What is interactive sales?

What is the most effective way to scale the sales organization of an online solar equipment distribution business?

• We are building a leading edge direct solar distribution business in San   Francisco with great early success. Check us out at: http://www.CivicSolar.com . Our next challenge is to grow our sales team from a few people to a sizeable sales organization (with a proven formula for turning new hires into productive sales people within a few weeks). My questions are:    1)  What types of sales people should we hire? a) smart, young, aggressive recent college grads? b) installers (with experience and sales skills) who are tired of being on the roof and want to sell product (rather than install product) c) sales people with years of experience selling similar equipment (ie electrical equipment) on the phone? d) other    2) How to physically locate the sales force? a) independent agents in geo regions across the country b) telesales people all sitting close to each other? c) other?    3) And how should we compensate them? What is a typical electrical equipment distributor sales compensation package , in terms of salary, commission, etc?

• Answer:

  1. Sales people with years of experience selling similar equipment    2.  Regional contract recruiters answering to your salaried Head of Recruiting 3. This depends on your sales process - who is responsible for lead generation. No matter who you hire, you need to maintain both lead volume and quality. This is especially challenging with solar. Here are a couple data points you can use for targeted list building. http://blog.leadgenius.com/solar-lead-generation/ The challenge for most commercial solar providers is not access to individual data points, it’s collecting and making sense of a jumbled heap of information at scale.