How to Hire Sales People And Build A Sales Team For Your Agency

When it comes to scaling a digital marketing agency to $80,000 a month, $100,000 a month and beyond, one of the most crucial steps is building a sales team that can consistently land clients without you having to be on the phone or on Zoom. After building a sales team for my own agency that does multiple 7 figures per year and helping dozens of other agencies in our community hire sales reps and building elite teams, today I want to give you the entire framework you can use so you can finally remove yourself from the sales process and truly become the CEO. Let's dive in. Let me start by talking a little bit about why you need need a sales team. Usually as agency owners, we're pretty good at sales, right? And you wouldn't have grown your agency if you didn't have the ability to have a good conversation to get people signed up. And sometimes your superpower, selling the client, getting clients on board, becomes your Achilles heel. You're good at it, you don't want to give that up, and so it prevents you from elevating and delegating within the business. Most agencies get stuck doing the sales themselves, and you become the bottleneck because you can only take so many sales calls per month. Your time gets consumed by sales instead of strategy. And sometimes that strategy needs to be serving the clients, really dialing in what you're doing to innovate on the delivery side. Sometimes it's you thinking bigger picture about how you position the company, how you do better content, how you set up joint venture opportunities, how you grow the organization and move things forward. Really, the freedom comes from removing yourself from the sales process, right? When you've got somebody doing operations, you've got somebody doing onboarding, you've got somebody doing account management or a team doing those things, and you finally let go of the sales process, it becomes one of the most beautiful feelings in the world, because it's when you truly have an autonomous business. And I just want to share two examples of agencies I've had the opportunity to work with that were holding on tightly to the sales process and didn't want to let go. One example of that is Chris Rodriguez. Chris Rodriguez runs Grow Pro Agency, an amazing agency serving dojos and martial arts studios across the country. And she grew from $30,000 to seven figures, and she was kind of on the brink of going to multiple seven figures. She was so good at sales. She was like, I can't let that go, Josh. And we had this conversation. Look, I really I really think that's the next step for you. Put a salesperson in place. That way you've got the bandwidth. We struggled with a little bit, but she finally decided she was gonna put a salesperson in place. She had authority, she had lead flow, she had all that. She just needed someone to take the sales calls. Immediately her revenue grew. She had some bandwidth to focus on other things, and she's since grown to multiple 7 figures, over $250,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Another example, I recently had the opportunity to interview Brady Sticker from Church Candy. He, he runs an agency working with churches. He had grown to 7 figures, great sales person, great, like really strong personality in the business, let go of the sales process, put a sales team in place. Now he has 4 full-time salespeople, landed 108 clients last month as, as of the time of this recording. Would not have been able to do that if he didn't free himself up by putting a salesperson and then a sales team in place to take those calls. Before I continue, I want to quickly mention that we're currently offering one-on-one agency acceleration sessions where we're going to dive deep in your agency, craft a game plan that you can use to scale them to the next level. Just click the the first link in the description and schedule that. So let's get back to the video. 3 key roles when it comes to sales that you need to be aware of, because when I say sales, that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Some people, it's like, I need somebody that's gonna tee up my appointment calendar. I need somebody that's going to close deals. It's different. Be sure you're clear because there's a big delineation between these type of roles. Number 1 would be a hunter prospector, right? Somebody that's just going to make cold calls, they're going to try and set appointments, and they're going to try and fill your calendar. Like, that's a hunter Prospectors, a very hard role, probably the role that I see the least success with, with small agencies that think, oh, I'm just gonna hire a salesperson, it's gonna magically fill my calendar, gonna magically grow my business. But that— there's a place for that at the hunter/prospector. Second would be your appointment setter/lead follow-up specialist. So this would be, you've already got deal flow, you've got people opting in, you've got people trying to schedule in, you've got people scheduling for your webinars, but you don't have the time or the bandwidth to follow up with those people, to check in with them, to see if they were interested, to try and move them forward. In your pipeline. So think of this as somebody that would just manage your deal flow and move them to the next step. That's an appointment/lead setter. This is usually going to be the, the next and most important sales role that you have within your company if you've got deal flow coming in but you're not hitting your goals and targets. And then finally, you've got your closer or your consultative salesperson, and this would be the person that takes strategy sessions and discovery calls, knows how to take a prospect through the full sales process, presents your solution, and closes sales. Those are the 3 roles: hunter/prospector, appointment setter/lead setter, lead follow-up person, or closer and consultative salesperson. And rarely, very rarely, you're going to get somebody that can do all 3 of those roles well. Really, you got to decide, do I need an appointment setter or do I need a closer at this stage in the business? How do you know when you're ready for each role? The right timing on this is mission critical. We don't want to hire too early because there's not enough revenue maybe to cover it and it eats into your profits, or there's not enough deal flow to really justify it. But you also don't want to wait too long where you become the bottleneck. Usually hiring order here, it's going to either be your appointment setter first or closer first, but usually the closer, you need at least 10 to 15 strategy sessions per month. You need to have built up your deal flow. You need to have built up your appointment funnel where there's consistently opportunities at play. You need at least 50 leads opting in on a monthly basis. So you want that person to be able to take inbound booked appointments and have leads that they can follow up with in their downtime to keep themselves busy. You also want to make sure you've got a proven sales process that works consistently. Where you've been taking sales calls, you've already just, you know, really honed in. Here's the questions I ask. Here's how we bridge the gap. Here's what we presented, how we ask for the offer. You're not just hoping someone's magically gonna come in and close something that you've never sold yourself, right? You've got a proven process. You've got recordings of your conversations so that you could set clear expectations and you've got reporting in place, right? Here's how many sales calls, here's the close ratio, here's your minimum benchmark, right? If you're gonna hire a closer, those are the key things that you're looking for. Those are the key things that you wanna have in place. The next position would be your appointment setters. In order to know that you're ready for an appointment center, you need at least 30 to 40 inbound leads for them to follow up with every single month. If there's no inbound deal flow, you're actually looking for a hunter, right? Somebody that can just create opportunity out of the ether, which is much different than having 30 or 40 inbound leads. Maybe they're requesting your book, maybe they're requesting your, your lead magnet, maybe they're registering for your webinars. Those are, those are relatively warm prospects, right? You're training for speed to lead. Somebody just requested this, we're gonna call them, make sure they got it, answer any questions that they got. See if they're interested in scheduling a call. And you can easily train for that. This is a, a role you can absolutely place when you got 30 to 40 inbound leads. You've got a CRM in place, ideally HighLevel or something where things are getting dropped on a pipeline and you've got some scripts and some processes documented, right? When someone requests this, this is what we're going to say. This is what we're going to send. This is the process on the back end. That's your appointment setter. Now, at the very bottom of this rung is a hunter/prospector. This is somebody that creates opportunity out of the ether. They're going to come up with their own list. Maybe you're going to give them some list data. And they're going to be cold calling, they're going to be cold outreaching, they're going to be creating opportunities from the ground up. I would say this is the hardest position within sales to fill for because you need a true professional that can go through the adversity of making this happen. I would also say that when solved, putting hunters in place can be a massive catalyst for growth. In my experience, first thing I put in place was a closer, right? I had all these opportunities coming in and I needed someone that could convert those sales. Then I wanted to give that Closure, more opportunities, more consistent deal flow. And so we started to put appointment centers in place to deal with the inbound opportunities we were already generating from our marketing. Totally separate to that is let's go get some hunters that are gonna, you know, work lists, make introductions, eat their kill, so to speak. Compensation. How do we pay these people? How do we structure these types of opportunities? We want to make sure that we get the right incentive to drive the right behavior. I know a lot of people say commission only, right? That's what you should always do. I've had bad results with that, and I'll talk about that in a little bit. On the other side, I've heard people say, well, let's just make them base salary, right? Let's give them a relatively high base salary. And I don't like that either, because I think that sales is one of those positions that you should be able to make as, as much money as you earn, right, by closing more and more opportunities. And so I think too little base leads to desperate selling, right? Commission-only people become desperate and they start to sell the world. They start to sell promises. And if you get somebody good, maybe you can make it work. But a lot of times you're going to wind up up with bad clients that aren't good fits, that don't stick around long term. So too little base can be that problem. Too much base is complacency. Oh, you know, I've got the 6-figure income, I'm just gonna cool my jets. Even $75,000 or $50,000 base salary, I think, is extremely high for a salesperson where they can earn as much as that and more, but they'd have to sell, right, in order to make that a reality. Wrong compensation structure can lead to massive cash flow problems. I played with this throughout our agencies lifecycle at Plumbing and HVAC SEO, where I hired an appointment setter slash hunter type of role, gave them a percentage of revenue on a perpetual basis. Started doing a lot of our own marketing, getting tons of opportunities, people basically coming in pre-positioned to buy. I had an order taker that was getting a large percentage of recurring revenue, almost would have bankrupt our company. So it was really important that we removed that salesperson, removed that compensation strategy. Getting your compensation strategy in place right, so that as, as they win, you win, is super important. Closer compensation— and this again assumes you've got inbound opportunities, they're taking sales calls with people already interested, already qualified for what you do— I like real modest base between $30,000 and $40,000 per year, and then commission on the first month. So we're talking 20 to 30% of the first month. So if it's a $2,500 a month deal, they get 20 to 30% of that first month. And you can play with if hit certain benchmarks, the percentage is higher in that one particular month. I really would suggest avoiding high residuals. I've seen agencies get themselves into 5% of monthly recurring, 10% of monthly recurring. Knowing the margins in this industry, that has a massive toll on your profitability. I would say max for sales compensation, assuming they've got a base salary and you've got some marketing going, is gonna be between 1 and 2% of residual in only certain situations, right? So really avoid that. Go ahead and give them performance performance bonuses for exceeding targets. I've got a great compensation document that I put together that helps you map out on-track earnings and a video kind of talks you through how to set up that compensation plan and track it and show your salesperson, look, if you hit these targets based on these benchmarks, here's how you're going to make 6 figures, right? So if you want me to share that with you, just type comp plan in the comments and I will get that over to you. All right. So that's your closer. The next is your appointment setter. And again, this is the person that's working the leads that are coming in, people that are opting in, people are coming to webinars. Base salary for this role, and this You know, could be somebody international. Like, we've actually done pretty well in Pakistan through RepStack for hiring for appointment setter roles. Again, not cold calling, following up on your leads, setting appointments. I like to say between $10 and $15 per hour base, right? So that's still going to be a salary usually, but it's between $10 and $15 per hour. $25 to $50 per booked appointment that shows up. So they need to book an appointment for your closer or for you, and they get a little spiff. And so you're tracking how many appointments they're trying to get. They should be a good appointment setter. Assuming you've got some deal flow coming in, they should be able to book at least 2 to 3 appointments every single day, right? So that can fill your calendar, fill your sales team's calendar with one salesperson, and they get a nice little base salary. They get a nice little bump for every appointment that shows up, and then like somewhere between $250 and $500 per closed sale. They've got incentive to set appointments that are qualified, that convert. They can make money as the closer converts those opportunities. So that's your appointment setter. That could be an appointment setter for you if you don't have enough deal flow right now. You've got all of these people opting in, but you're not, you know, you're not hitting your sales targets. Having somebody that can set appointments for you, fill your calendar, could be the great intermittent step in your agency's growth. The third role is your hunter. Again, I think unless you're at multiple 7 figures and you're saying, I want to build a whole other division of my company that's just gonna hunt opportunities down, I would bypass this, right? Because you're much better served early on building up your own marketing, getting your Facebook strategy, and implementing the growth system. But if you were to hire a hunter, probably going to get a base plus performance incentive, somewhere between $30,000 and $40,000 per year base, because they're going to have a longer sales cycle. They're going to be chasing down opportunities, developing relationships, planting seeds, and they should get like a $20,000 to $30,000 commission on the first month. And whether they're hunting the opportunities for an appointment or whether they're hunting appointments and actually closing their own deals, you know, you want to set them up to be compensated because it's a very hard role. And again, probably the last thing I would focus on if I were looking to build your sales team. I would want you to focus on the appointment setter and the closer, get that 2 salesperson sales team humming, and then start looking at further growth strategies. We'll talk a little bit about recruiting and onboarding the right people. Best place to recruit for, for sales team, first of all, would be your own personal network. Post it on Facebook, post it on LinkedIn, post it on Instagram. If you got a following, hey, I'm looking to hire a salesperson to join our team. It's an amazing opportunity on a fast growth organization because there are people that buy into you, they buy into your brand, they buy into your vision, and they just want to be part of your team. If you don't wind up having anybody come in through your personal network, you can use the standard job boards, indeed.com, LinkedIn, all of the standard plays work well. I like a video application process for sales, right? Because they could send me their resume with all their sales experience and all of the great things that they've done. Until I hear their voice, how they show up on camera, because most of these sales calls happen on Zoom, it's, it's really not relevant. That's the way to do it. This is a video-based application process. You know, tell me a little bit about your sales experience. Tell me a little bit about why you're interested in this role with our company. People that have selling agency services in their background tend to expect a much higher income. You can hire someone with good sales skills and train them in your sales process. They don't necessarily have to have had agency agency experience. Some personality traits that will help you predict success in the sales roles, specifically your closure. You're going to want somebody that's from a DISC profile perspective is a relatively high DI. D Dominance— they've got the power, they've got the backbone, they've got the confidence to ask for the business and expect a yes. But they're also influential, they have great interpersonal skills, they'll have conversations, they'll like to get to know the person. If I had to choose one of the— I would higher D, but still relatively high I, because they're going to be talking to people all day. And if they hate that, and they're not comfortable on, on Zoom and going to events and having conversations, they're probably not going to want to do this job long term. So look for a high D, I role with the— for this particular sales role. And then I'd like to run Kolbe assessments for any role within the organization. And what you're looking for when you run a Kolbe assessment for sales is high Fact Find, high Follow Through, but you still need a little bit of quick start for this role. So high fact find is important because we're selling technical digital marketing services, right? We're selling how to get their company ranked, how to make sure we're converting their leads, how to make sure that those leads turn into sales. We need to actually have somebody that can talk the talk, not get super technical, but be able to talk the talk with a prospect at a high level and have a great conversation. Obviously, follow-through is important because they're going to be talking to prospects every single day, probably at least 30 to 50 prospects per month, having meetings, having relatively routine conversations. And if they're not relatively high follow-through, they're going to get bored of the redundancy of the role. And then the quick start is important because they've got to be a self-starter, right? They've got to be able to run with your process, make decisions on the fly when they're in conversations with their clients. Onboarding. You've got your salesperson. How do I get them trained up? How do I get them in a place where they're capable to have these sales calls. First thing you want to do is have them listen to recordings. Ideally, you've been selling for some time. Ideally, you've got recordings of your sales calls, you got transcripts of your sales calls. Grab like 3 to 4 that have converted, that have went the way that you wanted them to go, and have them watch those. Have them listen to the questions, have them listen to the flow. Put together a framework for your sales process. I would imagine you have this, but if you don't, there should be a framework, which is how do we open the call? How do we have those conversations? How do we understand the gap between where they are and where they want to be? I've got a deep dive training on the 7-Figure Agency sales process, the discovery call, the consultative sales call, and the close. If you'd like access to that, just say sales process here in the comments. I'll get you the link to it, but you should have a sales flow that you follow that you can hand that person and say, hey, here's how I want you to run these sales calls, right? It doesn't have to be the exact script, but there should be a flow that's followed on a consistent basis. And then your first 2 steps are going to be role-playing, like during that onboarding process where they're watching those videos, where they're reading those transcripts, where they're studying and practicing the, the sales script or the sales framework that you provided, they should be shadowing your sales calls. Ideally, you got some sales calls happening, they're gonna just sit in and they're gonna listen. They're not talking, they're not trying to do anything, they're just listening to you in real-world scenarios. Whether deal closes or not, they're learning through that process. They're hearing the questions you ask, they're hearing the answers the prospect give. From there, you want to roleplay with them and you want to set this expectation in the first couple of days. I'm going to give you this, this document, which is our sales process. I'm going to give you these recordings and I want you to start practicing. Practice with yourself. Like start having these conversations like you're really talking to a prospect. And before you start to do sales calls, you're going to sell me, right? And your guys are going to play practice. Don't expect them to be perfect right out of the gates. They should be able to carry their own. They should be able to ask the questions and they should be able to bridge the gap, but you're going to need to coach them, right? And that's the purpose of role-playing, right? And they're on Zoom and you're on Zoom, just like if you were customers, and they're going to have their screen up and they're going to ask questions and you're going to give feedback at the end. Let them do the thing and say, hey, you know what, that was good. These were the rooms for improvement. Let's practice that tomorrow. We'll come back and we'll do it again. Role-play with them until you feel like, man, they're getting it. They've got this. And if they're really bad, be okay with saying, look, I'm sorry, I don't I don't think this is a fit, we're gonna move on. For this role, hire slow, fire fast. Look, it's not a fit, let's move on, go get somebody else, because there is a base level of aptitude and communication skills that are required. From there, you're gonna start to gradually hand off responsibility. So to this point, they've been role-playing, they've been listening to your calls. Once you feel like, okay, they're pretty good, we're gonna do a joint call. Now they're taking the sales call and you're listening in. For the first handful, like, you're gonna listen in, and if you need to hop in, you'll hop in. Mr. Client, I'll take over from here, and you, you run the conversation. But eventually they're going to get to the place where they're having the conversation and they're getting the yes. And that's where you have to start to let go a little bit and say, all right, I'm going to let you run with these sales calls. And you're going to need to continue to coach them. You're going to need you to continue to provide feedback. Make sure you're tracking the KPIs, right? Which for a closer is going to be how many appointments did you have, what was the outcome, and what's the close ratio. If you've been tracking that for yourself and you're closing at 45-50%, you want to see them closing at 25-30% at least, right? It should be close. Set what that number is, track that number, listen into a call at least once a week. You can't leave salespeople on an island. Typically, you're going to put a closer in place and then they're going to need more appointments. So you're going to up the marketing and you're going to put an appointment setter in place that's going to tag team with them to set appointments. And the goal would be that that tag team gets so busy that closer calendar is full, right? And he's— he or she is overcapacity hitting their sales targets. Now it's time to go out and hire another closer, another appointment center. And that's when you can start to build a real sales team. I've seen agencies go to multiple 7 figures, even 8 figures by getting the sales team in place that just sets the appointments and closes the sales. So there you have it. Building a sales team is one of the most important steps you'll take as an agency owner. And I hope this video helped you out. Now, this is just one of the things that we help agencies we work with inside of our 7 Figure Agency Program, where we've successfully helped over 150 agencies scale to $1 million and beyond. So if you're ready to take your agency to the next level and you want access to the blueprint that hundreds of agencies have already used to scale, then click the first link in the description and book your agency acceleration session with us. On this call, we'll look at your current situation, identify the biggest growth opportunities for your agency, and create a custom roadmap to help you scale to 7 figures and beyond. So click that link below, book your free session, and we'll look forward to seeing you on the call.