Good People,

I will echo what has just been said by Mukiha. A business is basically just a set of systems. That is what you as an entrepreneur uses to manange ( actualy control) the employees, it is what makes the business bring returns and what diferentiates your company from the others. The day you rely more on employees than you do on your systems, realise that you are now running their show and you will surely lose!

The Problem with Sales
Companies are investing more than ever in sales training, but performance isn't improving. Just 9% of sales meetings end in a sale, and only one out of 250 salespeople exceed their targets. What's going on? Researchers observed 800 sales professionals in live sales meetings to understand the gap between investment and performance.

The Best and the Rest
They identified seven behaviors, of which only four were actually related to sales success. By mapping how salespeople relied on each behavior, they discovered eight types of salespeople. But only three were consistently effective, and they only made up 37% of the sample. The remaining five types of sales people — the other 63% — fell short.

http://hbr.org/web/extras/the-t...with-salespeople/1-slide


the Best 37% of the salespeople in our sample were in this group
Experts 9%
Closers 13
Consultants 15%

the Ineffective 63% of the salespeople in our sample were in this group
Storytellers 7%
Focusers 19%
Narrators 15%
Aggressors 7%
Socializers 15%


Despite the reputation most salespeople have of being socially gifted, it turns out that Socializers are the worst-performing when it comes to making the sale.

Storytellers talk a lot, but danger for storytellers is that they pay too much attention to past customers, and not enough on those sitting in front of them. Narrators hew too closely to their prepared marketing materials and their rehearsed sales pitch.

Focusers, convey all of the technical aspects of their offering, and may not hear customers' needs. Agressors approach every sales meeting as a pure negotiation on price.


Fixing the Problem with Sales Training
Researchers found that a disproportionate amount of training is allocated to presentation and rapport skills, as well as the actual sales pitch. Since everyone gets this training, these skills have been commoditized. Adding training on the key skill of rising to the challenge – that is, overcoming customer objections on the fly, the skill that all three of the "good" salespeople excelled at – would be a smart reallocation of training budgets.

Thank you all for the insightful info.
I think it all boils down to getting the right people.

Because when they know they are commission based they work harder if they are the go getter type.
But if it is a laid back person.. they may not survive.

On the flip side, if you pay the laid back person a retainer, it will be poor sales coz he/she is comfortable. And the go getter kind will 'go get' other things!!