Morning guys.
Day 9 – we’re doing this!
Kick-off is a little later.
Did my best to sleep in (although I did wake at 4am)
Yesterday evening I felt terrible, so a little bit more rest was much needed.
But still love being up and at it at this time of the morning before people are even thinking about being productive.
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I got on a call yesterday with my sales team yesterday.
Was weird to have a sales call with 4 people involved.
Ion, Joe, Mikala, and Michael – all with a sales background – all determined to absolutely knock it out of the park (I hope at least anyway).
So minus Mikala whose in a contracting position (and is also doing dedicated outbound calling) – the other guys are all on commission only.
I want to talk through how I’m building out a sales team that I hope between them will bring in £40-60k a month in upfront money banked new business and £120k a month in contract value.
They alone would then make the company a 7-figure business if I just relied upon them alone.
What I want to talk through today (as I’m sitting at the Inn next to West Brompton) is my relationships with each of them and the backstory.
Around April and May 2019, there were simply too many leads coming into Pearl Lemon via Google and other means for me and at that time my ex-business partner to get my head around.
I’d tried historically looking at various outbound cold callers but had been met with lacklustre results.
At that time I decided to take the plunge and sign up for a £2k investment into ‘Commission Crowd’ (CC) – basically it’s a platform dedicated to commission-only sales agents.
Several people within my circle said ‘you can’t build a commission-only sales force’.
At this time I was posting Indeed, Facebook and WorkInStartups all in the hunt for a cold caller.
I’d even interviewed several people; others had started but nothing meaningful ever came from it.
I took the plunge by doing my best to fill in the online forms for my agency profile on CC and post a job and the applications started rolling in.
Enter Joe Barr on May 10th:
That was the start of a journey into the world of commission-only sales forces.
Now.
Luckily, my primary skill set is probably sales. I have been ‘selling’ way before I was doing SEO. SEO was something I became competent at from my mid to late 20s (I’m 33). But ever since I convinced my school teacher at 15 that it didn’t matter if I misbehaved if I kept getting ‘A’s…
I’ve been in sales.
This is important because I thought about what would motivate me as a commission-only sales rep.
And it leads to high-quality leads that are booked into my calendar/come into my inbox that has an interest in my services.
Fortunately – we had this with the inbound activity being driven by Pearl Lemon.
Joe by August would go on to have Pearl Lemon’s record month in terms of revenue booked at £20k+ being the mark he broke.
So it was a pretty incredible transition.
Our leads come in fundamentally via two methods – inbound hitting our website and then via using our S-T-E-P formula on LinkedIn and email.
At that time both of these processes were a lot rougher around the edges and I had to make many changes to ultimately support the reality of a new salesperson coming in.
This meant:
- Building a dozen+ training videos
- Getting an E-sign template and programme setup (Docusketch)
- Showing how to build an SEO audit
- Building a templated proposal structure
- Setting up a calendar booking system for Joe
- Adding SMS automated follow-ups to that system
And a whole host of other elements to make things as easy as possible for Joe.
The ultimate idea was that it’d be as easy as possible for Joe to close deals.
This is what has been the key in my opinion to build a highly motivated and dedicated team of closers who bring in deals.
Make them see you are committed to their success.
Every week there have been new problems come up – clients requiring different clauses in their contracts, requiring contracts in general, and various other elements once I started to remove myself from the sales equation.
Joe was a guinea pig of sorts and a very successful one – soon enough he started rolling in deals.
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Fast forward from May 10th from when Joe applied to this role to Fri 28th Feb as I sat on a sales call with Ion, Joe, Mikala and Micheal.
How things have changed.
Ultimately for the better:
Ion is on a roll:
This is just one in a series of conversations we have throughout the day reviewing the pipeline.
Ion booked in £10k+ this week!
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Listen to Joe’s current pipeline:
Here are some insights from Mikala:
Micheal the new sales guy is starting from Monday and yesterday was spent sorting out all the items I can clear out to make their lives easier.
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So weekly we have a 30-45 minute call to drill down all the times I can work through to make their lives easier.
As you can see the ‘to-do’ list is big and that’s what will be the focus of this weekend to get these guys up and running.
I love these weekly calls where my sole focus is upon serving my sales team (which reminds me I need to do the same for my SEO team).
But yes the race is on to try to do 100k months as soon as I possibly can.
Most of my life I make up as I go along.
E.g whilst I’ve been writing this blog which now feels like it took forever (I must learn to focus more!)
I’ve been having these conversations:
Recorded this video:
And pitched Youcanbookme, Nusii, and Docsketch with joint venture ideas.
Scatterbrain at it’s finest.
So I leave you with today’s thoughts on building a remote + commission-only sales team (or indeed anything else)
- Lead with genuine value – it’s got to make sense for everybody.
- Always ask the question – what currently annoys you? What could we do better?
- Setup weekly calls to review and energise the team
- Like anything, building a commission only remote sales team is a journey – you’ll get better with time and dedication
And time check:
Almost 2 hours hah – I need to get these done quicker.
Tomorrow I’m setting a 90-minute time limit – let’s see how we go!
Catch you tomorrow 🙂
p.s if you have further questions about this process list it in the comments below and I’ll then update this blog!
