John Wall: As you’re growing your business, direct sales is the most common method and most successful way to do it. If you can tell your story to prospects, get them to buy, that’s fine. But one thing, once you reach a certain point, that you’ll want to dig into is what they call business development, mostly in the software industry and or in some large enterprises, and even further, affiliate management or affiliate programs. The idea with this is twofold. You really want to find companies that are in your vertical. So verticals are basically your category of business. It could be anything, but the idea is that if you’re in one of these verticals, there are other companies that are selling to the same people who do not directly compete with you. So an example is, let’s say it’s landscaping and property management, right? You’ve got people who are doing lawn mowing and snow shoveling, and you also have people who are cleaning pools. Right now, those are complementary. The customers that buy one may or may not be interested in the other two. But instead of just marketing to the whole neighborhood, you could go, as a pool cleaning company, to a landscaping company and say, “Hey, which of your customers have pools? Can we set up some kind of deal where, if you bring me a customer, I’ll give you a finder’s fee or some kind of amount of the ongoing business.” So this idea that you can get others to sell the product for you without having to actually bring them on as employees. is a great way to leverage the sales force and to get more business in the door without adding staff, which is hugely profitable.
At the farthest end of that are affiliate programs. You hear a lot of marketers talk about affiliate programs as ways to grow the business, and this is a whole area where there are a bunch of software tools that can automate this process. So you can actually invite large numbers of people to come and sell your product and get some kind of either cash back or payment, and it’s all managed through automated programs. So for a software type product, they would actually have links that they use that does mark them as the refer of the deal, and it automatically tallies how much business they bring in, handles the payments, everything involved with that. So between business development and affiliate management, you’ve got some ways to grow the sales force and bring in more revenue without having to add additional staff or overhead.
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