If you’re looking to improve your sales rate or your close rate, or maybe you’re looking to scale out your sales and hire someone to do the selling for you, in this blog post, I’m going to show you what you need to think about in order to get a VA or a virtual assistant to sell your marketing funnel services for you.
You don’t have the time or desire to sell
The problem is either you don’t have the time to sell or you don’t have the desire to sell. What I want to address is the difference between not having the time and not having the desire or the skill set.
99% of the time, it’s actually that people don’t have the desire to sell their marketing funnel services, so they look to other people or other routes to do the selling for them.
There’s nothing wrong with that but you have to get it right, if you want to do it right.
Replacing something you can’t/won’t/don’t want to do is tough
A lot of funnel builders don’t realize that replacing something that you can’t do or won’t do or don’t want to do is very tough. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of work. There’s no set formula for it, unfortunately.
If there was I would be a multi multi-millionaire. Unfortunately, you’re going to have to work at a few things that you’re already feeling uncomfortable with.
You can’t outsource things that you already struggle with without some level of difficulty.
So, I want to talk about how you can hire someone. It can be done but we need to think about some very specific options before we just go out and hire anyone to do the selling for us.
If you’re looking for sales strategies, I’ve got a book on the top seven sales strategies that I use to sell marketing funnel services for $25,000 here. It’s completely free. You can get it here:
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It’s basically my top seven sales strategies for selling a five figure funnel.
It’s not the book Five Figure Funnels but it’s what created that book in the end place. You can get that free sales strategy guide sent straight into your inbox.
If you can’t sell – why will someone else?
The first thing you have to understand before hiring someone is, if you can’t sell, will someone else sell for you?
To be able to answer that we have to ask the question, “Why would someone else sell for you?”
If you don’t want to sell because you’re afraid of selling, you’re putting yourself in a bit of a difficult situation.
I believe inherently that the founder of the business or at least one of the founders of the business has to be comfortable with making sales.
If you’re expecting someone else to do the selling for you without you training them on what that sales process is, It’s a bit like trying to train someone to swim when you’re afraid of water.
If you can’t sell and that’s not true because absolutely everyone can sell and I’ve proven this multiple times.
If you feel you can’t sell or sell at the scale and the level that you want to, and you can’t train someone else, then you’re going to have to hire experienced people and experienced people cost money. Especially experienced and good salespeople.
If you’re looking to hire a VA to sell for you, chances are they’ll have some communication and admin qualities and a background in that area.
But getting someone to sign on a $25,000 deal is a very different skillset. Not to say it can’t be trained into someone, in fact, we know it absolutely can be trained into someone.
However, you have to understand that if you can’t sell and you struggle to get someone to that point, then you’re going to struggle training someone else to get to that point.
I’m going to talk about a few of the areas that we can look at later because there’s actually a lot of the parts of the sales process that can be done by other people much easier than the entire sales and closing process.
However, if you’re trying to scale out your sales process because you don’t have the time to sell, that’s a really good position to be in.
Usually, it’s because you’re either working on the big picture stuff but if you’re busy doing the delivery all the time, then you’ll want someone else to do the selling for you.
If you have successfully sold $25,000 or $100,000 projects in the past, then it’s much easier to get people to sell it for, you can take them through that process.
That’s a really good position to be in. I think that’s the strongest position to be in in order to hire someone to sell for you.
However, that does still mean that you need to do a lot of training with your sales team. If anything, in some respects, it might mean that you need to do more training in a funny way. It also means that you can’t micromanage.
If you get someone else to do sales for you and you have done it before, you might say, “This is how I’ve done it and this is how particular process that I’ve gone through.”.
If you hire someone to do it and they do a good job and they’re generating sales but they do it in a slightly different way, you’ve got to step back.
If you’re going to take on people to do work for you there’s going to be elements of them following a process but there’s also going to be elements of them doing what they think is right for the job.
Finally, this kind of comes back to that top one of “If you can’t sell because you’re afraid to sell and you’re uncomfortable with selling” maybe you feel like you don’t have the skills to sell.
The reality is no one cares about your business, your products and your services more than you. Your customers don’t, your staff don’t.
They certainly get to a point where they appreciate them but no one cares about them as much as you.
Selling is just a transference of enthusiasm. That’s as complex as it needs to be.
If you’re struggling with that because you feel you don’t have the skill set to sell your services. It’s actually very difficult to get someone else to magic that up from within them because you’re the one providing that service.
Now, you’ve decided to go down this path of selling marketing funnels.
If you’re not capable of transferring enough enthusiasm to get someone to sign on the dotted line, you’re going to really struggle to find someone else who cares as much about the product and as much about the customer as you. So, it’s something to bear in mind.
What section of the sales process are they covering?
The next thing to think about is what section of the sales process are they covering?
It’s not just a case of doing everything from cold calling all the way through to closing. In fact, that’s actually unfair to land on one person.
There are of course sales specialists who can do all of that but they usually come with a pretty hefty price tag.
Rightly, if you’re taking someone from doesn’t know that you exist all the way through to happy, profitable repeat customer, they deserve to be compensated for that.
What you need to think about is what part of the sales process are you looking to have someone else take control of?
I’ve got prospecting, list building, lead generation, qualification, appointment booking, discovery and deep dives, consultation, the sales process, selling, proposal writing, proposal closing, follow up and account management.
You might be better off hiring for one small part of the process and still continuing to do the rest yourself.
Most people are uncomfortable with the extreme ends of the spectrum which is cold prospecting and lead generation and the closing part.
If that’s the part you’re uncomfortable with, that’s probably the part that you need to do to get better at it.
One of my favorite parts to outsource is appointment booking.
When we generate a lead via an email address, sometimes with a phone number, but usually with a name for a lead magnet, like a PDF or a report, we’ve got someone who goes out there and tries to book an appointment.
They’ll follow up with that email address and send them personalized emails.
They’ll say, “Hey, we’ve got a quick twenty-five-minute strategy session. We’d love to get you on talk through your use of the PDF or the report or the tool that you’ve got. Go through the assessment with you. Talk about some of your options and talk about some of those answers.”
That’s a very time-consuming part of the process. It’s not necessarily difficult.
It does not necessarily require a huge amount of skill but it is something that when you can get someone else to do that on automation and take care of that for you, it can be extremely powerful.
What it means is that you can focus on lead generation and driving those leads and prospecting, someone else is booking those appointments. Then you just jump on that call and start having conversations with people.
The second thing I like to hire for was actually proposal writing. Now this sounds counter-intuitive because you think, they weren’t there. They don’t fully understand.
If you can get your proposal discovery process and the qualification process like really tight and get the same answers and the same questions from every single call.
What you’ll find is that proposal writing is actually pretty easy. Yes. Delivery of it and closing on it and follow up afterwards, that requires a little bit of work.
Actually, writing the proposal is a relatively easy thing to outsource when the questions you ask to start with are standardized.
What you might find is that going after a particular segment of that sales process is in fact easier than trying to get someone to take over the entire process.
In my opinion, proposal writing and appointment booking are the easiest ones.
Another really easy one as well as qualification. Just getting someone to call them up, make sure that they’re the decision maker, go through B-A-N-T-S, budget, authority, needs, timescale and supplies.
Getting them to do that on the phone or via zoom or whatever then passing a qualified lead and prospect over to you in order for you to do the discovery selling proposal and closing.
Lots and lots and lots of training
You’re going to have to do lots and lots of training. There’s no way of avoiding this.
The reason why most salespeople fail in a new role is that they haven’t been trained enough and it’s because they haven’t been given enough sales collateral or sales resources.
I’ve worked with a lot of salespeople. I’ve been a salesperson for a lot of different companies. There’s a big difference I’ve noticed between businesses that hand you the collateral and the stories.
When I say collateral, brochures, sales letters, previous proposals, web pages, videos, training videos, product demonstrations, it’s all the stuff that kind of shows that it’s a legitimate product and even parts of the product.
Businesses that have lavished that onto their salespeople, the salespeople usually do well.
If a salesperson doesn’t do well after that, it’s usually down to the salesperson and their motivation. Unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do with that.
However, If you’re just hiring a VA, what you need to do is sell them on the product.
You need to train them on why it’s a benefit who’s buying it. What the process is, why anyone would want to buy it? Why do you sell it? Why have you created it? Why is yours different from the competitor?
You need to do as much training selling the product to the person selling it, the VA, as much as they do the customer and you do the customer.
Interestingly, this usually points out why people are struggling with sales. It’s because they don’t have the sales collateral themselves. They don’t have a standardized procedure for selling marketing funnels.
Perhaps they’ve been too wishy-washy in the past. They’ve said, “We’re a marketing agency. We’re a marketing funnel builder or whatever.”
They haven’t really standardized what it is that they’re delivering to the customer. This is why our salespeople tend to get let down a little bit.
It’s because the business says “Here’s a list of prospects, go and sell some marketing for us.” but they haven’t told them anything about their values, what makes them different.
All the salesperson’s going to do is end up boiling that down to price.
You have to do a huge amount of training on who you’re targeting, who your audience is, who the influences are within that space, who your targets and customers look up to.
What products have you sold? What products have worked well? What other products are in the marketplace?
Who are your competitors? Who are your immediate direct competitors? Who else is going to be competing for that same spend?
You want to talk about closes and objections. You want to talk about qualifications. You want to talk about the sales system, the journey, the prospecting journey, all of that.
You need to go over that repeatedly for about six months for the salesperson to really get to grips with being able to sell your products effectively.
It’s not something where you can go, “We’ve got a website, we sell marketing, off you go.”.
That’s not going to work. If you want to do this properly, you’re going to have to invest a lot of time and money into training.
Measure what their results are
And finally, let’s think about measuring what their results are.
The way that I like to break this up is with L-A-P-S as I’ve used in the past. Which is leads, appointments, proposals, and sales. There’s also upsells. So, that’s L-A-P-S-U, I guess.
1. Leads
Leads is the number of people who are qualified and you have their contact information. Everything from email databases, all the way through to full like CRMs with their address and their name and their job position.
The more qualified that data is the better the leads are.
That’s one of the metrics that you might measure someone on. Again, if we go back to the top and one of the first pieces I talked about was make sure that you’re focusing on a specific part of the sales process and not trying to get them to do everything.
2. Appointments
Appointments is calls so booking up calls like I mentioned, that’s probably my favorite thing to outsource.
Getting someone to say, “Yeah, we’re going to turn up Tuesday at 3:00 PM and Mike’s going to have the conversation”.
I like selling so I’m happy for someone to book calls for me. That’s a really good metric to measure people on. Ideally you actually don’t want to be measuring all four of these from one sales person, right at the start.
It might be that they affect these later on but chances are this is too much to put on them straight away.
3. Proposals
Proposal presentation is the number of offers made to the customer.
How many proposals did we actually manage to get out if it gets to the appointment part and your job is to say to someone “Hey, we’ve booked a call with you. I want to talk to you through your business. How about we send you a proposal?”
Then that proposal never gets sent. You can’t blame the sales person for not writing that proposal.
However, If you’re writing a kind of documentation and you’re documenting and qualifying the customer and you send that over to your VA and they don’t write their proposal, that’s a sign that the proposal part of the process is broken.
4. Sales
Next up is sales, which is pretty obvious, that’s the number of units sold.
That’s really important to understand and it might not necessarily be measured in revenue but it’s the number of sales that your guys are generating.
Some people just want customers because they know it’s about lifetime value.
Some people are going to be looking for a volume of sales because they know they sell a standardized product or service.
5. Upsells
And then finally there’s upsells, a really interesting exercise to give a new salesperson.
If they’re a full salesperson, try to get them to make money from your current clients.
To me, that’s kind of money on the table and it seems crazy to me that they wouldn’t just take the 10 most current customers, have conversations with them and see how they could help next.
Measuring upsales is a really interesting metric to go after because it demonstrates that they’re doing account management as well as new Greenfield lead and sales generation.
Pay well and pay often
One quick point, you’re going to have to pay well and you’re gonna have to pay often. If you want a $25,000 marketing funnel project what are you willing to pay for that?
You might need to increase your prices in order to get a 20% commission put out of that and given to your salesperson, although it won’t cost you 20%, you need to think in those types of numbers.
You might need to increase your prices before you’re able to even hire or afford someone to do the selling for you.
Remember, if you’re looking for sales strategies in order to sell marketing funnels for $25,000 you can get it here:
