Are you ready to take the world of telecom direct sales by storm? It’s important to be hungry, be motivated, and to keep vigilant on achieving your goals.
But it’s equally important to keep an eye out for some of the most common mistakes we see young direct sales firms make.
What are these common mistakes? We’ll lay out a few, and explain the importance of avoiding them.
Don’t Focus On Sales… At The Expense Of Growth
We talked about this in our post on opportunity, but Direct Sales is an industry of growth. The more you can grow your team, the more top performers and leaders you are able to generate, the bigger and stronger your organization becomes.
Unfortunately, it can be far too easy to get caught up in the daily/weekly/monthly grind of keeping up on sales numbers. New leaders of direct sales team leaders often place way too much emphasis on making and exceeding quotas, and not enough emphasis on identifying, equipping, and encouraging future leaders.
Remember: boosting the performance of a single rep is great. But growing additional leaders who can then train 4-5 more top-performing reps? That’s a goldmine of exponential growth.
So be sure to keep the big picture in mind- don’t neglect those leaders!
But Don’t Focus On Growth At The Expense Of Sales
That being said, we’ve seen firms make the complete opposite mistake: they are so focused on growth that they neglect to keep the team performing to their full capability.
Some teams grow, grow, grow. They spend so much energy on recruiting that they max out their team’s ability to train new recruits properly. New hires don’t get the training they need, and that means that they underperform.
Having a direct sales team of enormous size doesn’t help if the team’s numbers don’t rise at the same rate. The quality of your team matters as much, if not more, than the quantity. Make sure you grow at the rate that your training team can handle, and always have a scalable approach to your growth.
You never want to let quality slip just for the sake of getting bigger. More ill equipped direct sales reps just means more problems.
Don’t Forget About Quality Control
Maybe you’ve heard the old adage: as a salesperson, you sell yourself. But as a direct sales firm, you are representing a client, and that client’s product. Which means that your sales practices reflect the quality standards of your client’s organization.
Don’t forget that your firm is responsible to uphold and exhibit those standards as you present their product to your prospective customers.
Follow your client’s quality guidelines to the letter. Always make sure that you are in compliance with their standards and ensure that your reps are following those guidelines. You want to make sure you handle any issues of quality before it impacts your client, not after.
Remember: Your Top Performers Aren’t Special
Another common mistake we see young direct sales leaders make? Not being consistent with how they treat their sales reps.
It’s natural to want to reward good performance and punish bad performance. It’s how we’re wired as people, for the most part. But just because it feels natural doesn’t mean that it’s good for your team.
If you treat your bottom-level sales reps like they are inferior, and hold them to a different standard than the rest of the team, they won’t have the confidence to improve.
If you treat your top performers like they are irreplaceable, and don’t hold them accountable to the same rules and expectations as the rest of the team, they might get cocky or feel like they are better than their fellow sales reps.
These are morale killers. They are sales team cancer. They will literally eat your direct sales firm alive until nobody is happy and nobody is performing to the best of their ability.
Combat this by having high standards and keeping everyone accountable to the same rubric. Don’t grade on a curve. If everyone lives up to the same benchmark, then your team will have healthy expectations for performance and growth.
Don’t Go It Alone
Solcomm is leader in direct sales with fast-growing offices all around the country. Become a Solcomm Subdealer to join our family and you’ll have an opportunity to build your own business on the back of world-class training.
Visit us at https://www.solcomm.com/subdealers/ and learn how you can get started building a top-tier direct sales team, with all the support you need to be one of the teams that succeeds.