The Future of Independent Sales

 The Reality of Independent Sales>>

I just looked at our YouTube channel which is really where CCSalesPro started. We just have over 260,000 views. That is amazing! We have tens of thousands of visitors to our blog each month. We recruit on average about 30 new sales people every month.  So let me start this post by saying thank you for supporting our company whether you are an email subscriber, on our team, or just enjoy our free resources. I just want to say thank you for your support.

In today’s post, I want to talk about the future of independent sales and what our company is doing to stay ahead of the curve.  One question I get asked all the time is this, “What is CCSalesPro and what is CCBizPro?”  CCBizPro is our company name and the name that clients knew.  CCSalesPro is a special brand / blog creating for the purpose of providing free sales training information and also to generate connections with sales professionals that may eventually want to sell for CCBizPro.  So, what does the future of independent sales look like and what is CCBizPro doing to help you succeed in the changing environment?

Something that really differentiates CCBizPro is our mission. Our mission is enabling committed independent sales partners for success.  This is an extremely difficult mission to accomplish.  There is a reason why none of the other companies out there, definitely none of the processing companies, have that same mission statement.

There are companies that are dedicated to enabling their sales force, but it is almost never an independent sales force. Usually it is going to be W-2 employees. If they are going to put all their money into their sales team, then they are not going to want people to be independent. There are companies that have independent sales teams but their mission is not enabling them. Their mission is basically using them as a marketing arm. Their mission is serving customers, not serving sales partners.  Our mission really sets us apart in that we are trying to enable committed independent sales partners for success.

There are two words in that mission statement that I have learned basically offset each other. If you move the one, you have to move the other one. Those two words are “enabling” and “committed.” If you are going to be enabling sales partners, they are going to have to be committed.

1. Enabling

How are we able to enable sales partners?  First of all, we have the normal things we have done at CCBizPro and will continue to do.

Training – We have a 5 day training program that includes 2 to 4 hours of live training each day along with field work assignments to make sure you are ready to get out in the field.

Coaching – We assign an experienced sales coach to every sales partner.  This is an individual with a proven track record in our industry and with our company that can help you get started quickly.

Support – We provide ongoing sales support and training to our sales partners to ensure that every question they have is answered quickly.

There are many more things that we can do to enable you as a sales partner that we happen to be really, really good at. I want to describe what those are and then talk about why we have had such a challenge providing this to our sales partners in the next post.

-Lead Generation

I have personally used all types of traditional marketing for lead generation. I had a program a couple years ago where I had a telemarking company that was actually in the Philippines and we worked with them to create telemarked leads for our select sales partners.  I have done traditional marketing like postcard mailers, radio advertising, etc.

More recently we have started a telemarketing center here in Central Pennsylvania. We have scheduled about 250 leads over about a three to four week period as part of a pilot program. Guess how much we charged for those leads? $0. Guess how much commission we took from sales that were made from those leads? $0. We just said, “We want to try something out. We are just going to pick our top 15 sales people and give them free leads.”

Of those 250 leads, half of them, to date right now, the sales partner never even went into the business or at least never updated our shared database. We spent money on a telemarketer who contacted the business owner. The business owner showed an interest, we sent this lead to the sales partner, and nothing happened. The sales partner didn’t do anything with those leads. Again, “enabling” and “committed”, you are probably starting to figure out how these two work together.

-Inbound Marketing

What about our inbound marketing strategy? The reason you are reading this article is because our company dominates inbound marketing, or what you hear called Search Engine Optimization (SEO), blogging, social media, etc. We dominate that space for credit card processing sales. We can dominate the same way in small business services: merchant services, point of sale systems, web design, and all the different things that we offer. We are already starting to do that and get lots of leads from that on a monthly basis.

So, what is holding us back in these efforts?  We need committed sales partners. If we go out there and generate leads, we have to make sure we have someone to follow up on those leads.  Why do we have such an issue with this? In the next post, I am going to talk about the reality of independent sales.  Having started out as an independent sales person myself, I understand the reality of independent sales and why sales people don’t want to commit themselves to a brand.  I will discuss this in my post tomorrow so stay tuned!

Have a great day,

James Shepherd

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