We’re a large webdesign co in NJ … We’ve got a full staff in our office and I think it’s time to bring on an official sales person. Out of the companies who are fully staffed how many of you have a salesperson?
If you have one what has been the experience when did you hire and why?
Thanks
How big is “big”? What do you consider to be a “full staff”?
If you have three fee-earning staff, you might find it hard to support a full-time salesperson. On the other hand, if you more than, say, 20 fee-earners, you almost certainly want to hire a salesperson (or outsource your selling function).
If you would care to divulge how big you are, we might be able to give you a more definite answer.
Mike
we are also operating a large webdesign firm. we hire a official salesperson, it was a great decision as it was very beneficial for company…it was a good experience and ya very tough to handle also but it was good decision…as i have experienced it was not good to hire perrson on salary it was good when we pay them on their work base then they bring more work for us.
We hired our first employee in our sales department at the moment when I couldn’t personally handle all the sales inquiries our growing web agency was getting. It was 2008 and we were a six year old company with seven employees (the three of us co-founders included). We were three programmers, two designers and two of us in sales / marketing / business.
At that moment, I was personally handling 90% of all sales work (my other of the two partners was handling the remaining 10% in another city). I remember writing up to five sales proposals daily, of which three to four were for new clients.
The first person we hired in sales was hired as a sales junior and I became his sales manager. He was in charge of answering phones, talking to prospects about their needs and writing sales proposals. With time I let him go to sales meetings. He was handling smaller sales opportunities where there wasn’t so much custom software development. With time he was taking on more and more complex tasks and projects.
I have since exited from my web design/programming/seo company but my best sales people always grew from being project managers first. My designers and programmers never had an interest in selling, but project managers had good people skills and a good understanding of the little pieces of web projects that a normal sales person brought in from the outside would not think about when crafting proposals.
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