relpost-thumb-wrapper
close relpost-thumb-wrapper
You have a shortlist of candidates for your next sales leadership position. Choosing between candidates based on a few interview meetings is risky. You need to understand how the candidate’s leadership skills and strategic thinking will apply to your context. The solution is to invite your top 2-5 sales leadership candidates to present a sales plan for the organization.
There are a few reasons adding a sales plan presentation to the process of finding the right VP sales for your organization can help you to make a good hiring decision.
1 You Can See The Candidate In Your Company’s Context
Asking a candidate about their past sales leadership experience is helpful. For example, you can learn about their strategy to coach salespeople. However, each company’s sales situation is different.
For example, your company might have problems retaining skilled salespeople. A Harvard Business Review estimate in 2017 found that the annual turnover of salespeople can reach 27%. If high turnover is a challenge for the sales organization, mention this challenge so that the candidate’s sales plan can consider hiring and retention strategies.
2 See The Candidate In Action
For years, companies have offered free samples to consumers as a marketing strategy. It lets the customer directly experience the product. In a hiring context, some organizations give coding tests to technology professionals. It isn’t easy to simulate a leadership situation with a test. That said, seeing how each candidate thinks about the process gives you insight.
3 Speed Up The Onboarding Process
Ideally, the sales plan presentation should not be a theoretical exercise for the hiring process. Instead, encourage candidates to view the sales plan as a valuable document to help them onboard to the company. Further, the sales plan will help the candidate feel an immediate sense of ownership when they start because they will execute a strategy they have developed.
That said, a sales plan presentation represents a significant amount of effort for the candidates and the hiring company. To make the most of this process, use the following tips to fine-tune your process.
1) Outline Your Sales Plan Expectations
Providing a few simple guidelines to sales leadership job candidates will make the process unfold more smoothly.
2) Limit The Sales Plan Presentation To Your Shortlist
Sales leadership candidates are busy people, so asking them to spend several days on a sales plan presentation is a significant time investment. Asking ten candidates to prepare a sales plan presentation is probably unwise. Instead, we recommend only asking a maximum of three candidates to prepare a sales plan
3) Invite A Few Key Stakeholders
To reduce bias, it is helpful to have three people listen to the sales plan presentations and provide feedback. Specifically, invite stakeholders who are likely to interact with the new sales leader regularly, such as the CEO or President, head of marketing, and customer service. Inviting multiple stakeholders will also help to gauge how the candidate may interact with their future colleagues.
4) Use A 0-10 Scoring System
Rather than relying on highly complex scoring systems, use a simple 0-10 scoring system. Use the following definitions as a starting point:
A candidate who has met your other criteria in the hiring process and scores about 7 is well worth pursuing.
Now that you have selected a sales leader to join your organization use the sales plan document as a resource during onboarding. Provide your new hire with additional sales data like customer lists, sales statistics, and sales representative performance reviews. With this additional data, the new sales leader will be able to fine-tune their sales plan and start to grow revenue.
Managers and leaders play a critical role in setting the tone for the ethical climate in sales. Colleen Francis, good friend and author of Honesty Sells, states “Those who are in the top 10% of the sales profession have mastered the art of open, honest communication with their clients.”
Is your team in that 10%?
Are you modeling ethical behavior? Allowing for extensions on sales quotas, backdating contracts, or permitting a sleazy rep to thrive, demonstrate the philosophy that “cheating” is acceptable. Make sure the behavior you exhibit is the behavior you want modeled by your reps.
To ensure that the principles of your sales team jibes with the company philosophy, set formal ethical standards. Include an ethics clause on job descriptions, and discuss sales morality during team meetings.
Countless reps have come into our offices for interviews and quickly demonstrated that they have fabricated many of the achievements they touted. It follows that the best reps admit their failures and are honest about their experiences.
Where does it start?
Sure it starts with each and every one of us, but individual responsibility goes hand in hand with company standards. If we want our reps to be ethical, then we as sales managers have to lead by example. Be honest and open with customers, partners, and team members. You’ll be rewarded with a happy team and repeat sales.
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
relpost-thumb-wrapper
close relpost-thumb-wrapper
Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.
He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.
Meet Kelly Ruddick, Chief Spirit Officer at Peak Sales Recruiting
00:00 Intro
00:10 Remote Company Culture
00:54 Onboarding Process
1:48 Onboarding Tools
2:08 We Like to Celebrate!
2:44 Hashtag Days!
3:55 Companies Should Adopt This Role
4:12 Pointer
Reach out to the Peak Sales Team for your hiring needs: www.peaksalesrecruiting.com
relpost-thumb-wrapper
close relpost-thumb-wrapper
Success breeds success: In the end, CogencyGlobal made a single offer, which was accepted. From initial contact with Peak Sales Executive Search to the candidate’s acceptance of the offer, was under 120 days. The conversations with CogencyGlobal developed into an ongoing relationship with Peak Sales Executive Search helping to continue build out the sales and marketing team.
For most companies, growth is both desirable and difficult to manage. Too much growth can overwhelm an organization’s capacity; too little starves it of resources. Choosing the right pace and path can make or break the company.
Legal services provider CogencyGlobal had come to a fork in the road when it reached out to Peak Sales in late 2020. With offices in North America, Hong Kong and London, the New York-based firm works in jurisdictions around the world, offering compliance, statutory and registered agent services. Many of its clients are law firms, who resell the services to individual clients. These law firms are able to offer a large menu of services to their own clients while having a trusted partner, Cogency, handling critical and exacting details in the background such as formation, required corporate filings, IP, research, independent directors and managers
FIRST STEPS
The first step was for the team at Peak Sales to understand how Cogency planned to go to market and — most importantly — to understand the nature and culture of the organization.
“We spent time talking with them about the company. The CEO was very engaged with sales,” Moore notes. “It’s a familial kind of organization. The CEO knows everyone’s name, and the sales team was accustomed to having ready access to him. Now, they were going to interpose a CRO between sales and the CEO, so that was a big change, and they knew they had to get it right.”
Armed with that understanding, the Peak Sales team got to work.
CASTING THE NET
“We didn’t want to go after someone from one of Cogency’s competitors,” Moore explains. “Instead, we focused our efforts on someone who was selling similar kinds of services into big legal firms, from a company that would have a real CRO themselves.”
As a world capital of law and finance, New York is a fertile ground for hunting legal sales talent. The first round turned up about 55 candidates. How to screen such a large pool? Peak Sales had its filters ready.
SURFACING THE GEMS
“We use psychometrics to help understand candidates’ natural preferences” Moore says. “In this case, the cultural fit was very important. We needed someone with the leadership experience to build out the sales organization and improve efficiencies, who would also fit into their culture seamlessly.”
Having found dozens of potential candidates with the sales leadership skills and right resumés, they dove into understanding each one’s management philosophy: how to blend into the culture of a new workplace, how they chose to lead their teams and how they coached and mentored their staff.
That process narrowed the field to six optimal candidates. Those six were all technically qualified; they had the skills, background and experience needed to tackle the new CRO job and were a good fit for Cogency’s culture.
FINAL SELECTION
“There was good diversity in that pool of six,” Moore continues. “They had different backgrounds, skill sets and tenures. Cogency also asked us to include candidates who had worked for smaller, nimble companies. All of the candidates were people we felt would do very well, each bringing different strengths to the table. That allowed Cogency to pick the candidates whose strengths most aligned with strategic growth plans.”
With a set of potential CROs in front of them, Cogency began its own evaluations. “The first two rounds checked off all the professional boxes,” Moore says, “followed by an in-person lunch to get a feel for the cultural fit. Their eventual choice was someone who strongly mirrored culture and had the ability to push the sales organization forward.
SUCCESS BREEDS SUCCESS
In the end, Cogency made a single offer, which was accepted. From initial contact with Peak Sales to the candidate’s acceptance of the offer was under 90 days.
“The candidate started with Cogency in mid-December and is onboarding into the organization extremely well.” Moore notes.
As often happens when Peak Sales places a leader, the relationship continues, and discussions move to further build out the sales organization in support the new leader.
“In these cases, we have a leg up because we’ve already completed the background work of understanding the organization, how they are structured, where they are headed and what they need. We become a true strategic partner with the ability to help them shape the future of the sales organization beyond purely recruiting.”
Meet Ryan Thornton, Operations Manager at Peak Sales Recruiting
00:00 Intro
00:14 Best Practices of Remote Training
00:47 Onboarding Material
1:29 Structure in Remote Onboarding
2:27 Updating Training Materials
03:19 Timeline for New Employees to Get Acclimatized
03:45 Measuring Success
Reach out to the Peak Sales Team for your hiring needs: www.peaksalesrecruiting.com
relpost-thumb-wrapper
close relpost-thumb-wrapper
Meet Zain Al Jaber, Client Manager at Peak Sales Recruiting
00:00 Intro
00:20 Best Practices for Interviewing Remotely – Three Key Tips for Remote Interviews:
02:15 How to structure the interview process in order to gain the needed information from candidates?
02:32 HELPFUL TIP
02:50 Questions to ask candidates to ensure they have done their homework
Reach out to the Peak Sales Team for your hiring needs: www.peaksalesrecruiting.com
relpost-thumb-wrapper
close relpost-thumb-wrapper
Meet Kyle Fletcher, Vice President Delivery at Peak Sales Recruiting
00:00 Intro
00:27 Best Practices of Hiring Remotely
01:24 Evaluating talent: Testing an individual’s ability to work remotely while interviewing is important, but even more so critical is to evaluate and understand if someone has been successful in a previous remote setting.
02:14 Setting Up Your Potential Hire for Success: Internally do you offer the proper support and tools? Ensure a new hire feels a part of the team and will ramp up quickly in a remote environment.
03:39 Remote Onboarding Tips & Tricks: Make sure you have a full onboarding program in the first few weeks of settling in. Find out what we do at Peak Sales Recruiting from Day 1
04:44 A few key takeaways
Reach out to the Peak Sales Team for your hiring needs: www.peaksalesrecruiting.com
relpost-thumb-wrapper
close relpost-thumb-wrapper
Your company sells a service to other businesses and you need a strong salesperson. So you turn to the usual source: Job boards. No doubt, you’ll get plenty of candidates. Unfortunately, most of them will be people whose experience is in selling products. In our experience, many highly successful product sellers struggle when selling services.
The nature of product salespeople is that they’re hunters: They may be very good at tracking down potential clients and closing deals. However, product sales can be all about comparing features, benefits and price against a competitor with a similar product.
If you’re selling a service — especially a complex technology service — you’re not selling something the prospect can immediately see and touch. You’re selling a solution to the client’s problem.
All salespeople want to get a return on their investment of time, and as their employer, so do you. Product salespeople can be transactional, chasing deals that can give them a quick win. Selling services on the other hand often requires the patience to build relationships, and to see the bigger picture even if it’s 12 to 18 months away.
Service salespeople must be willing to invest time in that longer sales cycle. To sell a complex solution to a client’s problem, the salesperson first has to understand the problem in detail. Some salespeople are very good passive listeners, taking in all of the information the prospect offers. But to extract everything needed to properly scope a solution, you need someone who’s skilled at directed listening — they need the ability to direct their conversations with the prospect to get all of the information they need.
In addition to directed listening, it’s crucial that the salesperson search out everyone on the prospect’s side who will have input on the decision to buy. Especially for software services, people within the prospect’s IT department — who may be two or three levels below the director who initiated the conversation — will get involved. The salesperson must engage with those stakeholders directly to understand their needs and their potential objections in order to close the deal.
Candidates who come to you with large, well-known corporations on their resumes deserve a look, but don’t be blinded by the notoriety of their former employers. Especially for a start-up or a company pivoting into a new market, someone from a big-company background may not be self-starting and self-managing. They may have been in a series of positions where they were fed qualified leads and in turn passed them on to a sales engineer to work out the details. If you’re expecting them to find their own prospects and work the deal all the way through to implementation, they may not have the experience — or tenacity — you need.
Everyone you interview will tell you they obliterated their quota every year. And those big company people will tell you they can do it all, from soup to nuts. We want to know about the sales process at those big companies, We ask questions of the candidate and can network with that company’s former salespeople and their competitors to find out what their sales process really is. Sometimes we find that the candidate may not have done their own prospecting for years.
If you post on a job board, it’s a given that you’ll get resumes from people who match your requirements. Here’s where experienced recruiters prove their value.
Beyond the requirements, it’s critical to find someone who will fit in to your organization and succeed. We spend a lot of time up front understanding our client’s culture and what kinds of people have been successful in their environment.
Especially for small-to-mid-sized European companies looking to break into the North American market we’ve found that cultural fit is essential to success. Companies headquartered in Norway or Denmark for example find the business culture in the U.S. is very different, and that can pose challenges for both the company and the new hire. These companies need someone who’s comfortable working with thin resources and with colleagues who have a very different view of business. When you add in the fact that headquarters is six to nine time zones away, we find that excellent communication skills and a commitment to use them are key.
When we screen candidates, we take culture into account and do an in-depth assessment of their character, their personality, their work style and how they like to be managed to make sure they’re a fit for our client’s needs and their organization.
To hire someone who can successfully sell services we start by verifying their skills. We delve into likes and dislikes, into common sales situations and their reactions, into past victories and defeats. We get a firm fix on their personality traits. And we spend the time up front to know our client’s culture. When we present a candidate, we’re confident they can be successful in that company. Remember, even mediocre salespeople still have the skill to sell themselves. Separating the pretenders from the performers takes skill and experience — and that’s where we stake our reputation, hire after hire.
Have a close look at the best sales teams—the ones that are committed to hitting quota year-over-year and deliver profi
table revenue? What do you observe?
A team of rock star sales reps, which has been built using meticulous and objective recruitment strategy. To put it succinctly, the first step to building a first-class sales team and finding success starts with recruiting the right people who can get you to your numbers.
This year, however, has changed the way we hire for sales. All across the globe, a plethora of organizations will attempt to reinvent, revive, and enhance their sales processes. Since these transformations can lead to the future of sales in an organization, they cannot afford to waste time, effort, and funds without having the right sales team onboard. Needless to say, the sales division needs to be on point.
But, finding high-quality employees that ‘fit the bill’ is not always easy.
This is where companies like Peak Sales Recruiting are changing the narrative in sales recruiting—with science.
Peak Sales Recruiting specializes in providing B2B sales recruiting services for companies that need to quickly and confidently recruit an entire sales team or sales leader. The company is squarely focused on hiring elite salespeople and sales leaders that bring additional value to firms in the technology, professional services, telecom, healthcare, manufacturing, and industrial sectors. Be it recruiting an account executive, sales manager, senior sales leader, VPs, or an entire sales team, Peak Sales Recruiting meets every requirement seamlessly. In doing so, Peak Sales Recruiting brings to the table its scientific, structured, and proven methodology that is configured to each client’s unique hiring requirements and combines detailed role profiling. “Evaluating sales candidates can be extremely challenging, which, if not done right, can lead to making bad sales hires. As a result, companies look for a true partner that can mutually engage and invest in creating success for them. We provide a highly flexible and scalable model that can fit with the requirements of any organization at any given time—to help them get the sales talent needed to drive revenue and growth in this post-pandemic era,” states Chris Donnelly, VP of Sales, Peak Sales Recruiting.
Touching upon the two main aspects of sales team recruitment, Donnelly stresses that only a handful of organizations are able to generate the numbers of qualified, interested, and top-quality candidates as well as evaluate them. For instance, many organizations are adept at generating and increasing candidate flow but often fall short in effectively evaluating these candidates. Evaluation includes differentiating between the performer and the pretender, interviewing and assessing sales talent, onboarding, and more. Similarly, other organizations may have the ability to assessing candidates but lack the expertise in generating the numbers of qualified and top-quality candidates. At this juncture, Peak Sales Recruiting acts as a true partner and helps its clients evaluate the right talent for the organization and attract the needed numbers of top sales performers to scale the team, thus filling in the gaps and fortifying their existing strengths. Moreover, the company presents a pricing scale that can be quickly adopted by any organization in dire need of a recruiting partner.
A Unique Recruitment Methodology
Treading on the philosophy of being a true partner to its clients, Peak Sales Recruiting empowers organizations with a four-step scientific recruiting methodology to help them recruit the talent needed to meet their aggressive revenue targets.
Determine Corporate Objectives: The four-step process starts with culture mapping as an organization’s corporate culture may differ from its sales culture. Often approached to improve sales culture or frame a sales culture to highlight different skill sets within an organization, Peak Sales Recruiting ensures that it understands corporate objectives and how the sales leaders or account managers fit in and align with those corporate goals. Peak Sales Recruiting helps organizations in hiring the candidates who not only have the required skillsets but also fit into the client’s organizational culture and make it more vibrant.
The uniqueness of Peak Sales Recruiting stems from the fact that it is owned and operated by highly experienced salespeople, which allows the team to deeply understand and resolve the issues while recruiting the right candidate. Putting theory into practice, there are numerous success stories that Peaks Sales Recruiting has scripted for its clients. In one instance, an eminent European manufacturer of a highly specialized product that got newly accepted in the US approached Peak Sales Recruiting for building a sales organization. The challenge was finding a leader who has acquired knowledge of the existing market, recognition, passion and was comfortable dealing with large incumbent competitors. The client was looking for a sales leader who had the skill to assess the needs of the sales organization in the early stages and make the necessary connections to do the groundwork and kick-start the business. Peak Sales Recruiting hired the right sales leader for the client and also helped to build an entire sales team.
In yet another impressive feat, Peak Sales Recruiting resolved the challenges for a client amidst the pandemic. The client required 60 qualified candidates a month but could not analyze the right talent for a particular role. Peak Sales Recruiting was able to help the client with 60 candidates per month in Italy, France, and other regions where the impact of coronavirus was very high.
Backed by rich sales expertise, focused team approach, comprehensive assessment, and value-added services, Peak Sales Recruiting has proven its excellence in driving fulfilling results for its clients, time and again. For the future, the company will continue building on what it has learned over the years and provide the clients with the right candidates. Peak Sales Recruiting has a vibrant enterprise practice and works with large organizations, like ServiceNow, building a large sales team. Similarly, the company can help any organization irrespective of the scale; it can provide 30 sales representatives for a call center along with an enterprise sales leader, key accounts manager or Senior Executive Sales Leader who can help boost the revenue in an organization.
While the startup industry seeks seasoned leaders to reach the next level, Peak Sales Recruiting fulfills these requirements with its rich expertise and experience. “We will continue helping firms of all sizes to find the key sales performer. As the market has experienced a significant shift during this pandemic, we are extremely busy with huge inflow of clients as they look for partners to recruit ideal candida
tes amid this crisis,” concludes Donnelly.
