Are Your Sales Reps Earning $500K? The Formula for Investor-Attracting Results

If you’re looking to maximize your company’s attractiveness to an investor or an acquirer one day, optimize your sales and marketing process.

If your company sells to other businesses, an investor will want to know where you get your leads from and how much each costs you to generate. They’ll want to know what technology you are utilizing to support your sales team. They’ll want to understand how your sales reps get meetings and how many appointments a good rep has each week. They’ll want to know the close rate of a high performer and how it compares to an average performer.

If you have optimized the client acquisition and sales closing process, the investor would look to scale your sales model with a significantly higher investment.

Acquirers love stumbling over a business where the main constraint to growth is capital. They fall over themselves for a company that has an efficient sales engine that needs more fuel (i.e., money). Most investors have lots of capital, but struggle to find businesses with a sales system that won’t collapse under the weight of more money.

How Gregg Romanzo Built a Sales System

In 2004 Gregg Romanzo started an old-school freight brokering business. Most freight brokers are nothing more than a handful of people arranging shipments in return for razor-thin margins, but Romanzo realized his sales model had the potential to grow into something much bigger.

The key to Romanzo’s business model was to hire high potential people with a starting salary of $40-60,000 and then teach them the business from scratch. He paid their variable compensation tied to the gross margin of the jobs they booked. As the majority of them began earning $100k in total pay, he kept them for the long term. The top 2 % were earning $3-500,000 in an exceptional year.

By the time he sold the company, he had 200 employees and 95% were in sales.

How does that compare to your company?  If you have a winning formula, what would result if you double your sales team or quadruple it? Either hire a lot more reps or show a deep-pocketed investor or acquirer how durable your sales model is and how all you need is their capital to grow it. If you build it right, will they come –and bring their money? Try it and see.