The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [54]
Rewarding Your Superstar
The last aspect of hiring top talent is to create a performance-based relationship with little or no base pay. There are countless ways to do this. Let me give you an example. I had a client who paid $9 per hour plus commission. He was even putting this in his ads for new salespeople. This base pay is not much—certainly not enough of a reward to attract superstars—but his commission structure was so good that his top producer was earning $92,000 per year. He could definitely find a superstar in his industry who would work for that amount of money. But to get top producers, he had to be clear on how he would reward them. I put it to him this way: “Do you want to attract the kind of person who will be like your top producer or do you want to attract $9-per-hour-type talent?” We put, “Can earn as high as $100K if you are a star,” right in his ad. This dramatically changed the type of person he started to attract.
You must reward top producers handsomely. Years ago I walked into my boss’s office to quit and he—the CEO of the company—jumped up on his desk and pointed down at me and said, “This is God talking and you are not leaving my company.” I laughed out loud. He then called the bookkeeper and wrote me a $5,000 check to stay. That was probably a $1 million check he wrote to himself. I brought in another million. He made me feel great and I stayed.
I have all my clients put together what I call a “recruiting document,” where they flesh out the most money a person can make, maybe even over several years. I have a client who sells apartment buildings. I had him put together a compensation plan that showed that after four years a salesperson could be earning $330,000. Using this recruiting document, we then went after recent college grads. He only pays a base of $2,000 per month, so we had to give new hires the incentive to work for that little money while they got up to speed. Picture your kid coming home with a sheet of paper in her hand showing how she would be earning $330K in four years. (See sample on next page.) Do you think you might help your kid get that job—maybe even subsidize her income or let her live at home longer if the payoff looked like that?
Another client of mine was in the insurance business. It takes an insurance salesperson a lot of time to build up income, but the rewards are fantastic if you get a big book of business. And the ongoing clients provide residual income. But the salespeople were always given incentives to get new business. We reduced the percentage that the rep could make from residual business each year. So for the first year, salespeople earn 30 percent commission on all business. For the second year, they continue to earn 30 percent on new business but earn only 20 percent on the ongoing business from the client’s firm the previous year. The third year and thereafter, new business is still 30 percent but ongoing business drops down to 10 percent. The new business is where the bucks are, so reps have a powerful incentive to get new business all the time.
How Even One-Person Armies Can Hire Top Talent
In the audience at a seminar I gave, there was a graphic designer who had never had salespeople. He was the salesperson, so his life was feast-to-famine on a regular basis. When he had no business, he’d chase to get some. Then he’d get business and would have to deliver the ser vice, so no one would be working on getting more business. When the project was over, he’d have to chase to get more. Here’s our dialogue:
ME: What’s a dream project for you?
HIM: An identity package for an emerging and well-funded start-up or growing company.
ME: How much would a gig like that get you?
HIM: The right project, $25,000.
ME: And how much of that are you willing to give away every day to get a project like that?
HIM: I could give 20 percent and still be happy.
ME: That’s $5,000.