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