Why you should hire salespeople?

This is a guest post by our good friend Aaron Ross. Aaron is the author of the best-selling book Predictable Revenue. During this video, he discusses why you should hire salespeople.

Overview

This advice will help you in understanding the importance and effects of hiring salespeople.

1. Salespeople are extremely helpful for clients, especially big ones.
2. They're beneficial for increasing revenue and growth.
3. They're essential to developing strong talent within the company.

Why companies are afraid of hiring salespeople

I’m from Silicon Valley and I was an Internet CEO and I’ve also worked at companies like Salesforce.com and been in venture capital and do sales coaching and so on and so, I have seen all these types of companies.

And there are some companies that loved the idea of salespeople and that’s the way they’re going to go to market and grow, etc. And then, there are lots of companies that have this idea of they want to automate everything and it’s all about the product, which is true, so they spend all their money on either building the product or in operations and they might have 20 developers and one or zero sales people and the one sales person is the CEO.

They see that salespeople are an expense. "I mean, they’re really expensive and I don’t want to have sales, you know, I don’t like sales and I want people to be able to buy online."

Help big companies buy

You know, a lot of that is really just fear or myths or misperceptions and, in fact, sales people can be incredibly helpful to clients especially big ones, you know, big companies need help. Big companies, actually they need your help buying from you because they have so many people involved and it’s just a nightmare. And a great salesperson—in fact whether it’s large or small companies—can help really educate, they can teach the client things, they can build a relationship, making it a lot easier for you and them and so that’s really valuable.

Rev up revenue

Salespeople are also a great way to make money and it depends on what you sell and everything else but, you know, if you have a smart sales model, you can easily, you know, rev up your revenue. I don’t know whether you double or triple it. It’s amazing what you can do with a great sales processing team and people in place. Of course if you have, you know, difficult people and no process, etc., it can be disaster but, you know, of course you’re doing it well, right?

Develop talent

And, the third thing is that sales team can actually be an amazing way to develop talent in the company because you have these people and assuming you’re hiring smart people with integrity, they’re talking to clients, they’re learning the value, they’re learning what people need, they’re selling, they’re helping bring money into the company.

Another reason why you should have sales people and what you’re doing is you’re creating a lot of potential, mini entrepreneurs and people who can deal with money and people and product.

And that’s something that all your developers just don’t get that kind of experience. And, so what you have is this pool of great talent that you can turn into product managers or sales executives or future CEO or start new divisions or whatever. It’s an amazing talent pool for your company.

Rethink your position on salespeople

So I would really encourage you to do is to start to take seriously the idea of “Wow, if you actually had a great salesperson or people, how could that really help your company?” And, to not treat salespeople as some arbitrary expense or bad thing that you don’t want. I think they can really, really benefit your company if you do it right.