Should I hire a salesperson to sell my services?

This post is the first of a series called Pearls of Bizdom - a monthly business advice column to give my unfiltered opinion on business + strategy.

I get an InMail message in Linked almost every day from someone who claims they can bring me qualified leads and help me scale my business with their “proven process”. I know in my business, my “proven process” is building and nurturing my network. Business owners hire me because I have been referred from someone they trust. It’s sometimes tempting when someone offers you a chance to skip the line, but I know that personal referrals cannot be easily substituted by mass InMail messaging on Linked In (or whatever they claim their “proven” process is) and so I tend to delete these messages. Therefore, I would also recommend you think about how you would get hired before outsourcing sales.

If you sell a service that can be sold by a 3rd party, the next thing to think about is whether or not you have a scalable offering. Listen, this can take a few years. In the early stages of your business, you are testing and iterating your services as you learn more about your customer. And It takes a few iterations before you have a scalable offering. Before you have built a scalable offering, I would recommend that you as the CEO still go out to source clients. You should personally have the conversation with them to figure out what they need, tell them what you offer, and develop a proposal by marrying the two together. You still need to be the front face of the business and make your clients 100% satisfied with what you have sold them. That is just the process of building a business. If you try and outsources sales before you know what you’re selling or how to scale it, it will be both costly and ineffective.

A simple rule of thumb is to sell your service at least 10 times before you get someone else to do it. That way, you know your customer’s questions and hesitations and can easily have a 3rd party address them.

For this reason (TL:DR) In a recent strategy session, I encouraged my client to hold off on outsourcing sales, and instead, to continue being the face of the business and developing their scalable service.

Note: There are many administrative tasks that you can outsource around the selling process, and I would recommend this at the early stage (my admin team has developed SOPs for each service, and they handle creating contracts, booking meetings, sending invoices and sending templated intake emails).