Ready? Set? Sell

If you read the first two articles in this series, you should have already accomplished two critical things. First, you have developed a business plan that you are certain is profitable. Second, you have accepted the only way you will succeed is to focus and execute your business to the extreme.

Now it is time to do what most of you dread most: Sell! Regardless of how well you execute your good plan, selling efforts will be the determining factor for success. You must develop techniques, policies, management styles and anything else necessary to make sure your selling efforts are the best in the business.

As a retailer or wholesaler, this starts by identifying exactly what your salespeople need to do, a compensation plan that matches money to the activity you desire, then proper hiring, and, yes, proper firing of employees who do not produce.

I'm not referring only to road salespeople, because I believe every employee of every business is a salesperson at the end of the day.

Some of you retailers have broken the mold, but most have not. To be blunt: Employees of independent retail stores should be paid partly by hourly wages and partly by commission or sales-based bonuses. This is the only way your employees will know their income depends on their ability to get customers to buy more!

Do you want hourly employees who simply punch a clock and collect the minimum? Recruit at McDonald's.

Or do you want employees who are excited by an opportunity to have unlimited income based on their productivity? Recruit at restaurants. Real restaurants, not fast food joints.

Thousands of people choose to work in restaurants long hours for far less per hour than minimum wage, on the promise they can keep the tips customers leave for superior service.

Why do we believe it should be any different in stores? The offer of minimum wage per hour in a retail store, plus a percentage of personal sales, should attract top-level people if they have the right personality and attitude.

Do you truly want to change the culture of your store? Go find some people who are serving food and beverage for mostly tips, offer them an unlimited income opportunity and build yourself a sales team!

I've met a lot of you wholesalers. I know your frustrations. You can't watch your salespeople all day, so you never know how hard they're working, how often they show your line, or even how talented they are. So, you just kind of sit there waiting for orders to come in and hoping you somehow have a few superstars out there that will carry you.

This statement will shock you. Forget talent. As a buyer, salesperson, sales manager and owner of a wholesale business, I have experienced thousands of salespeople. As to pure talent, there is not much difference between the best and the worst I have ever seen.

What separates the superstars from the failures as salespeople? Work ethic and basic personality. Will they roll out of bed every morning early and will they be in customers' stores all day, every day? Do they react to your policies and compensation plan with fear, or the excitement of someone who has just been offered the opportunity of a lifetime?

Great salespeople don't have to be constantly harassed to make sure they are in stores five days a week. They are driven to serve their customers and make money (you can't have one without the other). These people don't go for the largest guarantees; they go for the largest commission rates.

Give me a choice between an average salesperson who is in stores working with customers from 9 to 5 Monday through Friday, or a superstar who is only in stores three days a week from 10 to 4 and I'll take the average person any day. Hard work has always beaten talent over the long haul.

Whether hiring as a retailer or as a sales manager, you should always try to decide in the interview which "column" the person is in. I recommend you break it down into only two: opportunists and victims.

Opportunists radiate success. You can see it in their resumes, hear it in their voices and see it in their eyes. They smell opportunity and they react to it, usually by asking for the job, several times.

Victims are always ready to blame someone else about why prior jobs didn't work out. It's never their fault — always the company, policies or the person they worked for.

Ask all interviewees to describe the best and worst boss they ever worked for, and why. Opportunists will tell you their best boss gave them a chance to excel and they did so. Victims will tell you they've never had a great boss. (Hint, their next lousy boss is you if you hire them.)

Don't hire victims, unless you want to be one.

Firing is the toughest part of anyone's job. We all want to be nice, and unless you're a real sicko, you don't really like confrontation.

So, when you need to do this, do it quickly. Every time I've terminated a person, I can think back weeks, even months, and remember the first time I knew in my heart it was not going to work. I hung onto them, hoping for change that never came. It was not their fault I kept them from moving on to something that would fit them better. It was mine.

Don't hold people back in their lives. If you've made every effort to teach them your business and they're not responding, fire them. Yesterday.

If you have hired the right people, set your compensation plans based on maximum productivity instead of minimum expectation, and prepared your company to execute a profitable plan, get ready to blow the doors off.

Don't take my word for it. Think about the outstanding retailers you have met or read about. Think about the wholesalers you have seen grow to the moon. All of them based their core values on creating exciting workplaces where people were motivated and knew if they performed they would be rewarded.

Go and build the kind of business people want to work for. Have fun!

Watch this space every month for Business Memo. Our experts will present ideas and examples to help you be more successful in operating your own business. Nextmonth: Suze Bragg on the Internet.