Not all salespeople are created equal; some are more gifted than others and are often called the “rainmakers”. All good things are rationed because they are scarce; this universal principle applies to these rainmakers too.
These rainmakers follow an unconscious way of selling; they quickly adapt to the customer’s needs and don’t follow a single approach. And if you asked them to describe the sales process, they will be at odds to explain. The rainmaker’s inability to explain the process is often seen as a sign of fiefdom and reluctance to share knowledge. This is not true, they are genuinely not able to describe how they sell, and selling is innate to them. Rainmakers are rare, and your company will be lucky if it has more than two – three of them. Now if your business needs to scale up, it needs to find an alternative, this is where the second category of sales people comes into play.
The second type of sales people is the process hero’s, they exist in abundance on Mother Earth, and I am not sure about other planets as on date. These people need a structured and defined process to take the lead from one stage to another. In the first few years of my career, when I led the insurance business, I always thought that my end goal is to make my company a breeding ground for rainmakers; on the hindsight, that idea seems stupid. I tried my yen at collecting these superheroes’, the challenge was that the moment you have more than three or four of them, attrition peaks, rainmakers need adequate attention and only a handful can be in your company at one time.
My inability to hire was impacting my business growth, and then one beautiful evening I decided to experiment with people who followed a process and had the fire in their belly. These were the only two skillsets that I looked for in my first hires. The process ninjas never game me a big order, but they were always giving me a constant and steady cash flow, and my rainmakers were bringing big bags.
The second rung of my sales team would never have been successful if I hadn’t put in place a sales process. By automating these processes few years down the line, the first version of Platformax – our sales acceleration platform was born. It was magical, and we were able to grow our business by adding more people, our sales numbers increased multiple times as we could easily hire a motivated person and guide them through our proprietary sales process to deliver numbers. In three years we were twenty times bigger than our competitors because they had one or two rainmakers and were struggling to find their clones. We had in the meanwhile decided to build an army of these youngsters who could use guided sales process to deliver results.
The process and automation were in our companies genes by then, and magic happened, our rainmakers also wanted to take a look at these processes, with any prodding they started using it. At our company now we had the best of both the worlds. Our sales numbers were moving faster than light, and we quickly galloped to become the number one digital marketing agency in Slovenia.
We packed all our learning and experience in building the sales acceleration platform popularly known as Platformax. In case you are looking to grow beyond your core sales team of two – three people, we can offer you the best solution. Our solution is time tested and build and refined by rainmakers. We will be more than happy to set up a no obligation demo for you to try it out for a month, no charges if your sales don’t move northwards. Just click on the link below to set up your demo for next week!
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