Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

It's Only Common Sense: You Need Salespeople

Editor's Note: To listen to Dan's weekly column, as you've always done in the past, click here. For the written transcript, keep reading...How many times I am going to have to say this? For the loyal readers who've been reading this column for years, I apologize in advance and won’t blame you if you want to sit this one out--you’ve read it all before. Every time I think people have gotten the message, I'm proven wrong. Every time I think the times are changing, I wind up disappointed, discouraged, and angry. Angry because some people still don't get it. So, here we go again…and I wish I could promise that I am going to say this "one last time," but I doubt it. All I can promise is one more time, for now.  You need salespeople!

The biggest problem at every board shop is lack of sales, not enough sales, not enough customers, not enough new business, not enough backlog, or not enough new customers. But when I ask how they're selling they say things like, “Oh, word of mouth,” “People know who we are,” or this beauty: “We’ve had the same customers for years. They are not going to leave us.”

When I ask these shops' managers about salespeople, they say they've had some in the past, but they just didn’t work out. Or they don’t believe in salespeople. Or, my personal favorite, as soon as they buy a drill or a router or a press, they'll hire some salespeople. I sit there scratching my head wondering how that's going to work.

Let me see...you don’t have enough business so instead on spending some money on salespeople you're going to buy a piece of equipment for the same amount of money you would spend on two or maybe even three good salespeople for a year. I have to wonder, what are you going to do with the equipment? You don’t have enough business now, but you're going to spend anywhere from a quarter of a million to three quarters of a million dollars for a piece of equipment that will sit idle because--say it with me--you don’t have enough business!

To those who sell equipment: Don’t get your knickers in a knot. I'm a great believer in investing by buying new equipment, but you must admit it would be nice if your customers had the right amount of business to use on that new equipment. Maybe your customer base would be up around 1,200 like it was in the good old days instead of a little over 200--a number so small that many of you are leaving and going to China and the rest of Asia like proverbial rats on a sinking ship.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (but now that I think about it, some of you probably are rocket scientists!) to figure this out: If you don’t have enough sales you must hire some salespeople, or at least one salesperson, to get the ball rolling. I mean a real sales professional--a man or woman who has a proven success story; someone able to get you some business. And be ready to pay that sales professional appropriately. Don’t try to skimp and don’t try to convince them to work on commission only for a while…really? That's just plain stupid. Would you ask that of a production manager? Would you ask that of an engineer? Would you ask that of yourself? Why the heck do you think a salesperson would be willing to take that deal? It just doesn’t make any sense.

Listen to me and listen very closely: You don’t have enough business. To get more business you must have salespeople--feet on the street, people calling companies and getting them to buy your products. And good salespeople cost money. They will not work for minimum wage, they will not work for commissions only, and they will not work at a salary for six months with the promise of it being cut in half in another six months. They are professionals and they need to be treated as such: They need to be paid as professionals and they need to be respected as professionals. If you hire a good professional salesperson you'll get results. It's only common sense.