Hire, Train or Outsource - What to do when you have a Sales problem

Once a business owner realises something's wrong with their sales, there's a whole industry ready to sell them a solution. In this episode of The Sales Director Podcast, Jerry Meldrum gives a candid, experience-led review of the options — the ones worth real caution, and the ones that genuinely work if you go in with the right expectations.

He starts with the solutions to be wary of: telesales agencies (which can work, but only if you've already got market reputation to capitalise on, and only with real consistency — including the story of one seller who made 49 touches to a single contact before landing a conversation), lead generation agencies (where a "guaranteed" lead is rarely worth what you're charged for it), and the newer trend of AI-generated appointments and outreach, which Jerry is refreshingly blunt about.

He then covers what actually works: hiring your own outbound salesperson, proper sales training (and why most of it gets forgotten within weeks), fractional sales director support, and when hiring a full-time sales director outright is the better move. The theme throughout — diagnose the real problem first, then match the right fix to it, rather than reaching for whatever's being pitched hardest.