Lisa Proeber

Welcome To Eloma Episode 21: Removing Owners as Solo Sales Teams with Lisa Proeber

“Make sales a focus for your entire company,” shares Lisa Proeber, Founder and Owner of The Middle Six, a sales consulting business. In this episode of Welcome to Eloma, special guest Lisa Proeber joins host Kiley Peters to discuss common mistakes made by small business owners when it comes to sales and tips for how to be successful in sales using automation tools before ever hiring a salesperson.

Often small business owners think they need to keep sales in a silo and rush to hire a salesperson, but Lisa explains that this is not necessarily the best first move. The best salesperson can be hard to find right away because they need to be naturally extroverted and always thinking outside the box. As the business owner, you can be your own salesperson in the beginning and use that time to define and standardize your best practices so that when you do bring on a naturally gifted salesperson, they will have guidelines already in place to follow. There are many amazing tools like CRMs to help automate your business and make the sales process easier and less time consuming.

By making sure sales is a priority for your business and investing in it up front, you can be successful whether you bring on a salesperson or not. Tune into this week’s episode of Welcome to Eloma for a conversation with Lisa Proeber about how business owners can reduce the amount of time and work that goes into being their own sales team through automation tools, and learn the best qualities to look for in a salesperson, so that when you are ready to hire, you are prepared to find the perfect unicorn for your team.

Highlights:

• “One of the first mistakes that [small business owner’s] make is keeping sales in a silo. The owner of that small business is the only one bringing in the sales and they put it on themselves. And they think in order to scale, or grow, or sell more, that their first plan is to hire a salesperson. And I don’t necessarily agree with that.” (3:55-4:20 | Lisa)
• “First you need to create the funnel, then you can fill the funnel, and then you can sustain the funnel.” (4:40-4:45 | Lisa)
• “At the end of the day, sales is still a person game. Which I hope, is one of the only industries that won’t change and become AI.” (7:08-7:20 | Lisa)
• “Getting a CRM in place is vital. I mean, literally vital. From a time saving, and a not dropping any balls aspect.” (8:02-8:14 | Lisa)
• “Make sales a focus for your entire company.” (9:49-9:51 | Lisa)
• “If you want to introduce a salesperson to your team, chances are if they’re a salesperson, they’re going to be a bright, shiny unicorn and not fit in at all. And that’s good, because that’s what they’re there for. But unless your team is prepared for that, and understands that sales is the focus, then it usually falls flat. And that salesperson that you add to the team looks like this outsider instead of an asset.” (10:52-11:24 | Lisa) Audiogram
• “When we talk about all the fun stuff of sales, like not the strategy, but the work itself, the sales campaigns, the really juicy stuff that that brings you the business, it can stem from this sales mindset of being creative, thinking outside the box, thinking of who that target customer is, putting together that process, but to execute, marketing is vital. So they really do have to play really nicely together in the sandbox.” (28:26-28:58 | Lisa)
• “Don’t beat yourself up about not being able to find a salesperson.” (31:57-32:00 | Lisa)
• “You’re your own salesperson, you’re going to be fine. Let’s find some automations. Let’s put together a plan. And small businesses, I don’t think need to spend the big bucks on a salesperson, I think they can start small and find that natural talent.” (32:26-32:44 | Lisa)

Listen
Apple Podcasts – Spotify – Google Podcasts – YouTube

Connect with Lisa
Website | www.themiddlesix.com;
LinkedIn |  https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-middle-six/

Connect with Welcome to Eloma
Instagram: @WelcometoEloma
Website: WelcometoEloma.com
Weekly Email Newsletter: bit.ly/RIXEmail 

Connect with Kiley
Social: @kileypeters + Linkedin.com/in/kileypeters
Websites: RAYNEIX.com, BrainchildStudios.com, KileyPeters.com
Weekly Email Newsletter: bit.ly/RIXEmail
Email: info@rayneix.com

Lisa Proeber’s Bio

Lisa has had a wildly successful almost 20 year career in sales at companies ranging from family owned businesses to giant publicly traded conglomerates.  Early in her career she was trained in Lean sales management and has since viewed sales through the lens that it is 50%an art and 50% a science.  She believes that not only naturally gifted salespeople can be successful, but anyone with a great roadmap and process to follow.