The Sales Focus Podcast: What Differentiates Sales Focus Inc. and Why Sales Outsourcing Works

The Sales Focus Podcast: Episode 2

Intro: You’re listening to the Sales Focus Podcast. Your go-to for developing high-performing teams, next level sales skills, and real results. It’s time to get focused.

Welcome back to the Sales Focus Podcast. My name is Tony Horwath, founder and CEO of Sales Focus Inc. In the first podcast, I talked a little bit about our history, foundation of the company, little bit about my background. Today, I want to talk a little bit about why organizations come to us and is it time for you as a small business owner, as a sales individual, perhaps as a big organization that just needs some help and need speed to market. What makes companies come utilize Sales Focus services?

We’ve evolved over our 28 years. Our foundation, we were the founder, pioneers of the sales outsourcing industry. Over the years, we’ve developed our services to encapsulate more services for clients or capabilities for our clients. So, some clients now, we may not be doing the full sales outsourcing solution. We may be building the plan for them, developing the structure, developing the process, a toolkit if you will, and then, they implement that. And, they manage their sales team. Some organizations, we may not be a good fit for, but we can surely help you get on the right track to success. As I mentioned earlier, our focus is on your success.

So, companies ask me all the time, or clients or people ask me all the time, why do companies come to us. We generate a lot of opportunities for companies who want to grow. That’s really the foundation of why organizations come to Sales Focus. How do we grow to the next level? Sometimes, that’s a million-dollar company that wants to hit the next threshold of five million or 10 or 25 million. Sometimes, it’s a $50 million company that wants to or needs to expand to that next level of growth of achieving 100 million or 250 million. And sometimes, it’s a Fortune 500 company, multi-billion-dollar organization, they come to us for different reasons. So, I’m going to start with the smallest and take it on the biggest.

Small organizations primarily come to Sales Focus because they don’t have the knowledge to do what we do. They don’t have the capabilities, they don’t have the experience, and they don’t have the interior knowledge of what it takes to build an organization. I talked a lot about small companies that struggle because they believe they hire the wrong salesperson or people. And what they do, they go out and find the best available person they can. They go through the interview process. They feel good about it, and they hire a salesperson or salespeople. Six months later, they fire that person and go, “That person didn’t sell anything. That was a terrible salesperson.” And, they do it all again, and they go through that rollercoaster process. The problem is not necessarily the salespeople they’ve hired. It could be, but more than likely, it’s not, because I will tell you there are many instances, many occasions when companies come to us, and they want our help. They say, “You know what, we’re just going to do it internally,” and then, they call us six months later or 10 months later and go, “You know what, we’re really struggling; we need your help.” Where they are struggling is on the structure, understanding the infrastructure needed to make salespeople successful. If you’re going to spend $200 thousand on a salesperson, you want to make sure you’re getting the right person who really knows your business, knows your customers, knows your value proposition, knows everything and is really, really good. Most people don’t have that luxury of spending that kind of money, so they’re typically spending 60 to 80 maybe $100 thousand plus commission, but those salespeople don’t have the industry knowledge. They don’t have the experience of developing they ideal client profile. What does it mean to go after the right targets? Not just types of business, size of business, who within that business, multiple contacts within that business. They don’t understand, “How do I go about doing an outreach program? How do I utilize a CRM to a campaign that does a multi-touch approach? How do I utilize marketing to really generate awareness or generate warm leads?” Those salespeople that you’re hiring that are beginner lever, mid-level, somewhat upper-lower level, really don’t have all those skill sets. An organization like Sales Focus, we’re able to come in and implement process that will allow those salespeople to be successful. Sometimes, it’s as simple as the clients don’t know how to build commission plans. We’ve built thousands of commission plans. They may not know how to even develop a job description to attract the right people. We’ve written thousands of job descriptions to hire thousands of salespeople. We’ve trained thousands of people. We’ve trained and managed well over 25-thousand salespeople in every industry you can imagine. Small organizations need our level of experience, so they don’t make the same mistakes that every other small organization does. They’ll invest a lot of money into the product or service, but they don’t invest in the sales, business development, revenue generation. I would tell anyone who’s starting a business or has a small business, the focus of your business is “how do I attract clients?” Because if you’re not getting new clients, your business will die. If you’re not growing, you’re going to eventually fade away.

The mid-size organizations that come to us typically need feet on the street, face-to-face salespeople someplace across the country, and what they need is a process in place that allows them to hire and manage remote salespeople. It’s not as easy as you may think because salespeople sometimes can be like herding cats, and you have to put a process in place and procedures in place and KPIs in place where you can track and manage salespeople on a day-to-day basis because sales is about process, it’s about procedure, but it’s also about trying to repeat that process and be able to have a predictable result or predictable outcomes, so when you’re building a sales team you want to know how many touches do you typically have to do, a typical salesperson. How many conversations do they need to have? How many times do they need to outreach before they get a warm lead? How long does it take that warm lead to transfer into a sale? Now a lot of those things vary depending on the business, the industry, who you’re targeting, price points, all of those things factor in to what that sales cycle look like. All of that knowledge, we’re going to bring to the table. So, if a mid-sized business is out there, and they want to go after, even residential (we do residential sales), or they want to go after other businesses, that process has to be implemented and managed very quickly.

The large organizations, the Fortune 500 companies come to us for speed to market, scalability. We can launch a sales team anywhere in the world, any size sales team in 45 days or less. How do we do it? Our only focus is sales. Everything we do is internal. We build the plan. We develop all the HR requirements from a commission plan to job descriptions. We do all the postings. We have our own recruiters. We hire all the people. We get them through training. We have our own training department. We can do it faster internally that they can do it, so our ability to hire and launch, train, and manage a sales team in 45 days or less is unheard of in a large organization. The other part that we bring is that quality of sales. Right. It’s the brand protection. Most big clients are very focused on brand protection. Remember, we’re an extension of their organization. Our salespeople are carrying their business card when they’re knocking doors or talking to other business owners, so Sales Focus is behind the scenes. We’re doing all the heavy work behind the scenes, the recruiting, the training, the management, the replacement of people, the tracking, the oversight, everything that we’re doing on the back-office side of it. The front, the face-to-face, that’s done as the brand of our client, so all our salespeople are recruited and background checked and drug tested. We verify that the people we hire are quality people. We have zero tolerance for any unprofessional, unethical sales practices. So, we know we’re an extension of our clients. We’re representing that brand, and our clients, our large clients, are very protective of their brand. I would challenge every client, every company should be very protective of their brand. Small clients don’t typically ask us about brand protection, but they should be just as concerned because a big company can overcome some issues. A small company, if anything happens to their brand, if it’s not well represented or unethically or unprofessionally, it could be the end of their company. So, every company, whether you’re small, mid-sized, large enterprise, you should be very focused on getting the right people and not just how quick, although we are 45 days or less, but it’s really about the quality, the brand protection, the ethics, the professionalism, making sure that when our people are out there, you’re proud to say, “Hey, those are salespeople from Sales Focus who are representing our brand, carrying our business card, and bringing in the results we require.”

So, those are the three types of clients we work with. I know it encompasses everyone to be honest with you. The really small start-ups sometimes, it’s really helpful for us just to give them some guidance as far as building a plan or the toolkit and let them hire their own people. But, the small organizations, mid-sized companies, enterprise companies, we can give you the direction and the guidance. Appreciate your time. Join us again for more tips, tools, and techniques to improve your sales performance. Thank you very much.