We all have experts that we lean upon in our everyday lives. During the course of a typical year we might use attorneys, doctors, dentists, carpenters, plumbers, auto mechanics, etc. Some of us outsource lawn cutting. Not because we can’t do it but maybe we don’t have the time to do it or we simply don’t enjoy doing it. You get the point.

Yet in the business of professional sales we sometimes fail to use this same logic. Running a sales territory requires a multitude of skill sets in order to be successful long term. It is important to develop expertise in many areas.  It is very similar to running a small business. And a small business owner, if he was smart, would not attempt to do it all.

This was one of the biggest mistakes I made early on in my career. I felt management would view me in a negative light if I asked for help. So from start to finish I made it a point to do it all. In other words I would find prospects, call on them all, do all the presentations and sales calls, put the proposals together, deal with the competition, negotiate price, and attempt to close the business. This is a foolish way of doing business for even a well-seasoned sales executive. And I can assure you at 24 I was not well seasoned. Yet this was the way I worked until I started to observe how the successful sales execs leveraged their resources.

We are all gated by an important fact. There are 24 hours in a given day. How we deploy this precious time resource will ultimately determine our success. To this point take a look at the internal resources that are available to you. Resources that can save you time or provide expertise to assist you in your sales campaign.

Perhaps there are folks that can assist with email marketing. Maybe there are subject matter experts you can leverage. Are there internal folks that are excellent presenters or proposal writers?

Once you have exhausted the internal resources available to you I would then consider looking outside the company for assistance. If you are not a detail oriented person you might consider hiring someone to assist with your reports or paperwork. I worked with a guy that paid a women to go over his commission statement with a fine toothcomb. He assured me that he recovered more than ten times what he paid for the service. Or maybe it makes sense to pay someone to generate leads and set appointments for you? The point is to consider how to best utilize your time resource.

There are three criteria to consider around outsourcing:

1)   Can someone do a better job than you?

2)   Can the job be done at a lower opportunity cost? ( if you pay $500 and it helps you generate an additional $2,000 in commission as an example)

3)   Do you enjoy the task?

For example when I wrote my book it became abundantly clear that I needed professional assistance in terms of correcting my poor English and grammar.  So I hired a professional copy editor to read the entire manuscript and highlight proposed corrections in red for my review and approval. When I received the manuscript back there were some pages that had more red than black! When you hire a copy editor, you pay per word. So I can assure you that I got my monies worth.

However, for my blogs and newsletters, I have not taken the extra step to send them off to a professional copy editor for review. And quite frankly I have been embarrassed by some of the spelling, grammar and punctuation errors that some of my readers have pointed out to me (in a loving way of course)

So the point is I very much enjoy writing about professional sales, but I don’t enjoy the details of proof reading and making the necessary corrections. And quite frankly I’m not good at it!  I’m sure in this article there are several errors that should be corrected but I did not pick up.

To this point if someone has the desire and interest to proof read my material BEFORE I release it I would sincerely appreciate it. You would be doing me, and my readers a tremendous service. In fact I would be willing to barter sales counseling/coaching services in exchange.

I wrote a blog back in August on this subject that you may enjoy as well:

No Need to go it alone