One year later, we’ve trained and are using 7 sales designers, and grown 400%.
Here’s what I’ve learned on the journey:
Before even growing our sales force, we had to put “piping “ in place. Meeting with our most experienced EE at 0600 was how I did my initial research on what was worth selling, and what wasn’t.
We also put probably 100 hours into building our quick books online, the right way.
That said, I wasn’t ready to “standardIze our products” just yet, I needed more data.
I gave some rough guidelines to our sales guy(1) at the time.
For example, if you see it on wayfair or Amazon, and the customer wants it, mark it up 150% and we’ll do it.
I didn’t want to lock into a set of fixed services prematurely.
I started tweaking our product mix for simplicity, margin, simplicity of sale and delivery, etc.
One example - we were carrying 50 SKUs of products that sold for $9. Fixed that. Now just best sellers.
I studied what was being sold, and over many months, landed on the right mix of high impact products to sell.
I focused almost exclusively on “will it sell” - before considering any operational limitations. I figured sales cures all and I was right.
One big lesson:
Our sales reps want us to be a service company (so they can say yes to everything). “Sure, we’ll do that!” Is answer to everything.
Management wants us to be a product company (we are now).
This took me time to learn.
More to come on recruitment, commissions, mistakes,
• • •
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I stumbled around for a couple years - making loads of mistakes.
I wish I had a cheat sheet on lessons learned, so I put one together.
Here are 10 things about hiring remote via Upwork I wish I knew sooner (#7 was most painful)
1. Tasks expand to fill the time allotted to them. If you give an upworker (who you are paying hourly) 10 hours to write one sentence, they’ll find a way to bill you for the 10 hours. Be unreasonably time restrictive.
2. Time zones can be a struggle. If there is any communication needed on your project, be sure to note it in the ad. If you don’t do this, you’ll be up at 9pm trying to zoom with someone you are paying less than $10 an hour. Not high leverage time.