How To Hire, Train, and Retain A Killer ISP Sales Team

Second only to the senior technicians who keep your network running, your sales team is the most important group in your ISP. Careful selection and nurturing will help them help you be successful.

by Christopher M. Knight [August 2, 1999]

"Without Sales, Your ISP does not exist. Everything begins with a sale."

New subscribers don't fall out of the trees, so to grow your revenues it's important to build your ISP sales team. Many ISPs may feel they don't need a sales team; all that's needed is a great customer service or order-taking group. While that approach may work for the first few hundred subscribers, if you have aspirations to grow your ISP to the thousands and beyond, you're going to need to develop a killer sales team that will make your sales and growth happen.

First, consider this six word description for your ISP CEO: "The Best Salesperson In The House." It's vital that sales leadership, standards setting, focus, and drive come from the CEO. You may disagree, but I have never seen an ISP sales team become great without the drive and focus of the CEO. As the CEO, it's your job to set minimum sales expectations, help set achievable revenue goals, and kick start the sales team by hiring the first round of folks.

Top 5 Tips On Hiring Great ISP Sales Folks:

1. Look for 1-2 years of sales skills first, and industry knowledge second. It's always easier to train a person on the ISP industry, and almost near impossible to train someone on basic sales skills, to the point where it is worth the additional time investment.
2. Make sure you are hiring "sales types" and not ISP technicians who couldn't get a job in the tech field and now are trying sales. You want a person who gets an adrenaline rush every single time they close a sale. Techies don't get that feeling, but true sales types do.
3. Ask them to sell you something in the interview (like a pen). Most folks in the interview will babble, talk about the pen, talk about it's benefits and features, ramble some more, and then fail to sell you the pen, because they don't have the guts to ask you for the order. The bright salesperson will ask you questions as to what is important to you about the pen and why/when you would like to buy one.
4. Do they have previous success or experience selling the same thing you are selling? Previous success is one of the best indicators that they will have success with your ISP.
5. Are they internally motivated on their own? Are they willing to do whatever it takes to learn what they don't know? How disciplined are they about taking the total responsibility to drive their own sales?

Training time
Once you've hired a basic ISP sales team, you need to train them. Training is not something you want to start planning after you have hired them, but long before hiring time—so you aren't paying someone to sit and spin while you figure out what you must teach them before they can become productive.

A typical ISP sales training system might include (but not be limited to) the following:

•  History of your ISP
•  Your ISP's unique selling strengths and weaknesses
•  Your current market focus and what type of sales you are driving for
•  Order entry, customer flow management, and database issues
•  Company payment policies, disconnect procedures, credit issues
•  Competitive overview of who you are selling against
•  Sales skill builder exercises
•  Contact and time management procedures
•  Reporting requirements
•  Technical overview of your ISPs abilities
•  Memorization of all relevant sales prices of your ISP products/services
•  Goal setting for the next 90 days with your new rep

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