Traditionally, salespeople have been regarded as special—if for no other reason than they can do something many others can’t: sell. But natively, salespeople are in actuality entrepreneurs within the enterprise. If we take a closer look at why this is and what that means, we can see there are many ways you could empower salespeople to be much more of a contributing factor in your company’s success.
What is an Entrepreneur?
In various schools of economic thought—and specifically within the Austrian School of Economics—the entrepreneur is assigned a crucial role in economic development.
The entrepreneur is one who seeks out information that can be utilized for profit, and continuously finds creative ways to do so.
This is the concept of a “self-starter” magnified many times—this is someone who not only gets himself or herself going, but sees opportunity that others miss, and cleverly develops that opportunity into profit.
An entrepreneur becomes expert in weighing risk against protecting the existing enterprise. How much time and how many resources can be invested in a possibility and how much risk will be involved—measured against the preservation of the ongoing activity?
The examples of this are many and legendary throughout the history of business. Behind every successful venture there was or is an entrepreneur. But guess what? You have entrepreneurs right within your company—right there in the sales department. You may have to fully empower and utilize them to see it, but they are there.
Salespeople as Entrepreneurs
If you have ever gotten to know a sales rep well, then you have seen these entrepreneurial qualities in action. Every day when they come to work, salespeople must seek out and qualify leads; this is where they look for and evaluate opportunity. They then become clever in evolving those leads into viable prospects, and those prospects into profitable closes. This is their version of utilizing the information they gather for the profit of the company and themselves.
Salespeople are constantly evaluating risk against the existing activity. Risk can be as simple as spending their valuable time to talk at length with a particular prospect, to spending company funds in entertaining or demonstrating product or service to a prospect. The better a sales rep is at turning that risk into opportunity, the more the company will trust them.
Another aspect of entrepreneurs is, of course, that they thrive on creating their own incomes. They generally despise even trying to live on some kind of fixed income as they’re not in control of it and can’t raise it when they so desire. Salespeople work on commission for this very reason: while they take the risk of a lower paycheck on some weeks, they also reap the considerable reward when they pull off the miracles expected of them.
The Role of CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
CRM software was originally designed around an older “top-down” platform of computing. The result was a product that leans more toward controlling and confining sales rep activity than enabling it. This is the reason that most salespeople, if asked, groan and complain about CRM. CRM doesn’t tend to assist or enable them at all, while they are expected to spend valuable sales time with it inputting data and creating reports. This is time during which they are not selling; they are not getting paid and neither is the company.
If a salesperson is in fact an entrepreneur, it stands to reason that CRM should support them in all aspects of entrepreneurship. CRM software should be intuitive, so that it is easy to figure out and use. It should logically follow the company’s existing sales process, so that opportunity and progress can be recorded and located quickly and easily. Needed reports and analyses should be able to be created with a minimum of time and effort. CRM should be flexible so that as market conditions, product or service specifications and other factors change, CRM can readily follow.
As you can see, your salespeople are indeed entrepreneurs. Treat and support them as such—and watch your sales and profits soar.
Watch for further articles in our series on salespeople as entrepreneurs.
