Selling is everything! It's the customer who pays our bills. Customer is king. The rhetoric is endless, yet, so true. When you started out, naturally, you were responsible for bringing in the sales… along with growing the business, managing day to day operations, motivating the staff, crunching the numbers…. But you can't be the sole rainmaker forever! As the business expands, it needs a smart sales force to keep it growing. Therefore, building a sales force that delivers should be a top priority for any entrepreneur.

Let's face it - the idea isn't easy to get used to. After all, handling customers is a hugely important responsibility, and you may be loath to leave it to others, fearing all types of adverse consequences, or worst of all, loss of sales! Totally understandable! However, it need not necessarily turn out that way. Building a sales force is a process, and like any other, it can be developed to yield the desired result. You just need to take a few precautions.

So, once you've accepted the fact that you'll need to have other feet on the street, don't just shoot out an advertisement in the local appointment pages. Strengthening your sales force doesn't necessarily mean that you have to hire new people. Making the most of what you already have can be an even more effective way of building a sales force. See how.

It's likely that you may already have some people in your company sharing your sales responsibility, directly or otherwise – for example, the customer service team. Or perhaps, you already have a small sales staff? It gets even more interesting, if you're in the knowledge business, and can deploy a virtual sales force through an affiliate program – just check the resources to understand this better. Whatever the case may be, look at your force with a fresh perspective. Are they well equipped to handle the sales process – from prospecting to closing? If not, would some specific training do the trick? On the other hand, are they clear about what is expected of them, and by this we don't just mean a quarterly sales target! Selling a premium product that needs a consultative approach is a very different ball game from peddling high volume commodities. If you're operating in the former segment, your sales force needs to focus on building relationships as opposed to going on a prospecting rampage! Quite often, you may find that you simply need to set the house in order, rather than take on new people.

Then there's the big P – productivity. Simply put, it's just a measure of sales per salesperson. Evaluate how the numbers stack up as far as your staff is concerned. How many beat the average, and why don't the others? Again, it may just be a question of redistributing the right people in the right function, or loading the terms of compensation in favor of performance.

After the soul searching, if you still conclude that upping the head count is the only way to building a sales force in your firm, hire by all means. You have more than one option of going about it.

Start by looking within. This not only saves you the cost and time involved in locating, evaluating and integrating a new person into your team, but might also help you retain staff who are looking for a change in job profile, and are therefore likely to head out sometime soon. Deploying a person with no prior experience also means that they can bring a fresh perspective to the job.

Talk to local institutions. You can save the considerable cost of advertising, by simply placing a notice in catchment areas such as business schools, training colleges and so on. Approaching the local business council may also be a good way of finding prospective employees.

Ask around. Your professional network can be very useful when you're building a sales force. Talk to suppliers, agents and other acquaintances to see if they can recommend someone. There's obviously a very big plus to this – your candidate automatically comes with a decent reference.

If you've tried all this to no avail, well, there's always the appointment column or head hunter community to fall back on!