Seven Ways to Drive Sales

Independent sales representatives. These are sales people who typically work for straight commission and they probably work for more than one master. They are most likely individuals who work out of home-based offices.

• Positive: They typically work on commission, so they are incentivized to sell as much as they can or they make nothing. They are self-motivated and usually have great business contacts, which expedites sales.
• Negative: They probably work for more than one company in order to spread their risk.

Strategic partners. These are companies who sell noncompeting products to the same market. They believe selling your product will produce another source of revenue and it's a way to diversify their own sales portfolio.

• Positive: They have contacts and acceptance in the space you are trying to sell in. The partner is excited to produce another line of revenue.
• Negative: A lot of time has to be spent training the sales force. You have to stay on top of the sales manager and sales force to get them to produce. Unless the sales people working for the partner have a great incentive to sell your product/service, the partnership will produce little or nothing.

It is rare for companies to try to use all seven resources to build sales. Most companies simply don't have the management bandwidth to do all seven. Plus, using more than two can lead to confusion in the marketplace in terms of who represents the company, and the overlap can cause fighting between sales teams over who "owns" the customer.

10 Things to Consider

Before you decide which sales process you are going to select there are 10 criteria you want to consider.

1. Capital investment. The cost of hiring one sales person includes a base salary, benefits, travel expenses, computers and other various items. Although this number, according to Salary.com, can range depending on the region of the country and industry, on average one sales person can cost you $50,000 per year.

2. Control. For a lot of business leaders it is important to control sales and using nonsalaried employees requires giving up some control.

3. Growth goals. If you want to grow quickly, then hiring one sales person at a time probably won't do it. (See criterion #1.)

4. Internal sales skills. If a business owner or a partner has good sales skills, then that might help you decide whether to keep sales in-house or to outsource the function. Having a partner with sales skills will save the company from initially hiring a sales rep. Partners also provide a passion and knowledge that hired guns never possess.

5. Product. Some products are so complex that they need to be sold by people trained in-house. Others such as basic retail products like office chairs can be sold over the Internet. By selling over the Internet, there might not be any sales people or just someone to answer the telephone.