Latest / Closing Sales in Nigeria - Sales For The Nigerian Business Person: The Sales and Marketing Blueprint / Beyond Hiring: The Foundational Steps to Building a High-Performing Sales Team

Transcript

Beyond Hiring: The Foundational Steps to Building a High-Performing Sales Team · Closing Sales in Nigeria - Sales For The Nigerian Business Person: The Sales and Marketing Blueprint

• 0:02
  Hello and welcome to the show. Now that we are done with the
• 0:06
  episodes on objections, we're going to move on to other
• 0:08
  questions that I have on the list.
• 0:11
  But before I continue, apologies because this is an out on the
• 0:14
  road episode, so expect to hear some interruptions, you know,
• 0:19
  just expect to hear some noises in the background.
• 0:22
  So, OK, well before I continue, if they are people listeners of
• 0:28
  the show who still have questions regarding objections
• 0:33
  that you figure we didn't treat things that we could have spoken
• 0:36
  about in some more detail, then I give my contact details at the
• 0:40
  end of every show. So hit me up with your
• 0:44
  questions, comments, things you disagree with, things you would
• 0:47
  like for me to explain some more, and I would make episodes
• 0:51
  that address that. So like I said, my contact
• 0:54
  details are going to be at the end of the show in case it's
• 0:57
  your first time listening. Yeah, you can also reach out on
• 1:00
  any clarifications or questions from things that we discussed
• 1:04
  today. So the next question on the list
• 1:06
  is how to build and empower a sales team.
• 1:10
  Now, why did I decide to pluck out this question from the list
• 1:15
  of questions that we have that are long overdue?
• 1:18
  It's because I'm currently working with a client who has a
• 1:21
  sales team of about 5 and it's bringing up, working with them
• 1:26
  is bringing up the importance of hiring rights to begin with.
• 1:29
  So I think that this is going to be something that is topical for
• 1:33
  those of you who already have businesses going.
• 1:35
  You have gotten past the ideation stage.
• 1:37
  You figured out the idea, you have gotten some traction.
• 1:41
  You now have validated that this is a good business to build and
• 1:45
  you've gotten some sales people on board.
• 1:47
  And right now you're at the stage where you're trying to
• 1:49
  scale the business idea. So for those of you who are at
• 1:53
  the scale stage when it comes to business growth, this episode
• 1:57
  and the episodes that are going to follow will be dedicated to
• 2:00
  you guys. So that's the reason why we are
• 2:02
  handling this question today. Now the question how to build
• 2:06
  and empower a sales team, Yeah, looks like a short question, but
• 2:11
  actually there's a whole lot that's involved.
• 2:13
  So rather than try and squeeze everything into a 15 minute
• 2:17
  episode and then we end up taking you know, 45 minutes, one
• 2:20
  hour, I think I'm just going to at the outset, I'm just going to
• 2:23
  decide we're going to break this into two stages.
• 2:26
  So First off, I'll be looking at all the stuff that is required
• 2:28
  in building the sales team to begin with.
• 2:31
  Then subsequent episode will be devoted to how to empower the
• 2:36
  sales team now that you've got them on ground.
• 2:39
  So today we're going to tackle the question, how do you build a
• 2:42
  sales team? Now, for those of you who've
• 2:44
  been listening to the show for a very long time is going to come
• 2:47
  as no surprise. But for those of you who are
• 2:49
  listening to the show, this is your first time listening to the
• 2:52
  show. You're a newbie.
• 2:53
  Then the first step actually, is to figure out the sales kinks,
• 2:58
  figure out the knots, figure out the peculiarities of your
• 3:02
  context, your product, your scenario, your business.
• 3:05
  You know, the business that you're trying to build.
• 3:07
  You need to figure out all these things first before you try to
• 3:13
  even hire for a sales role or build a sales team.
• 3:18
  Now for those of you who are long time listeners, remember
• 3:21
  the episodes where I spoke about the episode that I did on
• 3:24
  outsourcing your sales and marketing?
• 3:26
  And I spoke about how it's really unhelpful to try and
• 3:31
  outsource sales or outsource marketing, Get other people to
• 3:35
  sell and to market on your behalf if you haven't even
• 3:38
  figured out some key core things about your business to begin
• 3:41
  with. First off, you need to be able
• 3:43
  to figure out your ICP. That's your ideal customer
• 3:45
  profile. The way that I look at it, your
• 3:47
  ideal customer profile is not your dream client, like the
• 3:50
  client that you want to actually run after, but the people that
• 3:53
  you've done business with in the past.
• 3:55
  And based on your, you know, you running through your WhatsApp
• 3:58
  messages and your invoices and things like that, you'll quickly
• 4:01
  get a picture of people that you have smooth conversations with,
• 4:06
  people that you enjoy working with, people that pay you the
• 4:09
  right sum of money, people that pay without hassle, people that
• 4:13
  are appreciative, people that refer you know.
• 4:15
  Those are the sorts of things that I'm looking at when I say
• 4:17
  the ideal customer profile because this is actually a very,
• 4:21
  very good place to start with because you already have some
• 4:25
  traction with these certain kinds of people.
• 4:28
  I'm pointing this out because you will run into some other
• 4:33
  people, some other people with other podcasts or blogs or
• 4:39
  whatever who when they talk about ideal customer profile,
• 4:41
  they want you to sit and dream up this ideal person that you
• 4:44
  would like to work with. So ideally I would like to work
• 4:46
  with this. Ideally I would work like to
• 4:48
  work with that. Now that makes sense.
• 4:50
  That is not a problem. But early on in the beginning,
• 4:55
  you know, there's going to be some tension between the, the
• 4:58
  ideal people that would like to work with and the crop of people
• 5:02
  that we actually have on hand. Now, in my own opinion, I say
• 5:07
  it's best to start off with the people that you have on ground.
• 5:13
  OK. Sorry about this.
• 5:14
  I guess I should have picked the better spot.
• 5:17
  Looks like people have chosen to have all sorts of random
• 5:20
  conversations around me today. OK.
• 5:22
  Next time I'll pick a more secluded spot.
• 5:25
  So where was I? Yeah.
• 5:26
  So I was saying that you have to try and figure out a couple of
• 5:29
  things. OK.
• 5:30
  Yes, I was on this whole thing about the ICP, your ideal
• 5:32
  customer profile. So the ideal customer profile is
• 5:34
  not this your dream client that you just sit down and dream
• 5:37
  about, but then people that you're actually doing business
• 5:39
  with. Now, this is something I can
• 5:41
  speak about first hand because early on when I started my
• 5:45
  wedding photography practice, me and my brother and my now
• 5:50
  brother-in-law, well, that time he was just my cousins, my
• 5:53
  sister's boyfriend. So these are some of the
• 5:56
  tensions or some of the tensions that we had to work through.
• 5:58
  We wanted to work with a much more, what's the word?
• 6:03
  I say, sophisticated, sophisticated clientele.
• 6:06
  That was Nigerians in Diaspora. You know, people who had
• 6:10
  completed master's degrees, maybe even living abroad while
• 6:13
  coming back home to get married. That was the ideal target that
• 6:16
  we're reaching after. But that was not necessarily the
• 6:19
  people who were paying our bread and butter in Nigeria at the
• 6:23
  moment. So there might be some tension
• 6:24
  here. So in my own opinion, let's
• 6:26
  start off with the people that you've actually done business
• 6:29
  with. So look at your invoices, look
• 6:31
  at your WhatsApp messages, look at your emails, look at your
• 6:35
  bank transfers. And you start getting a sense
• 6:38
  of, oh, OK, actually, yes, I want to work with returnees from
• 6:42
  abroad and, you know, returnees from abroad making a certain
• 6:47
  kind of income, living in certain parts of the world who
• 6:49
  are interested in this and this and that and that.
• 6:52
  But if you find that you're the people on ground actually paying
• 6:54
  your bills, you know, people of a certain age, certain
• 6:58
  demographic, certain city, certain interests, you know, run
• 7:02
  with that for now. So we actually have to figure
• 7:05
  out all these things before we start trying to hire people.
• 7:08
  Because if you don't know who your ideal customer profile is,
• 7:12
  but then you hire sales people and you expect them to figure
• 7:15
  that out for you, you're you're absolutely jonesing because it's
• 7:18
  you. It's your business, It's your
• 7:20
  own aspirations. You can't just hire a bunch of
• 7:23
  strangers and then tell them to go figure it out from you, at
• 7:27
  least without giving them some core.
• 7:29
  What's it called? Terms of reference?
• 7:31
  Yes. Uh, huh.
• 7:32
  Yeah. So for those of you who work in
• 7:33
  the civil service, you have a new HOD.
• 7:35
  The HOD comes in, he wants his agenda to be different from the
• 7:38
  past administration. The first thing he's going to do
• 7:40
  is to tell you guys the term of reference.
• 7:42
  Now look under the old administration was this is this
• 7:44
  that, but now there's a new sheriff in town.
• 7:47
  I'm the new, I'm the head in charge and this is what we're
• 7:50
  going to do. We're going to run after ABC
• 7:51
  123456. So part of the terms of
• 7:55
  reference for the people that you're going to hire will be you
• 7:58
  need to tell them this is who we're chasing after for now and
• 8:02
  ideally this is who we would like to go after in the future.
• 8:05
  They also should be able to figure out your price points
• 8:08
  because if you hire a bunch of sales people, you want them to
• 8:11
  sell on your behalf. To be frank and to be honest
• 8:14
  with you, what more sales people are going to do in the
• 8:17
  beginning, especially people who don't have, are not
• 8:20
  professionals and who don't have the right amount of training, is
• 8:23
  that they're going to default to price cutting.
• 8:25
  So if you just if you haven't figured out the price points,
• 8:29
  you know what is the ideal price you want something to be at.
• 8:31
  If you're going to discount something, what is the absolute
• 8:34
  level that things have to be discounted?
• 8:35
  People are going to come in and start discounting left, right
• 8:39
  and centre and before you know it your margins are going to be
• 8:42
  really tight and stressed out. So you need to figure out all
• 8:45
  the money stuff before you get people on board to sell on your
• 8:48
  behalf. You also have to figure out your
• 8:51
  sales channels. Just think of sales channels as
• 8:54
  those places where your people already hang out.
• 8:56
  So yeah, the ways that you're going to try and reach them.
• 8:59
  So try and figure out if for your business it works best.
• 9:02
  If you're going out or talking to people, maybe going to trade
• 9:05
  shows or going out to drop Flyers, or whether you're doing
• 9:08
  the whole Instagram and TikTok thing, or whether it's a
• 9:11
  LinkedIn social selling approach or whatever.
• 9:15
  You have to figure all of these things out before you hire sales
• 9:18
  team. You also have to try and figure
• 9:20
  out your marketing positioning. So that's, you know, you looking
• 9:23
  out into the market who are competition, OK, these guys are
• 9:26
  low price, these guys are high price, these guys are crass.
• 9:29
  Maybe we want to be classy. So we're going to come into the
• 9:31
  market this way. You have to figure out all these
• 9:33
  things by yourself. Because if you just hire a bunch
• 9:37
  of people, random folks, to come and figure out these things out
• 9:40
  for you, it's going to be absolute chaos.
• 9:42
  Because one person might assume that your ideal customer profile
• 9:45
  is this and that It's OK to discount to this amount and
• 9:48
  assume that it is best to go to shopping malls to look for
• 9:53
  customers. And the person might think that
• 9:55
  you're trying to position yourself at low entry price
• 10:00
  point while somebody else might be thinking that your ideal
• 10:02
  customer price, your ideal customer is someone else at the
• 10:06
  high end of the price scale. And that you should only be
• 10:11
  looking at LinkedIn or maybe only you know talking to people
• 10:17
  that you find in high end hotels maybe like Hilton Hotel or
• 10:19
  something going to go and drop Flyers and Hilton and have their
• 10:22
  own market positioning. And you can see that it's all
• 10:25
  just random. One person assumes all of these
• 10:27
  things, another person assumes all of those things and it's
• 10:30
  hard to build a business predictably with everybody
• 10:33
  running around with different assumptions.
• 10:35
  Then you also have to try and figure out your channels when it
• 10:39
  comes to communication. Are you guys going to be mostly
• 10:42
  calling people? SMS is going to be e-mail?
• 10:46
  Are you guys going to be DMS? You know, all those sorts of
• 10:51
  things. So these are the whole lot of
• 10:55
  things that you have to try and figure out by yourself.
• 10:59
  Well, either by yourself or in conjunction with a consultant.
• 11:02
  You have to figure out all of this before you hire your first
• 11:05
  salesperson because, well, I've already gone into all the
• 11:09
  dangers. So these are the things that you
• 11:10
  have to figure out. How do you figure this out?
• 11:13
  You can only figure these things out by interacting with your
• 11:17
  customers. So in the beginning, you have to
• 11:20
  be the one trying to go out and get traction in your business.
• 11:23
  You can't run away from this, even for those big tech
• 11:26
  companies. That's in the beginning.
• 11:29
  It's that's how they all began. So for what's his name, the
• 11:33
  whole the crew with Apple, what's his name?
• 11:37
  Jobs, So for, you know, at first when they started selling
• 11:41
  motherboards for computers and things like that, you know, Jobs
• 11:43
  was going around and talking to people and trying to sell those
• 11:48
  motherboards before they moved into computers.
• 11:50
  When it came to looking for investors, Jobs was running
• 11:53
  around looking for investors, blah blah, blah.
• 11:55
  It's the same thing Zuckerberg, Facebook in the beginning, he's
• 12:01
  the one writing code. He's the one trying to figure
• 12:02
  out how can we get students on in Harvard on this?
• 12:08
  OK, well, then it wasn't called Facebook.
• 12:10
  It was called face something I can't remember.
• 12:12
  So how do we get people on this face, whatever it was called at
• 12:15
  the time, after you're done with Harvard and they are trying to
• 12:18
  look at other universities, whether it's Stanford or all the
• 12:20
  other places, You know, he was in front of the whole thing.
• 12:25
  So whether you look at things in the foreign context or in
• 12:28
  Nigerian context, we can't run away from the fact that in the
• 12:31
  beginning, when you're the early stage founder, I mean before you
• 12:35
  become the Orga CEO or the Madam CEO, you have to be in the thick
• 12:39
  of things trying to figure all these things out.
• 12:41
  It doesn't mean you have to be the best salesperson and you
• 12:45
  have to sell all the while when you are trying to get this
• 12:48
  business going because right now Zuckerberg doesn't code anymore.
• 12:51
  You know, Zuckerberg is making higher, higher level decisions.
• 12:54
  You know, what's the strategy for Facebook?
• 12:58
  What's the future? Artificial intelligence Matter.
• 13:02
  Sorry, No matter. OK, Matter is the parent
• 13:04
  company. So artificial intelligence, what
• 13:07
  else? You know, all these challenges
• 13:12
  that they have to go through, You know, those are the bigger
• 13:14
  questions that he's asking right now.
• 13:15
  So he's no longer coding. He's no longer interfacing
• 13:17
  directly with customers. But in the beginning, you have
• 13:20
  to be responsible for some of these things.
• 13:22
  So that's step one. Figure out all these issues, all
• 13:27
  the knots, all the tricky areas, the peculiarities, your business
• 13:31
  context. Figure out everything.
• 13:33
  Who are the people we're going to be chasing after?
• 13:35
  How much are we going to sell this product or service?
• 13:39
  Where? How are we going to be talking
• 13:41
  to these people? So excuse me, to these people,
• 13:43
  our potential customers, are we going to be chasing after them
• 13:46
  live and in the flesh, going to markets to trade shows?
• 13:50
  They're dropping flowers at churches.
• 13:52
  We're not going to be sliding into people's DMS online, you
• 13:56
  know stuff like that. How are we positioning ourselves
• 14:00
  at the mark in the market? Are we coming as low cost to try
• 14:02
  and get as many customers as possible or from the beginning,
• 14:05
  do we want to form exclusive and then start with a higher price
• 14:08
  point? How we, what's the best way to
• 14:10
  communicate with people? You need to figure all these
• 14:13
  things out because that will serve as the foundation for
• 14:17
  training your future sales team. So that when you hire your first
• 14:20
  two or three people and you sit them down before you say go ye
• 14:24
  out and sell my product, you'll be able to tell them now.
• 14:25
  OK. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to
• 14:28
  SO, so, so and so. I'm the chief founder.
• 14:31
  This is the product or the service we're going to be
• 14:32
  selling. And there are a couple of things
• 14:34
  I need to tell you guys before we unleash you into the world so
• 14:36
  you can sell on our behalf. First off, you need to know that
• 14:39
  this is the perfect client that we're looking for.
• 14:41
  So please, only be going after these sorts of people.
• 14:44
  Don't go after these kinds of people.
• 14:46
  They're not our best kind of customers.
• 14:48
  Don't go in with these kinds of people.
• 14:49
  These kinds of people have been problematic for us in the past,
• 14:52
  so only stick to these classes of potential clients.
• 14:55
  ABC, you can see how you're making their job very clear so
• 14:58
  that when they hit the streets or when they hit the Internet,
• 15:01
  they know exactly who they're chasing after.
• 15:04
  You also have the conversation on price points.
• 15:05
  So ladies and gentlemen, I know you guys will be tempted to to
• 15:10
  discount and blah blah blah, but we already worked out the
• 15:13
  pricing. We make the most profit when we
• 15:15
  sell at this price. If you try and discount at this
• 15:19
  level or taking it out of your paycheck and that also hurts our
• 15:22
  profits, you know, blah blah blah.
• 15:24
  Have that conversation and then on to the channels, things We
• 15:28
  have found that we work best with people when we approach
• 15:31
  them on LinkedIn and in this particular manner.
• 15:34
  And something, something, something you need to have that
• 15:36
  conversation with these people or we have found that yeah,
• 15:40
  things work out best when we approach our people live and in
• 15:43
  the flesh. You know, we attend trade shows,
• 15:45
  we drop flowers and blah, blah, blah.
• 15:46
  You need to tell them so you can see how if you have all these
• 15:51
  conversations with people up front from day one when you hire
• 15:54
  them, the job is a whole lot easier.
• 15:56
  Because looking at things in the future, now it's just a matter
• 16:00
  of, look, I told you what it is that needs to be done and I told
• 16:03
  you how it needs to be done. Did you do the thing?
• 16:06
  So did you go out and look for this number of people, How many
• 16:09
  people did you talk to, things like that.
• 16:10
  You can see that when it comes to managing them, we can now
• 16:13
  start figuring out exactly where the problem was, where things
• 16:16
  went wrong, and we can come with a plan for how to improve.
• 16:20
  Now, another reason why I say that we should figure out all
• 16:24
  these things before we hire a sales team is because eventually
• 16:26
  you're going to work with, you're going to want to work
• 16:28
  with a consultant, someone just like me to come in, help you
• 16:32
  guys set up your selling frameworks and processes, train
• 16:35
  up your staff, things like that. When you have done all this
• 16:39
  work, it makes the job a whole lot easier because as a
• 16:42
  consultant, when you come in and somebody has done, it doesn't
• 16:45
  have to be perfect, but the person has done something.
• 16:48
  I can answer some of these questions.
• 16:50
  You guys make progress pretty quickly because some of the
• 16:53
  foundation has been set. So that's also another reason.
• 16:57
  Now, OK, 16 minutes. So let's wrap this up.
• 17:01
  OK, No, there's something I haven't addressed.
• 17:03
  So step one, I've told you guys what you need to do on your own
• 17:06
  before you start trying to hire a sales team.
• 17:09
  Now step 20, by the way, trying to figure out your ICP, who
• 17:13
  should be running after the price points, your channels,
• 17:15
  marketing, positioning, how communicate with people, things
• 17:17
  like that. That is where this podcast comes
• 17:20
  in handy. Not just my podcast, but there
• 17:22
  are other learning resources out there, not just podcast, but
• 17:24
  Youtubes and blogs and things like that.
• 17:26
  Pay attention to all these things.
• 17:28
  Start with philosophies or frameworks that you seem to
• 17:33
  blend with or you seem to resonate with.
• 17:35
  The only thing that I would have advise you guys is this.
• 17:39
  Stay away from people who say do these five steps and you will
• 17:45
  get 1000% returns on blah blah blah.
• 17:48
  So all those unrealistic specific promises, stay away
• 17:50
  from those people, and also stay away from people who say these
• 17:54
  are the top 10 hacks to something, something something.
• 17:57
  Now hacks can work, yes, but the problem with tips and hacks is
• 18:01
  this. Selling is part of the system.
• 18:04
  When you try a hack, you're trying to do something removed
• 18:09
  from a larger system or a larger context.
• 18:12
  So if it works, you'll be lucky and you won't know why it is
• 18:17
  working. If it doesn't work, you're
• 18:20
  unlucky and you have no idea of what has broken down and how to
• 18:23
  go about fixing it. So you don't have to listen to
• 18:27
  only me, listen to anyone, but make sure that the person you're
• 18:30
  talking to has a system. For instance, in the Abuja, the
• 18:35
  episode where I spoke about the Abuja, that networking group,
• 18:39
  the ladies networking group, brunch, brunch and bond.
• 18:44
  It was a conversation that we had where people are talking
• 18:46
  about should you dance on, dance online and point and work and
• 18:50
  all that. And it's a frank conversation
• 18:51
  that I had with them that look, between you and me, as far you
• 18:55
  guys are my sisters. I'll tell you guys don't do all
• 18:59
  of that. But if you must, there is a
• 19:02
  whole system to dancing and pointing and twerking and all of
• 19:05
  that on TikTok. If you haven't learned the whole
• 19:08
  system, but you're trying to do the pointing and the twerking
• 19:12
  isolated from the overall system, then you are going to
• 19:15
  waste your time and you will not make sales.
• 19:19
  So for those people who draw more business by dancing and
• 19:23
  pointing and twerking on Tiktok, there is an overall system.
• 19:28
  So you learn the whole thing. There's a communications that
• 19:33
  goes with it. There's an ideal customer
• 19:37
  profile that they are chasing. There's a whole lot.
• 19:40
  There's a way that they initiate their conversations with the
• 19:43
  customers. There's it's it's a system.
• 19:46
  You can't just see that because Binkley was twerking actually
• 19:50
  seems to be driving Mercedes-Benz.
• 19:52
  Then you start working. You actually should go to Bing
• 19:54
  Pay and learn the system because it's not just working that is
• 19:58
  making the whole thing work. So that's the sort of thing that
• 20:00
  I'm talking about. So because you see lots of these
• 20:03
  things like on Instagram, if you open up your Instagram explore
• 20:06
  now, you will see stuff like do these five things to explode
• 20:10
  your business in 2024. Stay away from those sorts of
• 20:12
  content. But if the person is talking
• 20:15
  about a system. Then by all means follow through
• 20:19
  for now. I'm not going to judge what kind
• 20:24
  of system, but you're better off.
• 20:26
  I'm starting this journey with someone who has some sort of
• 20:29
  system to begin with. So ignore these people who are
• 20:32
  saying do this and you will get 999% returns on your money.
• 20:38
  Ignore those people because it's not realistic.
• 20:41
  No, no that is not realistic. But in sales, you cannot
• 20:44
  guarantee returns, at least not now.
• 20:47
  For people who have well established systems, there are
• 20:50
  certain things you can guarantee because you know that if you
• 20:52
  tweak, if you're able to tweak your advertising copy and if
• 20:56
  you're able to improve conversions from maybe 1% to 2%,
• 21:01
  you can calculate it and see that, OK, at the end of the
• 21:03
  year, this is how much money that we're going to make.
• 21:05
  Well, in the beginning it's hard to run all that math.
• 21:07
  So I've heard all those people who are promising you 900
• 21:10
  percent, 10,000% returns and all of that.
• 21:13
  And then stay away from people who are promoting tips and
• 21:15
  tricks and hacks. What you what you need now is a
• 21:20
  system. When you become well versed in
• 21:25
  sales and marketing you will be able to assess and apply tips
• 21:29
  and tricks and hacks. So like at my own stage.
• 21:32
  So excuse me, my code isn't my sore throat is improving but the
• 21:37
  code is still there. So at my stage now, if I see a
• 21:41
  tip or a trick or a hack on the Internet, I've been doing this
• 21:46
  for a while so I can assess like, oh OK, this will work,
• 21:49
  this won't work. These are the circumstances
• 21:51
  under which this will work. You know, things like that.
• 21:53
  All right, so now that's all about step one.
• 21:56
  Now Step 2 to building the right sales team is to make sure that
• 21:59
  you hire the right way. Now hiring the right way is not
• 22:05
  all about product knowledge and skills in Nigeria.
• 22:13
  That is what we focus on most of the time.
• 22:15
  And yes, it makes sense for certain kinds of disciplines.
• 22:18
  When it comes to sales and marketing, you actually want to
• 22:20
  hire people who have the right attitude and the right
• 22:23
  disposition because sales requires people to be, what's
• 22:28
  that word? Self starting, self motivating,
• 22:31
  being able to work through difficult situations, to plough
• 22:34
  through, to be creative. And these are things that you
• 22:37
  cannot teach. You can't teach someone to plow
• 22:41
  through. Well, you can, but it's
• 22:43
  difficult. It is best to hire someone who
• 22:46
  already has the habit of plowing through and working through
• 22:49
  difficult situations and difficult contexts.
• 22:52
  Hire that person first. Then you can train that person
• 22:56
  on. These are the sales skills.
• 22:59
  This is how you talk to my customer or this is the product
• 23:02
  knowledge, this is how my product or my service works and
• 23:04
  blah blah blah. So skills, sales skills, product
• 23:08
  knowledge, those are the easy part to teach.
• 23:12
  You can take someone who has no sales knowledge and over two or
• 23:15
  three months you can teach them a couple of things and you will
• 23:19
  see great improvements. But if you hire somebody with
• 23:22
  the wrong attitude, you know, excuse my French, but you're
• 23:24
  totally effed, You're effed from the get go.
• 23:27
  If you hire somebody who a person is not motivated to pick
• 23:32
  up the phone, the person is not motivated to chat with people on
• 23:38
  social media, person is not motivated to drop Flyers.
• 23:43
  The person is waiting for salary at the end of the month.
• 23:46
  You catch my drift? So the main thing is let's hire
• 23:50
  the right, the right attitude, the right disposition, Hire
• 23:54
  someone who is teachable first. So let's the Niger thing of
• 23:59
  looking at product, knowledge and skills.
• 24:01
  Yeah, that's important. I'm not saying disregardo.
• 24:04
  I'm not saying you should hire a Don's.
• 24:06
  I'm just saying that first of all, let's look for somebody who
• 24:09
  seems competent, who has the right attitude, the right
• 24:11
  disposition, someone who is teachable.
• 24:15
  Let's hire those people first. Later on, we will now train them
• 24:18
  on sales skills. We'll now train them on.
• 24:20
  This is how you dress. This is how you talk to my this
• 24:23
  is how you're going to talk to my customers.
• 24:25
  This is how you will negotiate with them if there's a problem.
• 24:28
  This is how we handle the whole issues.
• 24:30
  This is how my product works. This is how my service works,
• 24:33
  you know, blah, blah, blah. Those are the easy things to
• 24:37
  train upon. So let me bring this real close
• 24:39
  since we're close to 30 minutes now.
• 24:42
  So how do you build and empower a sales team?
• 24:45
  We're going to do that in two steps.
• 24:46
  Today was how do you build a sales team.
• 24:48
  Step one is need to figure out the foundation that you're going
• 24:51
  to use to train these people upon.
• 24:53
  So figure out who your customer is.
• 24:55
  Figure out the money issues. Figure out the price points.
• 24:58
  Figure out your sales channels, where and how you going to be
• 25:00
  approaching people. Figure out your marketing
• 25:02
  positioning. Are you coming in cheap?
• 25:04
  Are you coming in exclusive? Are you coming in mid market?
• 25:06
  Figure out your communication strategy, how you going to be
• 25:09
  talking to people. Is it face to face?
• 25:11
  Is it online? Is it phone?
• 25:13
  Is it e-mail? Is it SMS?
• 25:14
  Figure out all these things so that when you hire a team you
• 25:17
  know how to train them. Then when it comes to hiring the
• 25:20
  team, please focus on people who have the right attitude, the
• 25:23
  right disposition, people who are teachable.
• 25:25
  It will save you a whole lot of problems.
• 25:27
  There's no point in hiring somebody who is a product
• 25:29
  specialist. As in the guy knows your
• 25:32
  product, he knows your service, and he has sales skills or she
• 25:36
  has sales skills. But then Monday the person
• 25:39
  refused to go out. Tuesday the person refuses to
• 25:42
  make phone calls. Wednesday the person says that
• 25:44
  they have to go to the hospital. Thursday, they say their mother
• 25:47
  is in town, so they want to go and visit their mother.
• 25:50
  Friday is a public holiday so the person doesn't show up.
• 25:53
  And then next week Monday, the person is expecting to collect
• 25:57
  the salary. So yeah, so that's it.
• 26:00
  So thank you very much for your time and attention.
• 26:02
  Like I said, you guys have any questions?
• 26:04
  Not just on this episode, by any episode prior, hit me up on
• 26:07
  WhatsApp. The phone number is 08064662140.
• 26:14
  Country code is +234. If you're not Nigerian, then I'm
• 26:19
  also available on LinkedIn. My name is Tabishima Ayede.
• 26:23
  I'm the host of the show. You can confirm the spelling of
• 26:25
  my name from the link. We're currently listening to
• 26:28
  this episode. Thanks for your time and
• 26:30
  attention. I'll catch you guys at the next
• 26:32
  episode.