Sales by the Business Owner Don't Count

Posted by Colin Clark on Jan 20th, 2010 | View Comments home title

I’ve twice found myself in the role that Tony Scelzo calls ‘the worst job in the world’… The first salesman hired in a startup company.

The first time I found myself there I worked for Marketpath, a web company in downtown Indianapolis. Actually I was technically the second salesman… I was hired a few months after my good friend T.J. Furman.

The founders had business coming in, and they wanted much more. They had just signed a huge deal with the Harding Poorman group that generated tens of thousands of dollars plus residuals.

‘Great!’ I thought. ’I'll sell a ton of websites and make a boatload.’

It didn’t take long for me to realize that selling websites was hard work. While TJ and I sold several websites in our first few months, we definitely weren’t generating enough income to justify having 2 salesmen on staff full-time, so I got the boot.

It seemed that the founders were much better at selling than we were.

So, I started looking for a new job, because I didn’t yet believe that I had the skills to go into business for myself. I went to work for Brandswag… as the first salesman they had ever hired.

The founder, Kyle Lacy, had a ton of momentum going which I thought would make working with us an easy sell. After a few months it became clear that people really preferred to do be sold by the business owner. And again I didn’t get the job done.

So I went into business for myself…

And people started buying from me.

Here’s my point… If you’re a founder or owner of the business, people assume you have the power to make deals. They know that you’re staking your name and reputation on your work, and they assume that you’re skilled in what you do (ie, you’re good at graphic design, so they don’t assume you’re great at sales).

So here’s the point. Sales made by the business owner don’t count. They all go towards funding the business. A salesperson will rarely be as good as the founder and it’s likely that the founder will lose money on the salesperson for the first several months.

Thoughts?

Michael Reynolds

Colin,

This is a very insightful post. I found that this indeed used to be the case at my company until we hired Arrick. We went through a few sales people that didn't work out for the reasons you described but when we met Arrick, it was clear that he had the right mojo for helping customers and making sales. We also sent him to sales training so that he had a formal process and it's made a huge difference.
Colin Clark

I completely agree. It takes a certain type of person, and training definitely helps quite a bit.

I guess that's the one thing I left out in my story. I also got a great sales trainer about 9 months ago, and that has also made a huge financial difference.