Build a Sales Force That Sells Without You

Welcome to Your Business, Accelerated! Digitally remastered with AI, Your Business, Accelerated! is the go-to podcast for entrepreneurs ready to scale smart. Hosted by Attorney Shaune B. Arnold, it delivers strategic business insights, legal frameworks, and real-world solutions to help you operate with clarity and confidence. Get actionable guidance to protect, grow, and optimize your business…one smart move at a time.

Tired of chasing leads while juggling everything else? In this dynamic episode, Attorney Shaune B. Arnold lays out a no-nonsense strategy for building a high-performance sales team—without draining your budget. Learn how to recruit, train, and empower motivated sellers who boost your bottom line and finally free you to scale. 

Transcript

Hello everyone, …and welcome …once again to your business accelerated. I am your host, attorney, Shaune B Arnold, and I'm very excited to be here with you today. Before we get started, I want to take just a couple of moments to take care of some housekeeping matters that we take care of every week.

I want to make sure that you are aware I'm a California business attorney. That means, any legal issues that we talk about here on your business accelerated have to be taken in light of the fact that I am a California business attorney. If we talk about legal issues, then I invite you to take those issues to an attorney in your jurisdiction, just to make sure that there are no differences between the law where you live in the law where I live.

I also invite you also over to listen to my other podcast, legal biz cafe. On legal biz cafe, we deal with the entrepreneur mindset issues that stymie you and make you feel stuck. They make you feel like you can't move forward, or that you're moving forward so slowly that the marketplace is out running you.

We deal with all those issues over on legal biz cafe. I invite you to listen to both shows, because they are two sides of the same coin. Together, they are going to make you a very strong entrepreneur.

So, let's dive right on in here tonight. We are talking about building a sales force in your organization. This is a little bit different from the conversation that we had last week, where we talked about different ways that you can participate in joint venture alliances to gain instant market share, instant clients and to explode your client potential by going all Tom Sawyer on them and having other people sell your products and services.

You're using other people's databases. You're using other people's hard work. You are creating a campaign and then presenting it to other people. Well, here we're talking about actually building a dedicated sales force for your business from within your organization. That is very different than joint venture relationships that drive sales.

The first thing that I would encourage you to do is to really create a good, solid sales culture within your company. This provides support to your sales people, and provides an organization and atmosphere where they feel supported, valued, and you're not making their job harder because you're doing things like providing excellent customer service.

Customer service is so important. It is, it is probably the single most important reason why 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers, and why they keep coming back again and again and again. When you build that solid customer service foundation in your business, you're not only ensuring that your customers will come back, you're making the work easy for your sales force.

Another thing that you could do for your sales force, to make it easy for them, believe it or not, is to pay them really well. You know, when I do joint ventures, I hire salespeople to sell the event. I make sure those people are making 50% of whatever the sale is. The reason why I pay them so outrageously is because I want them to prioritize my business.

Also, many business owners let their ego interfere with their good judgment to the point where they actually invent complicated compensation arrangements to make it difficult for people to make money and to limit their sales people's pay. My suggestion is that you hire yourself some powerhouse sales people and pay them really well. I'm happy to do that because I know that when I'm writing them a big check, they've made me an even bigger check. So, it's no big deal.

Another thing I would encourage you to do to build a strong sales force for your company is, if you are currently a one-person micro enterprise, then your business is going to change for the better when you turn your sales function over to a trusted professional. I know that's making you cringe, because you're thinking, I can't afford that. But you know you can't afford not to do it because that will free you up to stay at the 55,000 foot level and work on your business and not be stuck generating leads, chasing leads and bringing customers in.

If you're in a service business, you want to be the one that's serving the customers, but you don't want to be the one that's bringing the customers in. If you are, you're working too hard. I would suggest you hire a sales manager to actually deal with your sales people, and you can give them 50% of whatever they sell, plus, say, 5% of whatever your sales force sells. And so they're making a nice fat commission, and it might even be limiting or pinching down a little bit on you, because you're not going to turn around and pay your salespeople 45%. You're going to leave them at 50%. You're going to take 45% and you're going To give that other 5% to your sales manager. This way you can engage them in your business.

If you seriously don't have money to pay salary to a sales manager, how do you then build a sales force that's designed to make instant sales in your business, so that you can make instant money, and they can make instant money? Well, there are several ways that you can do that.

The best salespeople are very often just everyday people that you've already been doing business with. So, you should be talking to your customers and finding out who's looking for a job and who's looking for an opportunity. If they like your product or service, then you've already accomplished half the job, right? You've already gotten them enthusiastic. They're part of that 20% that gives you 80% of your business. Think about using these people because they're already enthusiastic about you and your business. And they could be sales superstars for you.

Here's another tip. If you've conducted sales for your own small business, then you already know what it takes to sell successfully for your business. You know the traits, you know the skills, you know the sensibilities that are required to sell your product or your service.

I'm suggesting that you then turn that knowledge into a process that identifies and recruits people that can be trained to sell for you. While you are in your interviewing process, for a candidate that looks promising, you can actually send them home with a sales script. You can then schedule a time when they can call you back, and you can role play. You can tell whether or not they have what it takes before you invest the time and the resources to train them. 

You can also offer them a 30 day trial period and make it clear that you are going to be training them during that 30 day period to evolve them into sales superstars for your business. This means they're going to be enthusiastic about working for you, because you're not just watching them in those 30 days to see if they're going to screw it up. You're actually helping them in those 30 days to build their skill level so they will want to do whatever is necessary to help your business succeed.

I also implore you to think of hiring actual salespeople for your business. As entrepreneurs, you want to hire people to sell your products and your services that have the same entrepreneurial mindset that you do. If you hire someone that thinks like an entrepreneur, that's going to be a person that has a tendency towards self-motivation. That person is going to invest in their own knowledge and training.

So, during your interview process, you want to ask them questions about whether they've taken sales training courses on their own, whether they read books on their own, whether they listen to motivational audios in the car. You want to ask them what they do in order to build up their own skills levels. That is plural, and I did mean that in a plural sense, to improve their own sales ability.

Someone who is thinking about sales as an entrepreneur, is thinking about sales as a career. So, he's making himself the best salesperson that he can be, and that is going to make that person an asset in your business,

Another way you can ensure you're getting somebody who's really good is to hire them away from somebody the job they have right now. It's done every day. In fact, so many salespeople become disillusioned with their current employers, you would be surprised how successful you could be in convincing them to leave their job and work for you, especially if you're setting up the proper culture and sales compensation.

You can just hire salespersons to work for commission only. Someone that believes in themselves as a salesperson doesn't mind taking a commission-only job because they know they're going to sell.

Make sure that you give them the right scripts and all the tools that they need in order to sell for you properly. You want to make sure that you're transferring your passion and your knowledge about your goods and your services to your sales force, and this will ensure they are able to articulate exactly the same thing to your prospects.

Make sure that you are providing them with top notch leads. If you can provide them with pre-qualified leads, those are the best.

You want to make sure that you're not dealing with leads of people who are interested but broke. You want to make sure they are well-qualified leads that you're providing. Make sure all of your website has the proper information; that you have a products page for your salesforce; that they can refer quickly to your products; and they can tell people very quickly what's in your product and what benefits and transformation that your products provide to your customers. 

Your salespeople have to know all of this. They need to be able to compare your various products with one another so that they can make the proper recommendations to your prospects. You should provide them with a list of frequently asked questions and frequently delivered sales objections that you know people are going to offer to your sales force so that they're armed and confidently selling for you.

You should have a complete sales letter, in pdf format. If your current offer is on your website, then be sure to also produce it in that sales letter or in a brochure format and then distill that into a pdf document so your sales force can email it to people.

Because often people will say, “Well, I don't want to buy from you until you can send me something.” Make sure your sales force has all of your sales materials available to them at their fingertips. Help them help you.

Lastly, make sure they have a testimonial sheet available to you. If you have testimonials from satisfied customers, then you can easily compile these testimonials into one sheet and just fill that into a pdf file so your sales force can email that to potential customers. You want to make sure that you give them all of the tools and all of the resources that make selling for you a breeze. In that way, you will make sure that the people you're bringing onto your organization are going to naturally evolve into sales superstars. As such, you can build a powerhouse sales force for your business that will bring instant revenue, not only to you, but also to your sales force.

Ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank you so much for tuning into this week's episode of your business, accelerated. I am your host, attorney Shaune B. Arnold. I encourage you to follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter X. In all of those places, you can find me as Shaune dot Arnold. In the meantime, …and in between time, …I am reminding you, …as always, to MAXIMIZE your COMPETENCE, to get the CONFIDENCE YOU NEED to succeed.

I'll see you next week right here on Your Business Accelerated. Bye-bye, friends.