Why Hero Selling Stalls Growth

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.

Hi, welcome back to the Sales Focus Podcast. I’m Tony Horwath, founder and CEO of Sales Focus, Inc. I always try to give valuable tips and tools and techniques to professional salespeople or salespeople who want to become professional salespeople, even individuals who just want to get into the industry of sales. As I’ve said many times, there’s so much information out there on the internet and AI. What I really want to do is give practical advice, things that I’ve valued internally but also to my salespeople over the past 30 years of doing sales. Today, I’m really going to focus on companies. I’m going to focus on small businesses.

Small businesses struggle constantly. The reason I actually started Sales Focus was to help small businesses grow. A lot of them make the same mistake in that they don’t know who to hire or they hire someone and they don’t have the support to provide that salesperson in order to be successful.

The opposite is also true, what we call hero sales. Hero sales is a term we use when you really do have a good salesperson, but you may only have one good salesperson or maybe you have a team of two or three and you’re having all your eggs in that hero’s basket. What happens if that hero leaves? If the problem is not really the salesperson, it’s great that you have a good salesperson as someone who’s really leading the charge for your company. The challenge comes if that salesperson leaves. Salespeople typically only last somewhere between six months to 18, 24 months and then there’s typically some turnover. Now, we’ve had salespeople on the same programs for eight, nine, 10 years.

So, if you’re providing them direction, giving them guidance, giving them opportunity to earn and giving them additional training to become better, they’ll stay. Unfortunately, traditionally, there’s quite a bit of turnover in sales. The challenge that small businesses have is when you have what we call hero sales and it’s really more about the company and the process that you’ve developed internally compared to just an individual or just a person within an organization.

I always like to tell people there’s a 20-60-20 rule in most sales organizations. What does that mean? It means 20% of your sales team are top performers, 60% are typically operating in the middle, and 20%, unfortunately, need to be replaced. That’s the bottom part of your organization. So, a 20-60-20 rule. Again, that depends on what you’re selling. If it’s more transactional in nature, a sale, if it’s selling widgets or quick sales, it’s even worse than that.

It’s usually like a 10% up top, 70% in the middle, and still 20% on the bottom. So, you have a smaller top percentage. But a lot of times in the transactional world, you have a larger percentage that needs to be turned over because you have more failure. Because the interaction is so quick, you can see the results much faster and then you can tell whether or not that salesperson is going to make it.

Let me go back to hero sales. So, as a small business owner, if you find yourself finally getting a good salesperson in place, or one out of two, or one out of three, but you have 90% of your sales or 80% of your sales coming from one salesperson, that’s a big red flag for organizations. The challenge is, or the challenge could be, if you don’t have process set up properly.

Everyone nowadays is using some CRM. There’s a lot of them out there, a lot of really good CRMs out there, but they’re only good if they’re used properly. They’re only good and effective if making sure the data that goes in is quality data. If you have a sales professional who’s your top salesperson, guess what? Other people are going to want that person. And that person may get to a point of saying, wait, I may have other opportunities where I can earn more, or sell something different, or move up in a different organization to another level. So if you’re not able to provide that and they move along, how much of their information do you have in that CRM? How much information is going to be able to transfer to the other salespeople that you have? And are those other salespeople able to step up to the plate and bring you that 90% of the sales that you’re generating?

So what happens effectively in small businesses a lot of times is they get a roller coaster effect. They’ll get a salesperson in or two. They’ll train that person as best they can. And that salesperson either takes off or perhaps they don’t take off. Maybe they fail. That’s a different challenge. If they fail, it’s typically because one of multiple things. But a lot of times it’s because the organization themselves haven’t put enough time into training and guiding that salesperson. A lot of small businesses aren’t started by salespeople. They may be started by a technologist or they may be started by someone who has an expertise in that product or service. And they can do well enough to get maybe up to seven figures. But then once they get to that point, getting to that next level means, hey, now I need to bring in a professional salesperson. I need to hire someone or a team to help me get to the next level of growth.

Obviously, that’s a great time to call sales focus. That’s what we do for businesses. Businesses that have finally reached maybe that million dollars or two million dollars in sales. And now they want to get to five million. They want to get to ten million and continue that growth. That opportunity we can help you with because we have the expertise to bring in process, sales process, to make sure that you can now sustain a good pipeline of business that can continue to allow your business to grow. But also implement process that if you do have a successful salesperson or two successful salespeople, now you can make sure that that data that you’re capturing is able to be transferred to someone else who can come in and take over.

So it sounds like hero sales is a great thing. It’s a challenge for organizations because if you just have one person who’s a hero salesperson and that person departs, where are you going to go from there? Sometimes it can really set a company back by a year or two years to get that flow back. That’s the challenge that small business owners have. That’s why using a company like Sales Focus, we’re able to give you that structure because we have many salespeople. We have managers. We have marketing people. We have all that structure in place whereby a small business owner may hire a salesperson.

That person leaves. Then you’re starting literally from zero to start building up again. So as a business owner to another business owner, make sure your process is in place. Make sure you’re capturing the data. Make sure you’re training other salespeople to get up to speed and you have a more level playing field when it comes to your sales team. Even if it’s a small team, you want to make sure you don’t have all your eggs in one basket.

Appreciate the time today. I hope this tip helped you as a business owner. For more information, go to our Sales Focus Inc. website and get some more tips and tools. Thank you. Talk to you soon.