Most people misunderstand and mis-define the word serious. They view it as stoic, non-smiling, stiff, non-humorous, and boring. Hardly.

Serious is the intention, the intensity, and the focus that you put into your work ethic and your personal ethics. Serious is a way of life, a way of business, a way of selling, and a way of serving.

How serious are you?

When your prospect or customer comes to the realization that you are “serious” about doing business or earning business, it stems from the actions you took to make that feeling possible.

Those serious actions or characteristics include:
• Speed of response.
• Ability to deliver.
• Ability to serve.
• Desire to serve.
• Knowledge about how what we have will help someone.
• Friendliness.
• Personable.
• Perceived value of product or service.
• Truth at all cost.
• Available when THEY call.
• Easy to access anyone.
• Easy to do business with.
• Online access to information and ordering.

If you have all those attributes, you have a CHANCE of being perceived as serious.

What are you serious about?

I always found it pathetically funny when someone told me, “We have all the business we can handle.” This is a sentence often spoken in response to an offer to advertise. I wonder if that same sentence is true today? Maybe if that business owner was more serious about business building rather than business bragging, he would be in better shape today.

Yes, I’m serious about the economy, and our present state of affairs, but I am 1000% MORE serious about my business, my finances, and my sales. My focus is on success, not doom and gloom. There’s no bailout for entrepreneurs. And the only stimulus I have is the one I create for myself.

In good times or bad times, here are a few things we are serious about in my business: (How do you and your business compare?)
• We are serious about helping our clients. Many are in need, and looking for answers.
• We are serious about being friendly. It costs no extra money to be friendly, and it sets the tone for positive outcome.
• We are serious about being an online leader. Online is forever, and we are investing in our future.
• We are serious about NOW IS THE TIME. We are not waiting to see what happens, we are taking success actions on the opportunities that exist NOW.
• We are serious about delivery on every promise. While we may not produce miracles, we absolutely give it our best effort.
• We are serious about managing expectations and providing measurable results – new accounts, relationships, revenue, growth.
• We are serious about doing the right thing and the best thing for our customers. This is a true mission statement.
• We are serious about having fun while doing it. We kibitz, we wisecrack, we engage customers about them, and we do it with the serious intention of having a great time and being memorable.
• We’re a family, not a team. Maybe that’s why we’re serious about working together, staying together, and succeeding together.

I realize that many of my customers need help and I am serious about giving it to them. Not selling – giving.

I realize that many companies are having tough times, and because our field of expertise includes attitude, sales, and loyalty, we have a genuine opportunity to help.

As a former university professor and now occasional speaker, I’m serious about connecting with my audience. I want them to get my message and improve their sales, their business, and their lives – and to do that, I know everyone must laugh. And laugh hard. And laugh a lot. I’m serious about humor. I practice timing as I’m speaking to maximize audience laughter, pleasure, and learning. Over the years I have come to the full understanding of the power and appeal of laughter.

These are times that call for different approaches and different actions. They challenge me to have a different mindset and slower expectations of victory. Not LOWER, slower.

Your sales force is your company’s lifeblood. No matter how good your product is, it won’t sell itself, no matter how much you believe otherwise. Establishing a competent, effective team to draw customers is often challenging for entrepreneurs, though, who would rather focus on research and development or chase VCs.

1. Don’t hire sales people too early. In the early days, the founders should be able to sell (and should be selling).

2. You don’t need sales people, you need sales. Don’t think VP of Sales – think “Revenue Engineer”. (Not the greatest analogy, but just like you won’t hire a development “manager” as one of the first 5 people in a startup, you shouldn’t hire a sales “manager” either). Don’t get caught up in fancy titles – focus on dollars in the door.

3. Don’t hire several sales people at once. Your goal is to figure out the “pattern” of what kinds of people are best based on what you’re selling and who you’re selling it to. You need some feedback from the system so you can continue to iterate on your hires.

4. If you’ve never hired or been around sales people before, be prepared for a bit of a shock to the system. They’re not bad people, they’re just different. It’s always helpful to remember the obvious which sometimes escapes us… that your startup needs to sell stuff!

5. Resist the temptation to create complicated compensation plans. If it requires a spreadsheet to figure out the commission, it’s too hard. You’ll have plenty of time to confuse sales people later – start simple.

6. Agile methodologies can work in sales as well. Iterate! Refine your demo script, your slides, and any other collateral information. Capture the lessons learned by the best-performing people and spread it to the rest.

7. Sales people will generally act in mostly rational (but often surprising) ways based on incentives. The rules of the game define the behavior of the players. You were warned.

8. Always connect incentives somehow to ultimate customer happiness. If you reward just “deals getting done”, you’ll get deals – but at too high a price. You might get push-back that sales people don’t control/influence customer happiness, but they do. They “pick” customers. They set expectations. And they control the degree of “convincing” applied.

9. Make sure you understand the economics of your business. Figure out your total COCA (Cost of Customer Acquisition). This includes sales people, marketing people and marketing campaigns. Quick example: Lets say you paid a sales person $10k, a marketing person $10k and you spent $5k on Google AdWords (for a total of $25k) last month. If you sold 10 customers last month, your COCA is about $2,500. Different businesses have different needs in terms of sales vs. marketing spend. Make sure neither is too far out of whack.

10. Your life-time-value (how much revenue you expect to generate per customer) should be higher than your COCA. (No, I did not need a degree from MIT to figure that out.) Once your LTV is a multiple of your COCA, you’re ready to start turning the knob and scaling the business a bit (hiring more sales people). But, if your LTV is way lower than your COCA, proceed with caution. If there is no hope for LTV getting higher than COCA, you’ve got a problem. Don’t try to hire additional sales people until the economics sort of make sense. If the car is pointed towards a brick wall, hitting the accelerator is not a good idea.

11. Track data maniacally (even if it’s just in a spreadsheet). Information you will want includes: What was sold, who sold it, when, for how much, etc. This data will be invaluable later as you start to scale. For example, you should be able to answer the question: We had 14 customers cancel last month – who sold those customers? Is there a pattern? In the early days, you likely won’t have the volume (or the time) to analyze the data – but you should at least capture it for future use.

12. Your pricing should be in line with your sales structure. For example, you can’t expect to have an outside sales force (that meets with customers in person) if your average deal size is only $10,000. The math won’t work.

13. Once you get beyond three or so people, running your sales in a spreadsheet will become painful. Start looking at CRM systems (like Salesforce.com).

14. Start watching the shape of your “funnel” as early as possible. How many leads are you getting a month? How many turn into opportunities? How many of those convert into paying customers? Once you understand your funnel, you can slowly start tweaking your system to fix the “leaks”.

That’s all I’ve got for now. Feel free to contact Kolikoff & Company for assistance in building and/or outsourcing some or all of your sales team.