Market for salespeople the way you market for prospects

1. Getting salespeople is marketing

It is called one of the big breakthroughs to have here: approach the marketing that brings you salespeople the same way you approach the marketing that brings you prospects.

Both sides of the business. It is also framed as acquisition running in both directions at once. One side takes leads through to customers; the other brings leads for jobs into the business. It works like a mirror, so growing one side means growing the other with it. Lots of leads will need lots of salespeople, and the way to get those is to go out and find leads for sales roles.

The same skill. One owner describes it as a big realization. That owner used to feel sure of winning customers and only wished they could win talent. It turned out to be one skill set: advertising. What you advertise is a job opening in place of whatever you sell, and to that owner the work is fundamentally the same.

2. The ad is sales copy

Sample ads come with a caveat: this is just an example. The point drawn from them: an ad for a salesperson is copy. It is sales copy; it is advertising. So if the ads you run for salespeople are not drawing enough interest, the reason, put bluntly, is simply that the ads are bad.

A different ad for each level. The salespeople a business needs come at different levels, a closer or a sales manager for instance, and each is attracted in a different way. The examples run a separate ad for each level. The wording of those ads is not on this page.

Borrow the structure, not the words. Where you work from another company's ads, the advice here would be: do not copy them word for word: your company differs from theirs, and so does your culture. You can take the structure and rework it to suit your own culture.

The other fixes for too few applications, the ads among them, are SOP 201 section 6.1.

3. Ask why you cannot do more

It works just as it does with leads. Take whatever brought in your first closer and ask yourselves why you cannot repeat it more often. It is the question you would put about the first customer: how did that one come in, and what stops there being more? Do more if you can. If you can't, then the cause might sit in one of these places, in this order:

Where it stops	What the owner says, and the reply
Metrics	No idea what one salesperson is worth to the business, or what landing one costs
Market	There are no salespeople here. Doubtful: probably untrue, though it could hold if you want local salespeople somewhere remote
Model	Would take one on, but has no idea whether it pays off in this line of business. That reads as not really a salesperson problem, though it could be the reason someone gives for not hiring

SOP 201 sections 2 to 5 walk more and then these stops again with people as the target, with a case at each stop from metrics on.

4. What a salesperson earns you against what one costs to get

Many of you know the customer ratio: lifetime value against what a customer costs to acquire. A lot of you do not know the version for staff, which asks what one employee brings in as lifetime gross profit, set against the cost of acquiring talent. SOP 200 section 6 names that ratio; a worked case follows.

An example, with made-up figures. Say you need another HVAC technician, and one costs you, let's say, 150 a year. They do not really cost that; go with it. So the technician costs 150 a year and brings in, at a guess, 400K of revenue. Net, that leaves you 250K a year in gross profit from that one person.

The question to ask. Suppose an investment on offer returned $250,000 of gross profit every year. How much would you put in to own it? $50K is the figure that comes up, and it is taken. Tons of owners, in home services and in other businesses hunting for salespeople, have been walked through this, and they say yes, 50K. The reply: there you have your cost of acquiring talent. Would you, then, spend $50,000 on recruiting and marketing to bring in one good salesperson? The math works, and yet people are badly afraid to do it.

The backing. In one case, a sales team was built fast by paying several outside recruiting firms a fee for each hire while running an in-house recruiting process alongside them, and the spend was set against what that team went on to sell. The instruction drawn from it: do not skimp on growth, and do the arithmetic.

5. When you say you have no bandwidth

The other issue that might come up: you would take on more salespeople, only there is no bandwidth for it. The answer is a question. What is going without them costing you? Picture three salespeople bringing you $250,000 apiece per year, $750,000 in all each year. Is the thing you are doing now, the one keeping you from recruiting, worth more than those three bring in?

Sometimes the answer is that you cannot take it on right now. It is a problem, just not a big enough one yet, and you will get to it. In one business, a known problem was left alone, because at the time it was not what held the business back. Once it became the constraint, it was dealt with. So sometimes a problem you know about is left on purpose. It comes down to what you put first.

The test is the constraint. Suppose you would go out of business without five salespeople. Then do everything in section 6. Suppose instead you are wondering how to fit all this in beside everything else. The answer: such is business. That is why it matters to ask whether this is the constraint. Everything takes work, and beyond running the business day to day you have only a limited spare amount of bandwidth to give any new project.

Why the constraint gets your resources first, and why several priorities at once is the owner's own problem, is SOP 185 section 7. Finding which thing is the constraint, by questions asked in a fixed order, is SOP 184.

6. Where to find salespeople

This is the tactical part, the most basic level, and worth close attention. Each route has a twin on the customer side, paired one by one, in this order:

• Posts to your own following. Put out more organic posts, aimed at anyone keen to sell what you offer. In the pairing, posting free content for customers becomes posting to your network for staff: posts from the business page and from your own page.
• Job ads. Run more ads on Indeed, or through LinkedIn's sales tool; LinkedIn is named as the main one. For customers these would be paid ads; for staff, they are called promoted job postings.
• Outreach. For salespeople of any kind, LinkedIn is the big one, because most of them are on it and they respond. Cold outreach keeps its name on both sides, as the word for head-hunting and the like, while warm outreach becomes asking your network.
• Affiliates. At groups and forums for salespeople, you can ask whoever owns them whether you may put up a post, or whether they would take payment to put one up. So many people run groups like these and earn nothing from them, while their communities are lively and full of exactly the people you are after. So post, and make an offer; it adds value for them. In the pairing, an affiliate is someone who owns a community of people with one kind of skill, editors or salespeople, say, and who becomes your affiliate once you pay them.
• Agencies. Headhunters and recruiting agencies, including recruiting firms with a specialty in sales. In the pairing: staffing firms and paid headhunters from outside the business.
• Referrals from your team. Section 7.

A salesperson who ignores you. The view here on outreach that goes unanswered: a salesperson who does not reply either does not care or is not good at selling; either way, give it no thought. Someone good at selling will treat you as a lead of theirs. You have become the sale, and you can judge them by how well they work you. SOP 166 section 5 turns the same test on recruiters, and covers finding and testing recruiters who fill one kind of role.

Why the routes line up. The reason: people have just four ways of reaching one another and telling each other about something, and hiring only calls them by other names. The four lead channels are anything one person can do; the people who get leads for you then work those channels on your behalf. For hiring, the pairing adds one route this list does not name: in-house recruiters, meaning staff that work for you and go out to find more staff on your behalf. Anyone who can win customers ought to be able to win talent by the same methods. The full side-by-side table of both sets of routes, and of the customer and talent funnels, is SOP 200 section 10.

7. Pay your own team for referrals

The view here is that this route is badly underused. If you are willing to pay a recruiter $50,000, why would you not pay your own team $50,000 to bring you someone? Your people know salespeople as well. In the pairing, referrals from customers become referrals from employees.

How to build it. The number is only a placeholder: if 50 grand is what you would pay, your team gets 50 grand for bringing you a salesperson, but not all of it at once. Some comes up front (five) and more at month six. What is expected to happen: the people who made the referral help the new hire train hard, to make sure they turn out good.

How the rest is split. Not established on this page.

SOP 200 section 8 has a referral fee held back to a milestone, with the reason the milestone makes the referrer care about the new hire. SOP 152, section 8, puts the team's fee at half what an agency charges, and says you could pay up to the full cost of acquiring talent.

8. The three growth moves, and knowing your number

For all of it, the answer is the three growth moves (do more, do it better, or do something new), plus simply knowing your price for acquiring talent. Choosing among them is SOP 40 — Choose the next growth move.

9. What this page does not decide for you

• When a referral fee is paid. Here part is paid up front and more at month six (section 7). SOP 200, in its section 8, pays the whole fee at month six, once the new person is activated, and not for the referral itself. This page does not settle which reading is right.
• The unit of the technician's cost (section 4). Not established on this page.

10. The checklist

Step	What to do
1	Treat getting salespeople as marketing, and grow it alongside the side that brings in customers
2	Write each job ad as sales copy; if interest is low, fix the ad
3	Attract each level of salesperson in its own way; borrow another company's structure, not its words
4	Ask why you cannot do more of what found your first closer; if you can't, look at metrics, market and model
5	Work out what one hire brings in as gross profit, and what you would pay to get one
6	Before saying you lack bandwidth, price what going without them costs, and ask whether this is the constraint
7	If it is the constraint, work the routes: posts, job ads, outreach (LinkedIn above all for salespeople), affiliates, agencies
8	Offer your team a referral fee, with part of it paid later

11. What this page does not cover

Interviewing candidates is SOP 253 — Run a group interview for high-volume roles. What to pay salespeople, and how they move up, is SOP 251 — Set sales comp and a career path for reps. Head-hunting for higher-level roles is SOP 163 — Head-hunt and interview for higher-level roles. For a new rep's first weeks, see SOP 255 — Onboard a new rep in phases, with a test to pass each. Tracking candidates in one system is SOP 166 — Track candidates in one system and use specialist recruiters.

Employment law and the wording of a job ad are not covered on this page.