Now I just need the sales

What I thought was one of my best qualities is turning out to be my worst nightmare; telesales. I am here looking for advice on what to do next.

I have set up a good service, a good product and the market is huge. So what is the service you might ask? You've heard it a thousand and one times before: SEO. My target audience are business owners who's website do not rank on the first page of Google for keywords that are probably the single most important for their traffic generation. For example: "Plumber Buffalo NY".

I know how to convince business owners of the direct benefits of ranking on the first page of Google for these highly converting search terms. I also know that there is a market out there and that business ARE being convinced through cold calls to buy these services and end up as very happy customers. I also have three unique key points that make me stand out from the competition (namely big SEO companies that cold call often).



So just pick up the phone and call right?

I have and I failed. Why? The language barrier. I am a Dutch native and I am also based in the Netherlands. My English is pretty good and I even get compliments from Americans along the lines of "wow, you almost have no accent". However, there is a huge difference between speaking freely and making a sales call in another language. As soon as the call actually becomes a conversation where I can't read of the script anymore, I just can't string it together. And when you're struggling to maintain a conversation, you just killed your sales opportunity.



Outsourcing sales

The first thing that came to mind to tackle this problem was just outsource sales. As I can't afford to pay much at the moment, it would have to be on a commission only basis, where the sales rep gets a percentage of the sale made. Is it a good idea to do this? The process would be something like this:

Cold call > email followup > (optional followup call) > PayPal invoice

This is what I have in mind. Does it actually work like that? Do business owners buy services like these over the phone? How many followups are needed? Meeting in person is not going to be a possibility.

I was also thinking that the independent sales rep should get his own email address like mike@mycompany.com, just so he can fully close sales on his own. Otherwise it would be lead generation and I can't pay him if sales are not made.

Now I have two more questions:

1). How many cold leads are needed for let's say 15 decent conversations with a DM? I called about 30 businesses today and surprisingly only a couple actually picked up the phone and most of those had no DM present.

2). How many independent sales reps should I hire? I've read online that you should always over-hire. However, if I'd hire 10 guys and give them 60 cold leads each, that's 600 cold leads a day which is insane and impossible for me to scrape. Generating these leads takes about 4 minutes each as I need to determine some stats about the site, business and Google keywords.


I am really looking forward to your answers. I know there are some great offline entrepreneurs and cold callers on this forum and I would really appreciate some advice on these issues.