SwipeTown Academy

As entrepreneurs, we love ye olde seafaring metaphor, don’t we? We’re call ourselves the captain. We’ve got our crew. We’re steering the ship. There’s no scurvy. Life is grand.

The last thing we want to do in our seafaring analogy is throw an anchor overboard and slow down the ship.

But that’s what hiring a salesperson feels like. You’re sinking all this money into a hire when, hey, couldn’t you just keep doing it yourself?

Or wait awhile until the cash flow improves? Or promote your super-smart assistant?

Here are the four mistakes entrepreneurs make when hiring a sales rep.

• Not Knowing What You Are Actually Looking For. Most of the entrepreneurs tend to believe one-size fits all but that is not the case actually.

  Most of the times, while looking for new sales representative, entrepreneurs would have HR frame a job description that gets posted on multiple channels. But, the problem here is the description that is way too generic.

  It eventually results in drawing candidates lacking potential. Or just don’t match the profile and becomes a tiring task to filter the results.

• Having Unrealistic Expectations. Majority of the entrepreneurs commit a mistake of expecting the sales representative to hunt, farm, assist and outpace the quota simultaneously.

  Ideally, the sales representative should be assigned one task and to do that task efficiently. Cut down the number of responsibilities and create realistic expectations.

• Hiring Before You Need To. This happens to so many entrepreneurs who get overly excited about their product.

  I’ve made this mistake before, and it’s caused me more migraines than I could handle.

  Depending on how you structure your deal, you may be able to bring a sales rep on for no initial cost.

  But just because you can afford to bring in more help, doesn’t mean you need to.

• Hiring “sales stars”. Small and mid-sized businesses recruiters often seem to believe in the hoary myth that “a great salesperson can sell anything to anyone.”

  In fact, salespeople who really excel at a particular job are seldom successful selling a different type of product or in a different selling environment.

I hope that now that you know this information you will be able to avoid these errors that are so common. If you have committed any of these mistakes in the past, do not worry, go ahead, learn from your mistakes.