The sales hire that was never going to work
- Jun 8
- 2 min read
Smile and dial. You've probably heard of it. It's the only way to scale a business, right? Get someone who's a hunter. Willing to beat the street, hit the phones, bring in new customers. Confident, high energy, ready to go.
I talked about this very thing during a recent podcast interview with Shawna Suckow. Shawna and I are cut from the same cloth. We both understand the power of the underdog, the small businesses like yours and mine. And she has lived the frustration firsthand of trying to hire someone to take over sales when she simply could not do it all anymore. It did not work out. Sound familiar?
You can listen to the full episode here:
Here is the nugget I want you to take from that conversation: Shawna's experience is not unusual.
The more businesses I talk with about this, the more I learn have already tried (and failed, multiple times) to hire someone to take over sales.
Here is what usually happens. They find someone with experience. Confident, high energy, talks a great game in the interview. They make the hire, cross their fingers, and wait for the pipeline to fill up. Three months later they are frustrated. Six months later they are done. And they have no idea what went wrong.
Here’s what’s happening:
When most business owners picture a salesperson, they picture the corporate rep.
Someone who:
Works a territory
Dials through a list
Hits a quota
Moves to the next name
That is the smile-and-dial model. It is built on volume. Make enough calls, send enough emails, and statistically some of them will convert. It works in environments with massive lead lists, short sales cycles, and a brand that opens doors before the rep even speaks.
That isn’t your business!
People trust you and your business. Because they met you, or someone they trusted vouched for you, or they watched you show up consistently over time and decided you were the real thing.
That is not a numbers game. That is a relationship. And when you drop a smile-and-dial rep into that environment, you are not just setting them up to struggle. You are sending the wrong first impression to every prospect they touch.
Even without considering hiring a sales rep, theres a lot of pressure to conform to this methodology of selling.
I know you’ve heard it: “Relationship selling is too slow, too unpredictable, not scalable.”
I want to be the one to tell you, that advice was not written for your business.
To switch to a transactional style of selling puts you into a totally different game; one the big dogs have been playing for years and they are ruthless. They aren’t in it for the customer, they are in it to dominate. Is that the game you wanna play??
Your Trust Style shapes how you naturally connect with people, and for many business owners, that instinct IS the sales strategy, whether they have ever named it or not. The problem is not the approach. The problem is not knowing why it works.
Which is exactly what we are going to dig into in my next blog post.
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