh, for, for for the sakes of this conversation. Uh, but in the early stage, it's important to do a couple things. It's first and foremost important to plant as many seeds as humanly possible, uh, because they're not all going to grow. Once again, going back to that, so, so right now we have to be very targeted with planting a ton of seeds. And thinking about it, we always recommend those 3 lists in your email marketing. I think we talked about it on a recent episode. Of you want to be segmented into your clients, your prospects, and your partners. And the seeds that are going to breed the most later on are going to be those partners. And so I want to get in front of potential partners early and often, but I want to make sure I've got clear value I can share to them. And also I want to make sure I've got some clarity of market. So when I go, uh, we'll talk about going into a CPA's office here in just a moment, but if I go into a CPA's office and I just go, hey, I'm a local payroll and HR provider. Let me know if you have anybody who's interested in our services. They're just going to go, eh, whatever. You're just one of 5 people that have swung by here today. But if I say, hey, I'm a local payroll and HR company that works primarily in the oil and gas industry, and I serve these other 2 industries really well, and I'm typically working with companies with this number of employees, do you guys service any folks inside of the industry that fit that criteria? Now I've given them a much clearer way that they can refer business to me. Uh, so, so think about your partners. So good partners are CPAs, obviously, healthcare brokers if you're not competing, you know, if you're not offering HR support, HR consultants can be a great, uh, one as well. But I know this individual that we're speaking to is going to offer some HR support, so they're not going to be great partners. So I would really focus my lens on CPAs, probably more a little if I'm going upmarket, that 50+ employee mark, the healthcare brokers are actually going to— I would flip-flop that. I would put the healthcare brokers in front because most brokers nowadays are trying to focus on bigger groups because they pay more money. Um, so find the folks that are working for some of the bigger shops that can serve the 50 and above audience and show them how you can make their life easier and their client's life easier. Plus they're typically, it's going to sound terrible, but like most CPAs don't want any revenue share. They just want to be a trusted advisor to their clients. A healthcare broker, when you start dangling a little bit of possible rev share commission, whatever, their ears perk up. They're a little bit more capitalist when it comes to getting some kickbacks. And so forming those relationships is priority number one. And a couple of points on that. First and foremost, approach with the mindset that you're asking for their advice first and foremost. So you want to put together a list, and this is one of the questions that Jennifer, you asked in your email., is, you know, how do I start putting together lists, etc.? The best place and easiest place to start is to get a Sales Navigator membership to LinkedIn. You can run criteria-based search in there better than anywhere. And then you also have direct access to somebody's public professional profile where you can connect and, you know, immediately start to like gain some, some, some relationship capital right there. Now I will stop there and say none of this spamming over LinkedIn is working. So if, if you're thinking about engaging in, and I've tried every different variation of it and they've all gone nowhere, um, and at scale maybe it does, you send out 4,000 invites a month and maybe one person will set an appointment with you. But, but the reality is, do you really want to spam a bunch of connections on LinkedIn? Um, because ultimately this goes back to that planting seeds thing. You're going to want to start creating content on LinkedIn as well. So creating content right now on social, LinkedIn's the best place for it. You definitely at some point in this, in this episode going to hear a little bit more about our LinkedIn course we're doing for personal brand, but you want to start to establish yourself as that local expert. So you want to post regularly on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a great place to attract inbound. And to create, you know, the know, like, and trust factor online with people, which you completely deteriorate when you start spamming them with messages on LinkedIn. Now, that doesn't mean that you can't reach out and say, hey, you know, Susie, and this goes into my next point, Susie the healthcare broker, is ask for advice. So if I'm going to Susie the healthcare broker, I don't want to come to her with all the answers because I'm just new in my sales journey or I'm new in my business journey. There's an old saying when you're raising money, they say, if you want money, ask for advice. If you want advice, ask for money. And so if I go to, and I think about some of my best friends today are actually CPAs I cold called and, you know, cold emailed. And we'll talk about what a campaign looks like here in just a second as well from some of our early days. And, and yeah, I said it, you're gonna have to pick up the phone, you're gonna have to go see people, you're gonna have to, you know, be a little bit more targeted. And that's why those, those large-scale sort of email and LinkedIn blasts just don't work because they're not personalized and you don't get to know the people and you don't really get to flex your kind of local muscle when it comes to that. So, all right, LinkedIn, use that to create your list. You can create your lead list in there, you can create your contact list in there, then you can send connection requests with no, you know, no spam necessary. You just want to get on their radar. So if I'm sending connection requests and I'm creating really good content that shows up in their feed and people are engaging with my content because I'm being very strategic about the type of content I'm creating, now I'm creating some inbound demand, but I'm also giving myself the opportunity to reach out to those potential partners and just say, hey, look, you know, excuse me, I know you get a bunch of stuff. This isn't a cold outreach, but I'm just, I just started this business here in town, or I'm new to this industry or whatever it might be. I would love your advice. I see you're tenured in this space. I would love to hear what you see in the market from providers like ours, how we can stand out. Come to people. People want their ego fed. They want to provide you with some advice. They want to provide you with some guidance. Feed the ego. They don't want you to reach out and say, can I pick your brain? Can we talk about how we can partner? I can give you some good rev share. Like, I gotta be real with you, I get, I get 5, you know, emails, LinkedIn messages a week that are, are, you know, we can help you provide additional revenue streams, or we can provide additional revenue streams for you. It just doesn't really doesn't really get me, you know, I'm more worried about selling my core business, not about adding additional revenue streams, right? So like, they're gonna like the fact of maybe you've given them that spiff. But ultimately, they're thinking, how can I keep my clients longer? I gotta sell more of my clients. And in reality, you know, all that stuff falls flat in the initial cold outreach. So just be genuine. Hey, I'm looking to you for some guidance. How can you help me with this? So Same thing on the CPA side. We'll talk a little bit more here in just a moment about doing some, some in-person outreach to CPAs. So, okay, so you've got LinkedIn, you're pulling your list there. You also have to have a CRM. So the thing is, you start having these conversations with people. If there's no notes, there's no documentation, there's nothing to— you're not gathering the proper intel, then what about when you do hire that salesperson? What's going to happen? They've got nothing to go off and all the work you've done has been for naught. So go in, keep up with some notes, use any CRM. We'll do an episode one day on CRMs. They're all great. They're all perfectly fine. I used to use Microsoft Act and it works just as well as any of the 3 CRMs we use today. Uh, it just depends, you know, we can get into— that's a, that's a whole full episode in and of itself. So I won't get deep into that list. But, uh, I will say there is this golden circle that we track that I would add as part of your fields in your CRM. So you want to know how many employees a company has. You want to track the industry. You would love to know their current provider, you know, their address, their location, who the decision maker is, and an email address. So these aren't things that you're going to necessarily pick up off of LinkedIn. But when we start talking about dialing in and making phone calls, these are things that you can pick up. And once again, you can ask these questions without asking, hey, do you want to do business with us? Like you can profile and get information about accounts without necessarily asking for for their business. So anyhow, let me take a step back. So we're building out a list, a targeted list of broker partners and CPA partners in LinkedIn. Now what we want to do here is get a little bit more strategic in how we reach out to a large portion of these. So ideally you're getting together a decent-sized list. So you've got some you're reaching out to one-off with that, hey, can we connect? Can we get together? But it's much more effective to put together a 10-touch or an 8-touch or a 5-touch or 7-touch campaign. So All of your sales are going to be made after 10 to 12 touches. So you really want to make sure that you aren't just reaching out to somebody once and then forgetting about it. I'm going to outline a campaign we recently ran that was very successful. It was a 10-touch campaign. We have on the document, I'm looking at over here, we had accounts to target. There were 20 to 100 employees. They were professional service industries, no restaurants, no construction. They all had to be locally headquartered. And then so we had an intern. And when we talk about— there's a couple different ways you can get that kind of, you know, what I call lower cash outlay support early on. And virtual assistants and interns are two ways to do that. So virtual assistants, we did a full episode on working with virtual assistants. Make sure you go back and check that out. Really informative, summed up a lot of what we've learned. I've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars with virtual offshore assistants. Hopefully you can learn from some of my mistakes. But interns, very similar direction you're going to take with an intern is what's on there. So go and check that out if you haven't already. But so, you know, then we have what do we need to have in Zoho CRM? We must have the executive contact, email address, mailing address, and number of employees. So we had to have the mailing address because we were going to mailers were going to be part of this campaign. And so ideally, you're going to get an electronic touch. A phone touch, a physical touch on every one of these campaigns, and sometimes multiple of each. And then nice to have was their current payroll provider and some sort of referral or connection to reference between the two of us. The theme was buy from a local mission-based company. You're local, we're local. Why on earth would you be working with one of these national companies? And so pick some sort of theme of the message of what you're going to do. And I'll say I'm not a big like save money guy when it comes to our marketing. But it's worth mentioning that Paycom has basically gone public off of marketing against saving 30% off your ADP invoice. So it's not a terrible strategy. It's not sustainable long-term probably, but if you're just trying to kick in a door and get a meeting, it's not a terrible way in. And it's certainly when I go and I look at all the sales collateral for early stages of these other companies, ADP, Heartland Paychecks, whomever, they're coming in and they're trying to say, all right, hey, look, If you're going to train a college kid fresh off the streets how to get indoors and talk to somebody about payroll, trying to save them money is going to be the easiest thing they can say. So there's nothing terribly wrong with it. It's not my focal point, but anywho. So here was the cadence of the campaign. So we sent them a mailer with some value in it. So always lead with value. So the person, this fictitious person, Jennifer, listening to this. So you've got your 42 free HR templates funnel. You can get that in front of people in a host of different ways that gives you immediate value, right? So for us, we sent out a mailer with an employee scavenger hunt, uh, template along with another template and, uh, just a one-page letter. That was touch one. Next one was an email with a video in it. We had recorded a brief video on Loom that we just sent, you know, that we tried to do 'em custom for everybody. Quickly realized that not enough people are clicking through to make it worth the time. So we made one. Uh, put it in there. Then I was sending a LinkedIn connection request, then a call, then another email, then another call, then an email, then another call. And so you could see a lot of this, you could get somebody else, uh, you know, you can get that intern to do for you or that VA. So putting together the mailer, getting those out, doing a mail merge out of your CRM, you know, sending the emails with the videos, you know, give them your LinkedIn login, have them send the connection request. Like at some point you got to pick up the phone and make the call. Like, I know, I know this is the part nobody wants to hear, but like the reality is you're going to have to pick up the phone and call some people. And the bottom line is this. I don't get that many sales calls in a week. If somebody calls and they either talk to me or leave me a voicemail, they're standing out, man. And just having a human conversation of like, hey, I'm the CEO and founder of this company, even if it's just still you, but you've got a few employees, so you've got that cachet and just making a real human connection. I literally, I can think about 3 of my greatest referral partners. I talked to them in those first 30, 60, 90 days. And those relationships, you know, they go beyond business at this point. Like, I, I just— I'm blessed to call those, those 3 individuals friends. And, and I wouldn't even know them without having reached out to them cold. It was the same thing. I had to call, email, call, email, call, email over and over until they finally were like, oh geez, you know, I recognize the number. I'm going to pick up the phone and, and talk to this guy for a few minutes. So, so make sure you've got something dialed in as far as— and I— and, and for you, I'm happy to share this, uh, this campaign as well. And for anybody out there, if you're really interested in this, just send me a direct mail and I'll share the document with you that we use for this particular campaign. It's something that we used to do back in the day at the large national companies. We create these multi-step campaigns for any, you know, oh, we're talking about 401. Oh, we're talking about workers' comp. Oh, we're talking about this, right? So you can keep recycling this with a theme every month, every quarter, whatever cadence you want. So All right. So that's it. Have a theme. Make sure that you've got a multi-touch cadence in place. Start with the partners because those relationships are going to bear the most fruit, right? 1 1 11. But in reality, early stages when you don't have a lot of clients, here's the point that should have been at the very front of the podcast. This was a pretty terrible miss on my part. 80% of your time should be focused on sales. You have no clients. Quit making excuses about moving a widget around on the website. Oh, this document has to be filed with this agency. Oh, I've got to do this. I got like, nothing happens until somebody sells something. So get comfortable being uncomfortable with the sales conversations. Like your success in life is going to be directly related to the number of uncomfortable conversations you are willing to have. And that never ever shines truer than in entrepreneurship and building a business. All right. So how do you do that? How do you spend your time there? Well, I'm going to go back to my old sales days when I was carrying a bag, carrying a quota. I literally had my week structured where I knew what I was doing on each day. So I knew on Monday afternoon I had a call block, you know, on Monday morning I was doing cleanup, follow-up, etc. Tuesday I was in the field. If I didn't have meetings, I was going by places, I was going to networking events, I was doing cold drops and stops at people's offices that were industries that I was trying to target, just bringing in a slick, asking who the decision maker is, who, who, you know, are they here right now? Can I talk to them? Can I get their business card? Like you've gotta go out and make it happen. They're not gonna come to you. So, um, so block your calendar, know those days that you're gonna be doing sales-related stuff. And like I said, there should be a direct correlation. There should be a very high percentage of your time that is related to sales. If you do not have enough clients, it's just the bottom line. Going back to that dietary reference, like you are not gonna lose weight eating McDonald's 5 days a week. It just doesn't happen. So make sure that then you start to understand the sales process and how that works. So you're gonna have an initial meeting, you know, you're gonna prospect, you're gonna finally get in the door, you're gonna have that initial meeting. If they're interested, then you're gonna go into a demo proposal phase. Then you're gonna go into some form of negotiation back and forth. Then you're gonna go into closing and onboarding, and you can lump that up. And we, we've got a little bit better defined in our internal processes, but Uh, just make sure you've got the time blocked to actually make things happen and stop coming up with excuses. Uh, so, you know, the other thing I'll say is just, you know, get your scripts together, practice your scripts for what you're going to say when you call somebody. The most basic old-school cold calling format I go back to, I, I used it, you know, I've used it since 2003 and it's still the most effective one. And it's just, hey, my name is Matt, I'm with Guru Payroll and HR. We work with companies like ABC and XYZ, providing them with value prop ABC and XYZ. I'd love the opportunity to just learn a little bit more about you and your business and see if we can help you to achieve those same results. Because all you're doing at the front end of a cold call is setting up for objections because the money's made in the objections. How do you overcome those objections, etc.? But in reality, if you're doing this campaign methodology, you're never making a cold call because the call doesn't happen until after the second or third touch. So you, they, they should be familiar. You know, I think in that example I gave, let me go back. When's the first call? First call is touch 4, right? So I've warmed this bad boy up. So I've got the mailer, I got the email, I got the LinkedIn connection request. They know who I am at this point. So now it's just, hey, I'm following up on those things. And just be prepared to overcome those objections. They're all kind of the same. We already use somebody we like, you know, we're not, we're not looking right now, I don't have the time, you know, whatever the objection may be, there's tons of different ways to overcome those. I've got some resources I can provide. We're running out of time here for this episode. But so finally, don't ever leave those calls with nothing. So don't ever leave a personal interaction. Like if you're going to take the time to go to a networking event, Be intentional. Who are you looking for? What's your elevator pitch? What are you going to say to people when you saw that, when you run into them? You know, how are you going to actually provide some real value to somebody and make them encourage you more? On the back end of this, make sure you're documenting everything you're doing. We use Loom to record videos. We use Snagit to do screen shares and screenshots and record videos. We use Google Docs. We use Connect from Zoho. Like, make sure that you can delegate as much of this as possible as you continue to move forward. So keep biting off chunks of it to give to other people. But really, when you're going to require a mix of outreach methods, you're going to want to start with partners, you know, then work into more direct prospects, but make sure you're really targeted in those prospects, right? So going back to the VA, the virtual assistant, they can help you pull those lists in LinkedIn, they can help you do some, some website scraping. Then there's a bunch of other tools that kind of piggyback on LinkedIn where you can actually pull the emails off of LinkedIn or on the email campaigns as well. So You really want to get into delegation mode as quickly as possible because that's the thing that every— that's the excuse that all of you are going to have in here is that I don't have enough time. I don't have enough time, which is true where all of our time is strained. But if you want more money, you got to close more deals. And that's the bottom line. And so if you start to put some of these things in place, most importantly, blocking your time, putting the time and energy into making these things happening, planting the seeds with your long-term partners,, then you're going to start to see results. That's just the way it works. And I'll end it with one last thing. And this is going into CPAs' offices. So we do a lot of cold footing of CPAs. Uh, well, at least we did in the early days. Um, you know, now we're, we're kind of still using this same methodology. I call it the VRA, Value Rapport Ask method. So you can't just walk into a CPA and be like, oh, hey, can you make some referrals to me? You know, we talked earlier about dummying up a little bit. I like that. Love that technique of, you know, hey, can you provide me with some advice? On how I can get in front of more businesses of this size, etc. How did you guys grow your book of business? Dummy up, get advice, get it from the people who know better. Uh, the fact that you're asking these questions, you know, to other people shows that you're not too proud to do that. Now do it at scale, right? Have the conversations with people that you can ask more questions of. But the Value Report Ask Method is pretty simple. So when I start coming in cold, I'm going to bring in a valuable asset So maybe, you know, going back to I've got that New Hire Scavenger Hunt, I got the 42 free HR templates, whatever it is, bring something of value, develop a little bit of rapport, you know, get to know the person, the individual, then make the ask. This is the most important part. Don't forget to ask, right? And when I can get more explicit with those asks, like we talked about earlier, hey, these are the industries, this is the company size, you know, do you have anybody you can introduce me to? Then I can get much better results. So hopefully that was helpful to all of you out there, most specifically to you, Jennifer, to help you to start to get your sales processes established. And if there's anything you'd like to add to that, please don't hesitate to drop me a note. I know that we got tons of sales experts listening in here that would love to add more. So appreciate your time. Have an awesome day.
