Before You Hire A Salesperson, Consider These 5 Must-Haves

You might be opposed to saying it out loud, so we’ll say it for you. 

Hiring a salesperson can be a terrifying experience.  It’s on par with excavating month-old leftovers from the fridge and almost as bad as living in the same home with your mother-in-law for an “undetermined” amount of time. 

Will your decision to hire a salesperson pay off?  Will this person be the person?  Do you have what it takes to bring on and retain this piece of your business that is absolutely critical to your eventual success?  Question marks like these can plague the entire process of hiring, managing, and training a salesperson.

However, we’d like to eliminate one of those many question marks for you, and this elimination occurs at the very beginning of the process—well before you even think about building a sales team. 

Here are the five must-haves you should carefully consider before hiring a salesperson for your MSP. 

Do you have a product offering?

This is a no-brainer, right?  Of course you have a product offering!  But, take a few minutes to think this through.  Has your Managed Service offering been clearly defined?  Is it the same thing today as it was yesterday, and tomorrow, will it be the same as it was today?  If you’re not sure, then how can you hire someone to sell a product that isn’t even a product yet?

Do you have a sales process?

If you can’t measure the progress of your new hires and if your new hires have no way to monitor their development, then no one will know the difference between success and failure.  What you think is a failure, your salesperson might consider a success.  To avoid this, you need a thorough sales process that starts at the first call and ends well after the check is signed, deposited, and cleared.   

Do you have presentation material prepared?

Any good salesperson will be good at selling stuff and building relationships.  But what they won’t be good at is doing math, designing a PowerPoint, and thinking of other departments.  So before you hire a salesperson, make sure you have the sales presentation taken care of.  Don’t leave it up to them and expect to be blown out of the water by a breathtaking presentation.  Because that will most certainly not happen.  Give them the material they need to be really good at what they do best… to sell.   

Do you have a training program?

Even if you have the product, the process, and the presentation, you can’t just expect your salesperson to know what to do with any of it.  You need to have a legitimate training program in place that covers all the bases and lasts quite a bit longer than a measly 24 hours.  Here’s what it is, here’s how it works, and here’s what you should do with it. 

Do you have enough money in the bank?

If you think the answer to your money problem is to hire a salesperson, then you’re mistaken.  Only hire someone if you can afford to pay them their salary and then go home at the end of the day and still turn on your lights.  Even a great salesperson may not start producing results for months—sometimes years.  In other words, they aren’t going to pay for themselves right out of the gate.  It just won’t happen. 

If you have these 5 must-haves covered, then you probably have what it takes to hire a new salesperson; however, if you’d like to learn a little more about the MSP sales process, then give CharTec a call today at 1.866.544.2772.  Or, feel free to contact us here.