If you’re an AE, I recommend appointing yourself a small business owner.
Just like most small business owners you probably feel like you have no time. You may also feel unsupported by your company and that you need to do everything yourself.
Just like small business owners there are things you can do to make this situation a lot better. By doing so you will (a) sell more, (b) get a bigger commission check, and (c) be less stressed. Not a bad combo.
Flat world
These days it’s a very flat world (ignore those globe things). What I mean by this is that it’s easy to get people from other geographies to help you. Keep in mind that a small amount of money for you can be a large amount of money for someone in a less wealthy nation.
You can get real human-beings to help you do your work…for not very much money at all. I am talking about tens of dollars here not thousands. It’s not the sort of money you need a committee meeting with your bosses to get approved. You can just put in on your personal credit card.
“What! I’m just an employee. I can’t go spending money like this.”
But you have my blessing to become a small business owner. You don’t have to be just an employee. OK, maybe keep it a secret between us for now, but when you kill your sales quota and everyone starts calling you a Rockstar, you may want to let on (in the right circumstances).
Build Your team
Say you buy into this crazy idea. Who would you want to hire anyway?
If you’ve bought into any of this “social selling” stuff then you are probably thinking “that sounds like a lot of work, posting content, curating content, maybe even creating some content. It would be great to be seen as a subject matter expert by my buyers but I don’t have time to do that. I’ve got to put together proposals and update the CRM and make sure my current clients are taken care of and respond to emails from my bosses and other political stuff in my company”.
Hey, but what if you had a team helping you? (No, not those blokes in marketing that never have time to help you, your own team.)
You could add people to your team to do things like:
- Post content for you on social media
- Look for content from others that you can curate on put on social media
- Research prospects lists
- Research account information for you so you can make customized approaches to prospects
- Update the CRM for you
- Help you write and edit your proposals
Train Your team
Your team does need training.
Although some people that can work for you may be quite affordable, they don’t usually know how to do exactly what you do. You need to train them.
In order to train someone, you need to know how to do something yourself first. It’s important to get that particular process down to something efficient before you delegate to somebody else and scale up a problem.
I have found a great way to train someone on a task is to make a video of you doing the task and send them the video. This applies especially to computer-based tasks. You can use a software program (I use QuickTime on the Mac) to record you moving your mouse around and you can record your voice giving instructions at the same time. I’ve found most freelancers, even from other countries, find they can replicate the tasks on this video on the first or second try with only a couple of questions to clarify what they need to do.
This kind of training does not take up a lot of your time and will get you a ton of time back to spend on things like developing real relationships with your customers and prospects.
So if you’re an AE, congrats!, you are now a small business owner! Go look at sites like Fiverr, Upwork, TopTal or ResultsResourcing. Your team is waiting for you. If you’d like a bigger commission check and less stress, I would consider talking to them.