Recently, our company hired a sales executive to serve the Hispanic business community. Before Yeilyn (the Y pronounced like the letter J) was hired, I was primarily contacting white collar small business owners and onboarding them through a corporate level sales system.
321 Biz Dev supports attorneys, CPAs, dentists, plastic surgeons, insurance brokers and real estate brokers. Our company reviewed training material from an 8-day, $30,000 sales system program offered to Fortune 500 sales executives and condensed the material to a 9-hour session priced at a fraction of the corporate investment.
What I found interesting was Yeilyn's outreach results were slightly lower than my results even though I have 20 years experience compared to her 3 years.
I asked myself the question: why didn't Yeilyn have much lower outreach results than I?
This is actually very good news. This means outreach actions by a 20-year vs a 3-year salesperson is statistically equal. The equivalent results point to an adjustment I needed to make to improve our consulting pitch to white collar small business owners.
What did we uncover?
321 Biz Dev uncovered a sales understanding gap not directly attributed to white collar business owner talent and skill. Most white collar business owners never spent hundreds of hours learning a sales system.
Our company pitch was not connecting with small business owners because sales systems are not known to white collar small business owners. Most attorneys, CPAs, dentists, plastic surgeons, insurance brokers and real estate brokers spent the majority of time and money mastering their trades.
At best, white collar small business owners mail postcards to homeowners, advertise on radio or television and/or rely on digital marketing...all which do not deliver strong, predictable results.
Readers may be surprised to hear sales proficiency has a 1,000 to 1,600 hour, 6 to 9 month requirement. There is nothing to substitute to successfully move through the selling learning curve.
The adjustment I made to the 321 Biz Dev pitch is communicating to white collar business owners the value of making corporate level training available to small business owners.
Most small business owners have no knowledge of corporate level sales systems. Again, it is not the fault of small business owners. If it were not for the corporation enrolling me in the 8-day program and making the $12,000 (year 2000 amount) investment, I would not be familiar with corporate level sales systems.
The reasons why corporate America so heavily invests in sales personnel are:
Product or service ticket prices can be millions of dollars per transaction.
The stakes are high as there are many competitors vying for the same customers.
most people are not good candidates for sales...so corporations do not want to waste money on unqualified candidates.
The sales department must be successful because sales pay the salaries of every company employee.
The common ground between large and small companies is the four items above apply to each. Therefore, small business owners should greatly benefit by implementing sales best practices.
We encourage small business owners selling big ticket products or services to install sales systems to maximize sales productivity and sales performance.
Yeilyn can be reached for English and Spanish language consultations at (786) 697-3400.
Rick can be reached for English language consultations at (786) 697-3401.
Thanks for reading this post.