DRAMATIZATIONS ARE BACK!! On this week’s episode of A Drink with “The Hurricane”, Steve discusses the first thing you should do after hiring a marketing representative.
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Video Transcript:
Hi folks, Steven Hurricane here. On today’s episode of A drink With The Hurricane, we are gonna talk about the importance of training a brand new marketing representative.
In that dramatization is something that I see happen all too often. Regardless of the work experience of your marketing representative that you’re about to hire or you just hired, you have to train your marketing person. This is vitally important! I know from my own story, whether you’ve heard the story or not, it’s relevant. When I came in to the home care business many years ago, I was hired as a marketing representative.. The owner of the company, Brian, gave me zero training. He gave me zero guidelines to track my performance, zero accountability measures, zero goals from bringing in new referrals, zero revenue goals, so I had no idea what a good week looked like. Basically, he hired me and said, “Go market.”
That’s what he did to me and it’s no wonder he had gone to three other marketing representatives before he got the right person. I was lucky enough to be able to figure it out, lucky enough to have the right personality, drive, and persona. I developed my own accountability measures so I would be able to track my performance. Most homecare business owners lack the structure of having a marketing representative. In addition, when I came on, I knew nothing about healthcare. I knew how to sell because I had worked at Cutco where I sat across the table selling knives to people in the comfort of their home. I knew how to bring on referrals because I’d worked in the dairy industry and I was used to going into businesses and restaurants and getting them to purchase products for me and the company that I was with. So those two, business to business and business to consumers sales experiences paid off dividend in having a basic understanding of marketing in sales, but I knew absolutely nothing about the healthcare industry.
A lot of acronyms I though were diseases, I mixed them up and I didn’t know what S.N.F. stood for. I didn’t know subacute and it goes on and on and on. I had to learn on the fly, which made it extremely difficult and I was just lucky to be able to get accomplished. What I was able to get accomplished is that now 16 years later, I am sitting in front of you training you on the same thing. Don’t do what happened to me because I was one of the rare lucky ones who was able to figure it out.
So what do we do? This is where you invest in training. Think about it from this perspective. The average salary of a marketing representative in the country is between 40 and 50 thousand dollars, depending on where you go in the country. That’s the average, you know, which means the lowest is around 30 and the highest is around 75 thousand dollars. But the average is 40 to 50 thousand dollars around the country. So if you’re going to invest 40 to 50 thousand dollars salary in somebody, isn’t it worth investing a couple thousand dollars in a training or a program that they can go to. Or at the very least some kind of course that this person could take to make sure
- You got the right person
- More importantly, they have the right skills that the right know how to be able to go on and execute on what they’re trying to accomplish.
That’s the whole purpose. This is the reason why I’m making this video and I’ve done similar ones to this, but I see this happen all too often. If you find yourself as one of the owners who’s had four, five marketing reps and it just doesn’t seem to be working out, the common denominator here is not the people you’re hiring, the common denominator is you as the owner of the organization. You don’t know how to manage a marketing rep, you don’t know how to hold them accountable, or we’re not sure what are the right marketing activities. Maybe we weren’t great at marketing ourselves and this is where the training and the support is vital.
Now, obviously, I own a training and support company and this is what I do, but there are other companies out there. So I’m not saying we’re the, I want you to call us but you have to just think about it from a logical stand point. I’m gonna invest 40-50 thousand dollars salary plus bonuses and commissions in this person. Shouldn’t I invest a couple thousand dollars to make sure that they’re the right person, make sure that they have the proper training, make sure they know exactly what their expectations are, make sure that I have the structure to make sure I can manage this person properly so that I can get my maximum return on investment?
Ask yourself those questions and if the answer which logically is duh yeah, I need to invest, then pull the trigger, commit, take action right now and pick up the phone and give us a call to find out what we can do for your marketing rep so you can help him or her dominate the marketplace and truly BLOW AWAY THE COMPETITION!
