subject: Selling: Would Your Rather Do It or Teach It? [print this page] Selling: Would Your Rather Do It or Teach It?
As a top salesperson, you must have wondered, "Wouldn't I be better off training others to do what comes so naturally to me? Shouldn't I launch my own consulting business, write books, record audios and videos, blog, and call my own shots?"
I was talking to an entrepreneur who described a young salesman that he had trained.
At first, the initiate was so timid that he'd leave an establishment without even pitching his wares. Under threat of termination, he returned to the same stores and racked up some orders.
Before long, he opened his own motivational speaking enterprise, and it seems, he made a smooth transition and a living at it.
Apparently, teaching selling skills was a better fit for him than making sales, though of course, in your own business you still need to earn business.
But it's not the same challenge as grinding it out, day after day, and year after year, in the trenches of commerce, selling for someone else's business.
As a general rule, if you're really top-notch as a seller, you'll make more money on the phone and in the field than from behind a podium. For one thing, as a salesperson, you're a specialist, wearing one hat.
You don't have to pay the rent or light bill, make sure the copier has toner, and submit form after form to the government. You're in a turnkey operation. Everything is designed for you and around you and aimed at supporting you.
In a training business, you need to sell an account and manufacture the content and then travel to and deliver the class, speech or seminar. While there are satisfactions to be gained from having total project responsibility, there are also drawbacks, not the least of which is a fracturing of your attention, and ultimately, exhaustion, if you keep doing it all alone, whether you succeed or fail.
Indeed, salespeople that haven't had to run their own businesses have no idea how spoiled and pampered they are. Simply being able to FOCUS on one challenge, refining and perfecting it as time passes, is an amazing luxury.
True, you're not building equity, in the conventional sense. Typically, that fat commission check doesn't contain shares of stock in the venture. But there's nothing to prevent you from learning enough as a seller to then open your own shop, later on, with savings and the savvy you accumulated.
One of the downsides to teaching others is that you might pay the awful price of stalling your own learning. Yes, you'll get better and better at delivering that seminar, but you probably won't get enough NEW selling experience to spawn your next set of insights.
Like classroom teachers, you'll be tempted to take the shortcut of using your old, ragged notes of yesteryear, because they're so tried-and-true. Your trainees will remind you of your creeping obsolescence by asking you if you've heard of the flashy "new" sales method of the month.
Alternatively, if you invest in research and development to the exclusion of disseminating the fine content you have already created, you'll suffer from frequent feast-and-famine episodes, incurring repeated risks to the financial health of your enterprise.
How can you innovate, stay on the leading edge, tirelessly hustle for new accounts, and do the actual training, bookkeeping and related fulfillment functions?
Where is the leverage in that?
And this is the fundamental scourge of becoming an independent sales guru, or really a "talent," a speaker, performer, or consultant of any kind.
You would think, "Hey, it's my own business, so there is unlimited growth potential!" but that's often illusory. Even if you are lucky enough to create a true "hit," like a song or a stage "act" that goes viral or packs the house, you won't be able to clone yourself and staff fast enough to fully take advantage of the trend you launched.
Competitors, lone wolves and larger, and better-financed firms will imitate faster than you can generate, though you were the one to initiate.
While you're tussling with these tensions, the other you, your clone in the parallel universe that never stopped selling, exclusively, well, that person is thriving.
You've had a more exciting, dramatic, and varied career. You took bigger risks, and from time to time, they yielded mightier rewards. Your name is in the Library of Congress, and is mentioned with respect by historians of the sales game, but your counterpart's name is at the top of a fatter financial statement.
Who came out ahead?
Ultimately, that's a value judgment.
One piece of advice: NEVER STOP SELLING, even if you believe you have promoted yourself way above the job title, salesperson.
Because even if you strike out on your own, as one of my clients once said: "I've never met a problem in business that a few more sales couldn't cure!"
