There are many startups that rely on low-cost, low-touch sales to get their products and services to market. In some of these cases, the sale is really a product; it doesn’t require an investment in building a new sales team.
These businesses find an unfair advantage by using a salesforce to sell a lot of product from their existing base of current customers. As our sales team migrates to social selling, startups must make similar transitions.
Where Salesforce Can Help
In an ideal world, startups would never have to hire anyone new to sell. When salespeople go in and out, new customers would join, the startup would become established and then go back to its regular operations. The problem with this approach is that it requires a lot of upfront investment on the part of the startup to get it all started.
Salesforce can dramatically help startups transition to the sales force model by providing tools that reduce their need for recruiting, training, and hiring more salespeople. If they can maintain consistent customer contacts, startups will never need to worry about things like bad reputation issues.
Additionally, companies can also employ computer software that can help salesforce to make calls and attend to voice chat with potential customers. By using such advanced tools, startups can save an enormous amount of time and money. It takes a great deal of time to recruit a sales team, train them and then maintain them for the long term. Even if salespeople have some spare time, they still need to manage their time and maintain relationships with existing customers. With a strong salesforce in place and the necessary support that can help the sales team to excel, startups can focus their time on building up a greater customer base.
Where Salesforce Can Fail
Every business starts with a product that they sell. While many companies will stay true to their product when it comes to hiring new employees, not every startup has such an advantage. If the product or service doesn’t sell well, then there is no benefit to adding salespeople in the beginning. Instead of learning how to sell, startups will have to turn to alternative business models, such as creating subsidiaries.
It takes significant time to build an entire sales team, train them, and then transition them back into the main business. Many startups spend so much time and effort working on product and service development that they have no room left to train new employees. While this approach can work for a startup that hasn’t developed their market presence yet, it won’t help a startup that already has customers.
Use a Sales RecruiterSome startups fail when they sell a product or service that doesn’t take off. What is the point of taking on significant risks and investing so much money in creating a product if no one is willing to buy it? Startups with a successful product or service have a different set of problems to deal with. They can focus their efforts on keeping their customers happy, delivering quality products to them, and growing their customer base. CulverCareers is a sales recruiting firm that can handle the sales recruitment side of things, leaving you to do what you do best and ratify your core business.
