In the hypercompetitive industry of sales, a motivated sales force can mean the difference between hitting targets and missing them by a mile.
In fact, a recent Gallup study found that an unmotivated workforce costs companies 300 billion dollars in lost productivity each year. Even the best sellers, with self-motivation and resiliency built into their DNA, still need a reminder of what they’re working toward and why.
Motivation is key to driving top performers and developing the junior ones. And, research supports this notion — organizations with engaged employees outperform those with low employee engagement by 202 percent.
So, what can you do to motivate your sales team? There are a number of tactics to fuel your team’s fire and keep them on track to achieving aggressive revenue targets. But to keep things simple, we narrowed it down to our top 10.
Here are 10 ways to motivate your sales team to crush their numbers this quarter:
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In today’s talent market, voluntary turnover rates are at an all time high. With the average turnover rate across all sales industries being 11.5 percent – software sales holding the top spot at 15.3 percent turnover – it’s more crucial than ever to create a work environment your sales team doesn’t want to leave.
With a record setting 51 percent of today’s workforce stating they’re watching for new opportunities regularly, Human Resources (HR) Leaders need to improve and maintain the aspects of their organization that top performing salespeople value most. These aspects include competitive compensation structures, training programs, opportunities for professional growth, flexible work location and schedule, and vacation time.
But there is another tactic HR Leaders can leverage to reduce sales force turnover and that is sales team building activities – both one-on-one and group based.
In this article we list and discuss the five most effective sales team building activities and how they help foster a work environment that builds employee loyalty, improves job satisfaction rates, and reduces voluntary turnover.
Here is a list of the five most effective sales team building activities HR Leaders can use to reduce turnover rates:
1. Conduct “Stay Interviews”
Stay interviews are an effective way of gaining insight into what your employees enjoy most about their role and the organization, and on the flipside, what they don’t like.
It is a proactive approach designed to address any internal issues that may cause voluntary turnover, versus a reactive approach, which involves conducting an exit interview once a sales rep decides to leave.
This one-on-one sales team building activity works as a trust fall exercise to keep a workforce engaged and on your team. It develops trust with your sales reps over time as you take steady action to follow through on promises of improvement. Some of these improvements could be with company culture, role attributes, company leadership, etc.
“It’s a relationship review. What’s your relationship to the company, the project team and your manager and what is within our purview to do to make those better? Stay interviews encourage managers to sit down and have a structured talk with their teams about what works and what doesn’t work for them.”
As HR Leaders build trust with their sales teams, sales reps are more likely to proactively share underlying concerns. As long as their HR Leader follows through with necessary action, they will continue to work with HR to improve their role and the organization.
The success of these interviews is dependent on the interviewer’s ability to remain open-minded and use both the positive and negative feedback to improve employee experience and employer brand.
For existing employees, conduct your stay interviews once per year during a slow business period. Conduct them all within a few weeks of each other so you can then take what you’ve learned and make any necessary changes.
For new employees, conducting stay interviews after their first 30 days and then again at 90 days is recommended.
When conducting the stay interview, questions should be broken down into three categories:
1. General questions to break the ice and gain insight into the employee’s feelings about your organization.
2. Questions relating to the employee’s role.
3. Questions that provide insight into their level of satisfaction with compensation and company perks.
You may also want to include time at the end of the interview for employees to include any information you may have missed, or to provide any additional suggestions.
Our list of stay interview questions:
Examples of general questions:
Do you believe that your work has meaning? How can we work together to make your work more meaningful?
Is the organization providing you with opportunities to grow and develop as a person and as a professional? What would improve your opportunities?
Do you feel that you have the necessary control over your job to perform most successfully and productively?
What type of feedback would you like to receive about your performance that you are not receiving now? From me? From coworkers?
Do you respect the amount and kind of leadership that you receive from the senior managers?
Examples of role specific questions:
Do you believe that your work has meaning? How can we work together to make your work more meaningful?
Is the organization providing you with opportunities to grow and develop as a person and as a professional? What would improve your opportunities?
Do you feel that you have the necessary control over your job to perform most successfully and productively?
What type of feedback would you like to receive about your performance that you are not receiving now? From me? From coworkers?
Do you respect the amount and kind of leadership that you receive from the senior managers?
Examples of sales specific questions:
Do you believe your sales goals are attainable? What can we do to make them more attainable?
Is the organization providing you with enough sales support to do your job successfully? What kind of support would help you in your role?
Do you feel that your goals are clearly set? How can we work together to create clear goals?
What kind of feedback would you like to receive from your manager during your performance review? What can we do to make performance reviews more enjoyable and effective?
Do you respect the amount and kind of sales leadership that you receive from senior management? What can we do to improve our leadership efforts?
Examples of compensation and perks questions:
Do you think your compensation is in alignment with the local market?
What would you like to see in the employee benefits package that is not currently offered?
When you consider the employee activities, events, parties, company sponsored sports teams, company paid race entries, company provided meals and snacks, and family activities, which would you like to see continued?
Please note: The stay interview questions are available for download at the end of the article.
Do stay interviews really work and are they worth the effort?
One organization that has experienced success implementing stay interviews is NOVO 1.
After implementing stay interviews with over one thousand employees, their voluntary turnover rate immediately decreased by 20 percent.
Mary Murcott – Founder and President at Performance Transformations Inc. and former President and CEO at NOVO 1, states:
“We build walls between us and employees by asking opinions in anonymous surveys which protect us from looking in their eyes and hearing their words. Maybe down deep we have a fear that they will ask for something and we’ll have to say no. We can’t become a great company unless we ask, listen, and then consider every reasonable request.”
2. Have collaborative huddles
A collaborative huddle is a group-based sales team building activity that serves a different purpose than a sales meeting. While sales meetings often include updates about:
Previous sales activity (number of meetings, cold calls, presentations, etc)
Pipeline status
Goal status
Deal status
Scheduled sales activities
A collaborative huddle addresses mistakes and obstacles your sales reps are presented with. And your team pools their talent and skills to find a solution.
Collaborative huddles are an important sales team building activity because a continuous obstacle that goes unaddressed can cause a sales rep to become unmotivated and disengaged. As a result, they may look for opportunities elsewhere.
Some obstacles include:
A client who’s hesitant to work with them
Going up against a big name competitor to win a deal
Issues penetrating a target account
An unsatisfied or disgruntled client
Also, two heads are in fact better than one, according to Scientific America. People perform better and make more intelligent decisions when they put their heads together, versus working alone. It allows open communication and collaboration to address challenges that sales reps may not be able to solve on their own.
“An idea is a network,” says Steven Johnson during his TED Talk titled: Where Good Ideas Come From. “I’ve been kind of on this quest to investigate this question of where good ideas come from. What are the environments that lead to unusual levels of innovation, unusual levels of creativity? I’ve started calling it the “liquid network,” where you have lots of different ideas that are together, different backgrounds, different interests, jostling with each other, bouncing off each other — that environment is, in fact, the environment that leads to innovation.”
To implement this sales team building activity, HR Leaders need to ensure their sales leaders are scheduling regular meetings so sales reps can collaborate on their issues.
Advise your sales leaders that these huddles can be held on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis, and can be combined with their regularly held sales meetings to save time. We recommend setting aside 20-30 minutes at the end of the sales meetings to allow your team to collaborate on their issues. Depending on the size of the sales team, your sales leaders may need to schedule more or less time.
3. Create a team-based selling environment
A team-based selling environment is where a group of salespeople work towards a common sales goal. Each rep is closely connected with their team members and combine their knowledge, experience and skills to prospect and develop new business as a group.
Creating a team based selling environment is beneficial because top performing salespeople work to engage with their colleagues and coordinate their abilities to hit their targets.
With the amount of sales teams who practice team-selling increasing from 22 percent to 49 percent, team selling now accounts for 44 percent of the overall impact on a company’s profitability.
This means that HR Leaders have the opportunity to not only increase employee engagement and decrease sales turnover, but also increase profitability through team selling.
A large media company saw great success in a team-based selling environment. They invested in an internal social-networking platform with a goal of getting their sales reps to exchange information about complex accounts. As a result, cross-selling increased, sales cycles decreased and conversion rates went up.
Here are some examples of sales team building activities HR Leaders can use to create a team-selling environment:
Create a scoreboard
Having a scoreboard does more than just keep track of how your sales reps are doing against their targets. They foster healthy competition amongst the sales team and they help your sales leaders understand what aspects of their sales process are working and what’s not.
This sales team building activity is another way HR Leaders can be proactive about making necessary process changes to keep sales reps loyal and engaged.
For example, your sales leader notices there is a drastic difference between the amount of presentations given and the amount of deals won. HR Leaders can address the issue by helping to facilitate workshops and improve on presentation and follow-up skills.
“Sales success requires great salespeople in a great system. You can get by with one or the other, but top performers can only do so much with a broken process and most likely won’t stick around”
When creating the scoreboard, make sure your sales leaders hone in on what metrics are important and over what period of time they will be measured. The scoreboard should include each sales rep’s name, their specific targets and their actual results.
Examples of metrics your sales leaders may include:
Individual quotas for each sales rep (if you do a team quota, list the overall target and the revenue each sales rep has generated to achieve the collective goal)
Level of activity (number of cold calls, sales meetings, trade shows, etc)
Number of Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs)
Pipeline size
Number of deals closed (new and existing business, or a combined target)
Some tools your sales leaders can use to create the scoreboard include:
Implement gamification
Gamification is used to describe the application of traditional game elements to other activities to encourage engagement and drive. In a selling environment, HR Leaders can use it it to encourage collaboration and healthy competition amongst the team.
While gamification is often associated with younger generations – such as millennials – it can be implemented and used to motivate all generations. Top performing salespeople are driven individuals who have a desire to compete and win. Gamification fulfills these desires.
One organization in particular that has had success after implementing gamification into their selling environment is Stanley Black & Decker. Their goal was to bring in gamification to drive results with their more seasoned salespeople, especially those who tended to resist new technology.
The results they achieved were a 29 percent increase in pipeline activity, a 43 percent increase in documented opportunities and 70 percent of employees showed engagement.
Before choosing the kind of gamification to implement, help your sales leaders determine their goals by having them think about this statement:
If our sales team did more of X, or did X more effectively, we would hit our targets this quarter/year.
Once the goal is established, determine what gamification is most effective in achieving your sales leader’s desired results.
Some gamification options to provide your sales leaders include:
1. Leveraging their peers
To encourage collaboration on your sales team, create a system awarding points when sales tips are exchanged. It facilitates a team-selling environment while aiding reps in achieving their individual targets.
2. Taking a new product to market
If your sales team isn’t talking about the new product with their clients, create a leadership board that rewards reps when they pitch it. HelloWorld used this concept and created a hashtag that was logged into Salesforce by the sales reps. As a result, they saw the product sales increase by 230 percent and the product pitches doubled.
3. Leverage your sales process to increase win rates
Collaborate with your sales leaders to analyze the sales process and determine what stage holds the highest win rate. Once that is determined, run a contest that gives points once the sales reps move an opportunity into that stage. This not only advances opportunities but it also helps keep your client data accurate.
4. Selling a particular product or service
If you have a product or service you want sold quickly – perhaps sales for this particular product are down or you have a new product launching – create a contest that awards points every time a sales rep successfully sells said product or service.
4. Facilitate side projects outside of their role responsibilities
Using side projects as a sales team building activity is a way for HR Leaders to increase their sales reps’ sense of purpose within the organization – which fosters loyalty and decreases voluntary turnover.
They allow your salespeople to feel like their role has a greater impact on the company as a whole. In fact, 78 percent of millennial employees say it’s important to have side projects as another area of growth opportunity.
“…most people do not know how to bring their ideas to fruition, they might be open to developing their idea with their employer. This will help the employer keep a hand on what is going on with their employees and how they are feeling, as well as potentially lead to interesting business opportunities,”
When considering what kinds of side projects to offer your sales team, think about these areas of the project:
The format in which it will be given
The time they will be allocated
The results you would like to achieve.
Debbie Madden, CEO and cofounder of Stride – an agile software development consultancy, based in New York City – explains that for 13-years she has been holding quarterly open space meetings where the entire company comes together for a whole day to discuss new ideas:
“Almost every single cool thing at Stride has come out of our Open Space meetings. It’s not a hackathon, so we’re not creating ‘products.’ We’re creating policy. [An] amazing idea that came out of a Stride Open Space is our monthly Lean Coffee. We talk as an entire company about the single most important issue facing our team at the time. The issue is self selected and voted on by all of Stride.”
Some projects you could facilitate include:
1. Peer mentorship opportunities
Going through the onboarding experience can be daunting and is filled with the pressures of ramping up. Tenured sales reps have knowledge about the company, its products and services, its clients, and best practices.
HR Leaders can have tenured sales reps provide lessons on products and services, sales best practices, and much more. The new sales reps could also shadow the tenured sales reps in the field as they move through their sales cycles.
Having the tenured sales reps teach the new sales reps bridges the knowledge gap, decreases ramp up time, and offers the tenured sales reps opportunity to improve their leadership skills.
Salespeople are busy and often so focused on hitting their targets that they don’t have time for side projects. However, encouraging them to practice “two-second lean” allows them to work on a new project and decrease the time needed for everyday tasks.
These “two-second lean” projects could include simplifying the way information is inputted into the CRM, decreasing travel time, or simplifying how expenses are submitted.
3. Professional certifications
Earning a professional certification not only validates you sales rep’s expertise but it also gives your clients a higher level of confidence in your business. Your sales team will become more engaged since you are invested in their professional development and helping them take the next steps in their career.
Companies like Microsoft, IDC, CompTIA and Novell have experienced increases in productivity due to their professional certifications preparing employees for their day-to-day challenges.
Some professional certifications you could offer include sales methodology training, seminars for presentation skills, leadership skills, etc.
5. Have a Corporate Community Initiative (CCI)
Companies that encourage community involvement not only distinguish themselves from their competitors, but also see the benefits of happier employees. Community involvement as a sales team building activity shows your sales reps that their role serves a larger purpose.
In a recent study done by Deloitte and Points of Light Institute, 74 percent of the white collar workers who participated in their CCI stated that it had a positive effect on their careers.
In addition:
83 percent of professional women reported that their CCI developed their leadership skills
78 percent reported improvements in their communication skills
Over 50 percent reported improvement in other workplace skills.
Below are some examples of companies who leverage CCIs to develop their employees’ skills and grow their employee bond:
Dow Corning
An employee was sent to Bangalore, India to participate in Dow’s international volunteer program. This program sends employees on a pro bono basis to work with NGOs and entrepreneurs in emerging countries.
One employee, an electrical apprentice, worked for four weeks with a local community and a team to improve the manufacturing process at Sustaintech – a local clean cookstove producer.
Throughout the experience, this employee learned leadership, problem solving, and out-of-box thinking skills. After returning to work, she stated she was excited about her future with Dow and hoped to move up in the company in the future.
Team One
Employees from Team One’s Atlanta office take over for the staff at the Atlanta Children’s Shelter one day every month. The volunteers look after the children so the shelter staff can hold their monthly meetings. The volunteers also help with classroom decorating and provide creative projects for the children.
An Account Coordinator stated the volunteering has deepened her understanding of the advertising industry and corporate philanthropy. She attributes her professional development to the volunteer program and gained valuable skills to help her work effectively with coworkers and clients.
Doing these activities with remote employees
More and more salespeople are doing their job remotely and at different times of the day. From 2012 to 2016 the number of remote employees rose by four points, taking it from 39 percent to 43 percent.
This means that employees have fewer face-to-face interactions with their managers and coworkers, and they’re communicating more through e-mail, instant messaging and conference calls.
To ensure HR Leaders are conducting effective sales team building activities with remote employees, we recommend using video conference software. Video conferencing encourages both participation and more face-to-face interaction.
Video conferencing is particularly useful for collaboration meetings, team-selling activities and side-projects.
Some video conferencing tools you can leverage include:
With CCIs and stay interviews, bring your remote employees into the office once or twice per year. As stay interviews are done annually and during slow business periods, bringing them in for a face-to-face meeting yields better results.
Decrease Your Voluntary Employee Turnover
Using sales team building activities not only decreases voluntary turnover rates but also increases employee loyalty – which is the heart of successful companies, according to Entrepreneur.
The more employee loyalty HR Leaders facilitate, the more the sales reps will go above and beyond to help their organization improve and succeed. Loyal employees share their expertise, they boost morale, and they consistently hit their sales targets.
Keeping your sales team engaged and feeling positively about your organization will help ensure your turnover rate stays to a minimum and your top sales talent continues to generate revenue and profitability for your organization.
Download your list of Stay Interview Questions here.
Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.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.
It’s the talent on your sales team that will determine your fate when you’re working to hit aggressive targets and achieve your company’s future goals. And finding top performers is the difference between your company’s victory or failure in competitive markets.
To find these top performers faster, you need to incorporate quantitative and objective candidate assessment tools into your recruiting process.
Specifically, sales assessment tests represent a unique and effective way to inject objectivity into your screening process and improve quality of hire rates.
In this article, we explain why sales assessment tests are effective recruiting tools and how they improve the screening process.
Why You Need to Use Tests When Recruiting Salespeople
Salespeople are driven individuals, who are competitive in nature, resilient, and have strong desires to influence others. Because these traits are common in top performers, yet are commonly misjudged, they challenge an interviewer’s ability to distinguish between A-players and average or below average sellers.
“Sales assessment tests, are a good way to pick out the candidates who are best for the job. We use these tests to figure out what kind of person they are in the workplace, how much time they put into a task, and how smart they are in real life situations. Using these tests has helped us tremendously and since implementing them, we consistently end up with our ideal candidates.”
With executives admitting to making the wrong hiring decision 25 percent of the time, additional steps must be taken to ensure only the highest quality salespeople are hired.
Assessment tests help interviewers overcome implicit and unintended recruiting challenges and their negative implications, such as a involuntary turnover rates.
So why is it that great salespeople are so hard to identify? Here’s two simple reasons:
Salespeople are difficult to assess. They’re skilled in presenting themselves in the way the interviewer expects. Their sales careers have depended upon their ability to quickly develop relationships, find common grounds, and persuade prospects to buy what they’re selling. Applying and interviewing for a new role is no different. They are simply selling a product they are the ultimate experts in, themselves.
It’s common for organizations to often be unclear about what they want. They understand they want top performing salespeople, however, they don’t understand what top performance means for the specific role. Having a generalized understanding causes bad sales hires. Having a thorough understanding of the specific skills, experience, and DNA required for success, improves quality of hire ratios.
But the task of objectively evaluating the performance potential of a candidate poses unique challenges for Human Resources (HR) Leaders due to 50 percent of sales reps today consistently below their targets. With an annual quota for an outside sales rep averaging 2.7 million dollars, the costs of bad hiring adds up quickly. If they’re generating 50 percent of their quota, the lost revenue is 1.35 million dollars per rep annually.
The average percentage of salespeople that achieved one hundred percent of annual quota last year varied by type of industry:
The Negative Impacts & Costs of a Traditional Screening Process
It’s common for companies to leverage their market experience when making sales hiring decisions. This decision involves using gut feeling, which is a subjective and emotional form of assessment. It is often used to examine candidates and find similar qualities to their other top performers. However, using gut feeling to find these similar qualities results in identifying similar emotional traits based on bias, versus identifying objective, skill-based qualities.
With methods like this being subjective and unstandardized, they are unreliable and unable to accurately predict an employee’s potential success.
PredictiveHire, a SaaS analytics solutions provider, observed that one of their clients could have saved 1.1 million dollars by using an assessment tool. This client had hired 80 people over 12 months.
Without using a sales assessment test, it cost them an additional 800,000 thousand dollars for time required to screen and interview the 80 candidates.
But only 29 percent of business leaders today are leveraging these emerging technology options. An even smaller 6 percent think their hiring process works well for them. These statistics show missed opportunities to accurately assess and hire top sales talent.
Sales assessment tests stop companies from merely checking credentials and move them towards confirming a candidate’s skillset and psychological preferences, in turn increasing quality of hire.
There’s a Domino Effect When Bad Hires are Made…
Making a bad sales hire is a domino effect. Making one bad sales hire can lead to many more, in turn costing your company millions.
Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, estimated that his own bad sales hires have cost Zappos over one hundred million dollars.
The effects of a bad sales hire trickles into other aspects of an organization; not just top-line revenue. Having a “bad apple” in your organization is contagious and causes top performing sales reps to feel disengaged. There is also the risk of causing employee burnout due to top performers having to pick up the slack and compensate for “bad apples”.
An organization who successfully focused their efforts into only bringing in the greatest talent is Instagram. In 2013, Instagram had 13 employees, yet they sold their company to Facebook for 1 billion dollars.
While their product wooed Facebook, Instagram’s success underlines the impact “homerun” employees have on a company’s success.
What is a Sales Assessment Test?
Sales assessment tests are an objective, data-driven evaluation technique removing intuition, gut, and heart driven decisions from the talent acquisition process. In other words, it’s a simple and easy way to avoid making bad sales hiring decisions and increase your quality of hire.
Experts agree that measuring quality of hire is needed both pre and post-hire. Since recruitment quality measures directly correlate with post-hire performance metrics, sales assessment tests used pre-hire aid in determining quality of hire measurements post-hire.
These tests properly calculate pre-hire metrics, which talent acquisition leaders can later use to hone in on specific hiring problem sources and eliminate them. Based on the data gathered from hiring and case studies, and by analyzing employee data, sales assessment tests come in many forms and can be customized to suit your specific environment.
Assessments are typically done via online portals and are delivered to all candidates who apply. Employers then decide on the candidates that will come in for in-person interviews.
Some assessment types include:
Psychometric Assessments Examines a candidate’s sales DNA and unquantifiable traits to gauge their odds of being successful. Here at Peak Sales Recruiting, we leverage a software called DISC Profile, which is a non-judgmental psychometric assessment to give us insight into candidates’ behavioral differences.
Cognitive Tests Measures a candidate’s reasoning, memory, reading comprehension, and knowledge of a specific role function.
Simulation Tests Includes performance tests, role-playing, moral judgment, work samples, and job previews. It tests candidates in real life work environment situations. Unilever is known for using this software in the last step of their recruitment process.
The sales and talent leaders who have a thorough understanding of the vacant role they are looking to fill, obtain the most use and value out of their evaluations.
Having an understanding of the vacant role ensures that the assessment results you gather from prospective candidates will be in line with your ideal candidate profile.
Keep in mind the assessment results you receive from candidates should account for 20 percent of your overall hiring decision. Your decision should also include data from their application, resume, in-person interview, reference checks, etc. These tests do not function as an all-encompassing recruiting tool used to replace other stages. It is an additional measure to save you time and assist in making accurate sales hires.
Sales Assessment Test’s Potential Impact on Reducing Hiring Bias
Sales assessment tests help HR Leaders predict a potential sales hire’s on-the-job performance and retainability. Additionally, these tests reduce hiring risk factors like implicit bias.
This concept refers to people’s ability to harbor bias outside of their awareness or control. NeuroLeadership Institute refers to the mind as an iceberg and while our conscious mind seems to command our brain activity, in reality the vast majority of what’s going on in our brain is below the surface. This is where the following biases can occur:
The Halo Effect: When the interviewer lets a positive fact overshadow everything else the candidate says and/or does.
The Horn Effect: When the interviewer lets a negative fact overshadow everything else the candidate says and/or does.
The Stereotyping Bias: Forming a snap conclusion about someone based on their specific characteristics, such as race, religion, age, gender, etc.
The Contrast Effect: When you interview a stronger candidate after a weaker candidate, causing them to appear more qualified than they are.
The “Similar to Me” Effect: The interviewer developing a positive opinion of the candidate due to the candidate having a similar mindset or personality.
With many HR Leaders relying on human judgment in their recruitment process, sales hiring biases have become common.
Lauren Riviera, a professor of management and sociology at Northwestern University, says:
“Hiring now resembles choosing a romantic partner more than an employee.”
A bias that has had startling effects on the tech market is motherhood. A recent study evaluated two equally qualified candidates, one of which was a mother in the tech market, and found the following results:
Women who did measure up to these higher criterion were considered bad mothers for being dedicated to their work.
An example of the success behind confirming skills through tests and avoiding hiring bias is within symphony orchestras. Orchestras were traditionally dominated by white men. Women accounted for less than 5 percent of the musicians in all top five symphony orchestras in the United States.
That is until the blind audition policy was implemented in the 1970s. To counter bias and avoid missing out on top talent, they put up screens to conceal the musician’s appearance.
The Results: Women were selected 25 to 46 percent more often
Applying the symphony orchestra’s success story to sales recruiting, unconscious bias is filtering out top salespeople. Removing hiring bias can increase the number of top performers hired by 25 to 46 percent. Comparable to the symphony orchestra increasing their count of female musicians.
To further see what kind of unintentional biases you harbor, Project Implicit developed a study to provide further insight. With over 17 million implicit biases measured, they have participants answer questions about different words and phrases. This helps them determine the negative and positive connections people have.
Success From The Frontlines
One company in particular has reported success through using these assessments and technologies.
Unilever — a global consumer products organization — is combining video interviewing and gaming to create a digital, four-step, recruiting process.
These four steps include:
1. Candidates complete a short online form associated with their LinkedIn accounts. There is no need to upload or provide a resume. There is no waiting process, as they’re sent an SMS almost immediately after completing the form.
2. Candidates spend 20 minutes playing a series of 12 games. These games give Unilever insight into different capabilities, including personality, communication style, and problem-solving. After completing these games, candidates get a report with feedback within 48 hours.
“The level playing field provided by anonymous gameplay also reduces the potential for unconscious bias among the recruiting team.The fact that candidates can play in their own time, in their own space, and complete the entire process in 20 minutes cuts back on time and costs too. In fact, the whole process is more agile,”
3. This step is for candidates the Pymetrics program selects as eligible to move forward. The candidates go through a video interviewing process, which Unilever does through HireVue. The software assesses the video interview and ranks the candidate based on their fit for the role. The highest ranked candidates then move to the fourth and final step in the process.
4. They are then invited to the Discovery Center for an in-person simulation of a “day in the life at Unilever”. They work through real-life business situations to indicate how they will respond to quickly changing markets.
The Result:
Their digital recruitment platform decreased their time-to-hire to under two-weeks, and as short as one to two days. Unilever’s recruiters are now screening two candidates and putting one through the four steps. Versus screening six candidates to put one through for an in-person interview.
Hilton has also started using data-driven assessment methods and has cut their recruiting cycle down to five days from six-weeks. They found their sales assessment test trimmed the number of interview questions from 200 down to five. It also increased the chance of hiring someone after one in-person interview.
Some Assessment Options
Below are sales assessment test options, which were selected based on the successes other organizations have seen.
Predictive Hire is a cloud-based, predictive analytics, solutions company offering customized AI based on data gathered from your specific company. They fuse your specific KPIs with the results from the questionnaire done by your existing workforce. The AI asks candidates questions to evaluate their likely success, and provides 90% accuracy.
DISC is a psychometric assessment that examines candidate’s behavioral differences. Candidates register on their website and answer a series of sentence based questions. Their answers produce measurements of their dominance, influence, steadiness, and conscientiousness. They provide the pros and cons of a candidate’s results, so in-person interviews are tailored accordingly.
Hiring Simulations is an organization providing job simulation assessment software, which is either licensed in-house or outsourced through their team. They offer options based on your specific needs and have been proven to help increase hiring success rates.
Pymetrics offers games for candidates to play in order to test diverse aspects of their capabilities. The global neuroscience community developed these games over decades of research. They use blind auditions to mitigate conscious and unconscious biases. The candidates move through their platform completely anonymously. The prediction algorithm does not use demographic information, race, gender, etc, to assess career fit.
Increase Your Sales Hiring Success
These sales assessment tests help HR Leaders make more effective sales hiring decisions. By using an assessment you ensure all potential candidates are measured in the same objective way and based on what they need to be successful in the role. It’s hazardous to rely on gut feel or in-person interviews to make sales hiring decisions – with 50 percent of sales reps not hitting their sales targets. These tests weed out the pretenders and make sure you are interviewing the true top sales talent. The more candidates you put through the objective sales assessment tests, the higher quality the sales hires, and the stronger your team will perform.
Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.
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.
Building an all-star sales team is one of the greatest challenges a hiring leader will face. In fact, research from Deloitte shows that talent acquisition is the third most important challenge organizations need to solve in 2017.
However, sales hiring is often put on the back burner — only being addressed when an open seat becomes available. While it is entirely possible to find a great employee in short order, it is far more likely that you will end up settling for someone average or worse. If attracting top performing salespeople is a primary driver of sales success, then shouldn’t recruiting be a top priority?
World-class organizations adopt the ABR: Always Be Recruiting principle. Continuous recruiting allows hiring managers to find and engage the best sellers and keep them warm until a position opens. Sales Expert and Founder of Engage Selling Solutions, Colleen Francis, recommends adopting the ABR mantra:
“Many sales managers settle into complacency when their team is performing well, or recruiting falls by the wayside when there’s too much else on their plates. But in reality, it’s essential to constantly have recruiting on your to-do list.”
Still not convinced?
This infographic details five reasons you need to always be recruiting for your sales team:
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When I became the leader of a sales team for the first time in the mid 90’s, I did not have the luxury of selling for many years and being mentored by someone who could teach me the ropes. Instead, I was a company founder who filled a need that we had at the time to build our sales team, and I kind of made things up as I went along. As I think back to those days, I realize how much I struggled to achieve my goals, and while I was successful, I can’t deny that it probably had as much to do with luck and timing as it did with my will and effort.
It was a time of great learning but there are a few lessons that would have served me well if I had known them in advance.
Here are the top things myself and 28 other sales leaders wish we had known before becoming a Sales Manager:
1. That it’s almost impossible to be a player-coach selling manager
“I wish I knew how little most senior executives understand the true job of a Sales Manager and how much crap companies throw on the sales leader’s desk that has nothing to do with leading the sales team. I wish I knew that much of what makes people great as individual producers in sales does not translate to success as a manager. The jobs could not be more different. As a producer, you win on your own, but great leaders win through their people. Night and day difference. I wish I knew that it is almost impossible to be a player-coach selling-manager. To do that, well you have to be schizophrenic. The reason sports teams abandoned the player-coach model is because it’s stupid and produces sub-optimal results while creating a mess.”
“I wish I knew that not everyone thought as much about how to be successful as I did. After meetings/conversations with prospective buyers, very few sales reps took time to self assess. To help them develop, I needed to teach them how to think differently. I constantly asked: What do you think went well? Why did it work? How can you use it again? Where did you get stuck or run into trouble? What was your role in creating this situation? How could you do things differently next time? What else could you try? Doing this creates an upward spiral. Everyone gets better, driving increased revenue.”
“As a sales leader, you likely want to jump in and make every sale happen. It is vital you have wise discernment, though. You must recognize you’re playing a long-game, and as such you should focus on the development of the people you’re leading, not just on chasing short-term customer opportunities. As tempting as it is to close the sale, the bigger benefit is in coaching the salesperson to know how to close the sale when you’re not around. The mark of a sales leader is not what occurs when they’re present, but rather the success their team has when the leader is away.”
“I think a lot of sales leaders wish they knew how difficult it was going to be to transition from salesperson to sales leader. The skills that made them successful as an individual performer turn out to be only a small part of the toolbox they need to build a successful team. As a salesperson, they could easily and quickly respond to adversity, but as a sales leader, they often find it quite frustrating that people don’t do things the way they do.”
“Without many years in sales myself and having to take over leadership of a sales group, I didn’t appreciate the value of a structured selling process. I told my sales reps to call-qualify-develop and close and left them to their own devices beyond this, which meant that each rep sold in their own unique way. Beyond ensuring that customers received different experiences from my sales team, it made it very difficult for me to coach and develop my reps. In short, without a structured process in place, some of the characteristics of a dysfunctional sales team were beginning to reveal themselves.”
6. To spend more time on the hiring than the selecting
“I wish I had known that what people say and what they actually do are two different things. While your salespeople may tell you something that has transpired, they may not be telling you the whole story. It’s important to have full transparency as it helps them in their sales cycle. It’s important to understand that not everyone lives in the CRM and you need to look for that when recruiting, as that data’s so important. I also wish I had spent more time on the hiring process versus the selection process. It’s much easier to hire than it is to fire someone. Relying on the experts to find you the right people is much more beneficial than selecting someone and having to fire them later due to poor performance.”
7. How to understand the different personality types of people in sales
“When I first moved from sales into a sales management position, I was fortunate that my company sent me for some training. The most important lesson taught was about understanding the different personality types of people in sales. Previous to this, I thought everyone would handle their business the way I did. Upon taking over, I quickly learned that you cannot manage everyone the same way. Each person on the team had a different temperament, a different attitude, and was motivated by different things. Once I got a handle on each person’s wants, needs, and desires, I was able to take an office that was on the bottom of the revenue-generation pile and turn it into the first place office in the company.”
“I wish I knew before becoming a sales leader/manager that 1+1 = 3. When I became a sales leader I thought it was my job to be the best seller on the team. I would swoop in to save deals, and ride along with sellers to close deals. Always being the hero. We did well, but not exceptionally well. It was only after I learned that my job was to coach each individual to be better than me that our sales really accelerated! A sales manager’s job is not to be the best seller on the team. It’s to curate excellence and leverage it amongst the team members.”
Tell your salespeople what they did right. A Harvard Business review study confirms that individuals who receive at least a 6-1 ratio of positive-to-negative advice outperform those more often criticized. Focus on a maximum of three improvements at a time. The brain can’t possibly remember 36 new techniques to incorporate into a sales presentation. Like golf, a good swing coach offers just one suggestion that triggers all the other actions. Feedback must be specific. Avoid generic suggestions like, build more trust or tell better stories. Instead share the four components of building trust or five keys to a powerful story. “
“If there is one thing that I know now that I didn’t know then, it’s the importance of time management and prioritizing tasks. As a young business owner or professional, you will have many moving parts and daily tasks which can easily keep you busy. However, there is a major difference between being busy and being productive! In my opinion, the “Eisenhower Principle” is a must have time management principle that should be learnt and adopted by every business owner and professional. In essence, it is understanding the difference between urgent and important activities to help you think and structure your business priorities correctly.”
11. The value of really getting to know each person on the team well
“I wish I knew the value of really getting to know each person on the team well, especially personally. When I did, it made it much easier to help that person overcome a problem or set better goals – whether personal and professional – to keep them motivated. Especially once they ‘got good’ at their jobs, it’s easy to get comfortable and go on ‘autopilot’ as a manager.”
“Many salespeople spend their precious time on the wrong things. Sales Managers and leaders play a crucial role in helping their reps focus on high-value sales activities. Here are three tips: Guide them towards activities that benefit customers the most. The bigger the problems reps can solve, the more resources, time and money customers will commit. Ask reps what they need to do their jobs better. Knock down any obstacles that make it difficult for reps to sell and customers to buy. Limit business hours to high-value sales activities. Train reps to save travel and administrative work for “non-working” hours.”
“This is easy for me …. firstly COACHING 2.0. As a 2.0 manager, learning that there is a big difference between demanding results and putting the right people in the right roles and conditions for success is crucial. Lastly DOGS versus STARS. If you spend 50% of your time with your ‘stars’ – who are often independent by nature – instead of the ‘dogs’, you will double your results. Apologies to ‘dogs’ but they always have an excuse, lots of personal issues, etc. Once they are past a reasonable training time they will vacuum up all your time and energy. Go with the stars who are building a joint path for their career development and success!”
14. To trust myself and not suffer from “Impostor Syndrome”
“I wish I had known to trust myself. Many of the leaders I coach now have the same syndrome that I had – Imposter Syndrome – the fear that the world will find out that I really don’t know anything. The truth is that I did/do know a lot and you do too. It’s those who think they know everything who are circumspect. It is OK to be authentic and a little vulnerable; it engenders trust. And, a team who trusts you will follow you into the unknown where you’ll likely create great things together.”
“The one thing I wish I knew before becoming a Sales Manager was that when it comes to managing people, people don’t care what you know until they know you care. I have coached many new sales leaders to get to know their salespeople before they begin talking business or trying to tell them what they would do.”
“I perceived that sales leadership was a very complex task, so I tried to explore and navigate every possible course of action. In reality, leading a sales force is all about finding simplicity. Identify the few things that really drive sales performance, and then hammer those things hard from every possible angle. If you wade into the complexities of sales leadership, you’ll drown.”
“I wish I knew that I had to understand that the separation between the ideology of church and state is a real thing as a manager. When I was an SDR, I developed friendships with people on the SDR team and when I became a manager everything had to change. You have to realize as a manager that once you come into work, it’s like you putting on your jersey during a game and your reps cannot be seen as your friends when you have to put your manager hat on.”
“The first time I built a sales team I made 3 faulty assumptions that almost cost me my company: 1) I assumed that salespeople knew how to sell because they had sold something for someone else. 2) I assumed that salespeople have discipline and are disciplined. 3) I assumed that a CRM system would help us sell better as a team. My conclusion and advice: design an informative and actionable sales process that is easy for salespeople to learn and execute. Make it the vehicle for sales methodology, enablement content, performance tracking and coaching. Then improve it!”
“Many Sales Managers make a mistake in assuming sales reps are coin operated, and that therefore the most important parts of motivating a sales team are the compensation plan’s size and structure. Although those are important, salespeople are much more complex, and there are things you can do to motivate them on a deeper and more sustainable level. Help your team understand the big picture. A sales rep should be able to connect the dollar they earn to the company’s ability to produce a better version of the product they’re selling. This can be more motivating than just the cash in their pocket alone.”
“When I was a sales rep, I once worked for a micro-manager—and hated it! I resolved never to be that way myself if became a sales manager. Years later, as a Sales Manager, I got confidential feedback from my sales team about my management style. Sure enough, the overwhelming perception was “Hey, Kevin’s not involved enough in our opportunities and our coaching. I realized then that I had over-corrected. And because I did little coaching, I wasn’t helping my team develop. Though I’d had the job title “Sales Manager” for over three years at that point, that was the moment I truly became a Sales Manager.”
“Your time is not your own! I’m not sure what I was expecting when I first moved from an individual contributor to a Sales Manager, but I was surprised at how much time was required to manage and lead a team. My calendar was suddenly full of meetings, 1:1’s, customer calls and coaching sessions. And for a while I felt a bit out of control. One skill I had to work on was time management and prioritization. Sometimes I miss the days when my time was truly my own, but I wouldn’t trade the privilege of working with a team for any amount of hours back in my day.”
22. To understand the uniqueness of each person on my team
“One Size Does NOT Fit All. You need to understand the uniqueness of each individual on your team. It sounds obvious, but as a young leader you try and apply a one size fits all approach. The key is to take the time to know what motivates each member of your sales team and what demotivates them. Having this understanding means you can play to their strengths. This allows you to adapt your coaching, training and feedback in a manner that gets results.”
“It was one thing to be 100% responsible for achieving my numbers as a rep and totally foreign to achieve my new numbers through 20 people as the manager. My first biggest “ah-ha” was they didn’t sell how I did, think like I did, have the same goals or methodologies and they were certainly not interested in hearing how I did it. Because of my teaching background I immediately realized I needed to coach each person to be the best that they could be in the way they learn, process, speak and execute actions. A few months of building a great team could have been shaved off if I had known coaching was the key before day one.”
“To lead your sales team to perform, treat them like you treat your customers! For customers – you make the time when they need it, lead them to the best outcome, explain everything relevant to them, offer information, solutions, tools, and resources relevant for THEM, and make it easy for them to work with you. It’s the same for your team. Get them what they need to succeed (it’s not just leads and software), make the time to coach, and make everything you say, do, ask, and expect focused on what makes it important to them. You’ll be an effective leader with a performing team.”
“What I wish I learned earlier in my career is how you need to make a sales rep’s life simpler. Selling, especially in B2B, is a tough job. Navigating byzantine internal bureaucracies while at the same time maneuvering complex customer buying processes is challenging. If you absorb as much of that complexity as possible, it makes it much easier for sales reps to close business. Whenever possible simplify processes, products, messaging and asset distribution to enable a rep to focus on selling.”
“Anyone with a career in sales has heard the stereotypes that salespeople are coin operated and competitive. Understanding that there is definitely truth to these, I have always paid close attention to how sales people are being paid because it is directly tied to what they will actually do. Therefore, sales comp plans MUST be aligned to the results the company wants to achieve. As an old boss/mentor of mine once told me, they must be simple enough to pass the spouse test. So any spouse that looked at it would instantly understand how their spouse is being paid. In regards to competition, mostly all sales reps use it appropriately as a little bit of healthy competition, which never hurt anyone and can be just added driver to achieve greater results.”
“Recruiting is hard, not only because it is a totally different skill set and process than sales. It also requires an even bigger focus on a long term mindset. On top of that, your legacy as a manager won’t be the number you hit but who and how you developed the team. I would have spent far more time being involved in the recruiting process prior to being a hiring manager myself.”
28. To use programs to set up sales contests and broadcast sales results frequently
“One of the things I wish I’d done earlier is use a program like Zoho Motivator. It plugs into our CRM so it’s always up to date and makes it easy to give the sales team daily contest results and tie 1st place to a prize. I have always communicated targets but never publically broadcast results with regularity or frequency. With Zoho Motivator, I set up the contest in the beginning of the month and it runs on autopilot. I think good sales people tend to be competitive and seeing team member results regularly will either light a fire under someone driven or highlight the duds on the team.”
“Of course you want to stay on top of everything, but there’s a different between being updated on a project and hovering over your employees. When you micromanage, your sales team feels smothered and unappreciated. Instead, give your employees ownership of their work to let their talents shine. Productivity will improve dramatically.”
Put these 28 tips to use and visit the Peak Sales Career Blog for the latest actionable insights on how to advance your sales career.
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Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.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.
Technology and data analytics are a critical advantage for human resource leaders that are committed to building and maintaining a high performance sales force.
Recruiting A-players, the most important sales force effectiveness driver, is quickly moving up the priority list for sales leaders – 41% express dissatisfaction with their current sales force, saying they weren’t able to effectively sell value. Yet with strong indicators that US and global marketplaces will be healthy in 2017 and beyond, corporate leaders have set aggressive sales and growth targets. This has put increased pressure on Heads of Sales to critically evaluate resources — specifically human capital resources — that are vital to making the number and advancing the organization. With more than 40% of employers reporting talent shortages in 2017 (revealing a 10% increase since 2010), and Baby Boomer retirement contributing to a declining population of proven salespeople, human resources (HR) is being counted on to fill the sales force with top talent.
Companies that embrace new technologies to support recruiting and other critical HR responsibilities will find a better breed of salesperson, improve diversity, and reduce hiring costs.
In this article we’ll look at how technology, such as data analytics, professional networking sites, and hiring software, are improving HR leaders’ ability to sales recruit.
We’ll focus on three areas:
1. Helping companies source better candidates;
2. Sifting through resumes at scale with more accuracy and less bias; and
3. Choosing candidates that match the attributes of top performers.
Human resources has been slower to adopt tech and data analytics than other business functions, such as customer acquisition, customer retention, and finance. But the shift is happening. 57% of business and HR executives polled by Harvard Business Review in March 2016 currently use new recruiting technologies, while 32% are planning to implement them.
Let’s look at real-world examples of how companies recruit better salespeople through the use of new technologies, platforms, and analytical models. We’ll start at the beginning: sourcing candidates.
Sourcing candidates: Using social networks to expand the pool, then pinpoint the best talent
Social professional networks and the internet give human resource leaders access to an unprecedented number of candidates. They also shift the candidate pool to a higher-quality population. Where talent acquisition efforts may have once only focused on industry or location, online networks readily surface salespeople in other cities and enable more cross-pollination from different industries and job functions.
These sites work. A study of 4,000 companies in 31 countries reported that 43% of companies cite social professional networks as a top source of quality hires, putting it in the number one spot above internet job boards and employee referrals.
Social professional networks are especially important when hiring salespeople because they make it possible to find and contact passive candidates at scale. Passive recruiting is the practice of contacting talent this currently employed and
performing well at their current companies. It gives recruiters access to the people who very well might be the best salespeople in the industry: those who are actively delivering results at their employers. As McKinsey analysts explain in the 2016 report Connecting Talent with Opportunity in the Digital Age, “companies are no longer limited to posting a job and waiting to see who responds … They can seek out the talent they want, even if those individuals are not actively job hunting, and then approach any number of prospective candidates in an immediate but personalized way.”
The passive candidate population is too big to ignore. According to research by the Adler Group and LinkedIn, approximately 65-75% of LinkedIn members are passive candidates and 15-20% are “Tiptoers” who are gainfully employed but casually looking for another job. So if HR waits for candidates to drop their resumes at the door, they will only see the active job seekers that make up 5-20% of the talent market.
If talent acquisitions efforts can bring more candidates through the door, the ability to retain that talent is critical.
LinkedIn data shows that employees sourced from online platforms are eight times more likely to stay with their employer for over 2 years, and are 11 percent more satisfied in their jobs than they were in their previous positions.
Why?
One reason is that social professional networks are a two-way street. Candidates can better select fulfilling roles by researching the profiles of current and former employees, anonymous reviews about the employer, and salary information. Options abound online, including job matching sites such as TheLadders, review platforms such as Glassdoor and Vault, and, of course, LinkedIn.
Tech platforms also give standout candidates a voice to showcase their merits.
Before the age of the open web, a candidate only had an 8×11″ sheet of paper to communicate their achievements. Now there are myriad ways for a salesperson to publish their track records and personal stories. Sales reps and sales leaders can curate their own websites and portfolios, represent their views on Twitter, and write thought leadership articles for industry publications or on Medium. It’s easier for human resource professionals to spot top voices in the community, or at least find more material to help them vet applicants.
This practice has room to grow in the sales function, but is well developed in engineer and developer communities. Sites like GitHub (an open-source code repository) and HackerRank (which lets programmers solve code challenges) make it easy for recruiters to spot and contact the best developers from around the world. In fact, a data tech company called Gild has developed a product to do this automatically. Read more: A Startup That Scores Job Seekers, Whether They Know It or Not.
Resume screening: Using tech to be a better gatekeeper
Technology can reduce the time and cost of initial candidate screenings, as well as human bias.
Where humans once suffered paper cuts from reading stacks of physical resumes, algorithms now slice and dice as many applicants as a company needs to review. If companies are expanding their talent pools with more professional networking sites, it’s critical to sort through the noise by filtering search results and candidate pools by desired experiences, skills, selling results and qualifications.
One can question whether it’s wise to trust an algorithm to make decisions about who to let through a company’s gates. After all, wouldn’t humans have a better read on the intangible qualities of a top performer? And can a machine deliver on recruiting standards while increasing employee diversity?
It turns out that algorithms may do a better job than humans when sorting candidates, both from a performance perspective and from a bias perspective. Companies that embrace automated resume screening systems outperform their human review processes by at least 25%, resulting in better outcomes and more diversity. This finding comes from researchers from the University of Minnesota who reviewed 17 studies of companies and academic institutions that backtested their applicant evaluation algorithms and compared them to their traditional methods.
Here’s a real-world example of this from a professional services company that struggled keep up with screening the 250,000 job applications it received per year.
To lighten the load, they introduced a resume screening algorithm that mined for education and work experience and considered the history of the company’s past applicants, extended offers, and accepted offers. The tool sorted resumes into 3 groups: most likely to be hired, least likely to be hired, and in-between applicants that needed the attention of a human recruiter. The intent was to reduce time and cost for the HR team, but there were concerns that a machine would interfere with the company’s goals to hire more women.
The algorithm delivered a 500% return on investment in terms of cost savings.
It sorted away 55% of the resumes, either into the “least likely to be hired” pool (where they were automatically rejected), and the “most likely to be hired” pool (where they automatically went on to the next stage).
Moreover, it improved the female hiring initiative. The system passed 15% more women than manual screenings did, and all of them on merit. “The foundational assumption—that screening conducted by humans would increase gender diversity more effectively—was proved incorrect.”
Google also uses a systematic, data-driven approach to reduce bias in resume screening. They analyze employee profiles that lead to success at Google, and use the insights to reassess candidates they are about to reject. This helps them identify potential false negatives, helping them catch excellent hires they would otherwise pass over.
In a similar exercise, an Asian bank challenged their hiring assumptions by taking a closer look at the backgrounds of their top performers:
“Whereas the bank had always thought top talent came from top academic programs, for example, hard analysis revealed that the most effective employees came from a wider variety of institutions, including five specific universities and an additional three certification programs. An observable correlation was evident between certain employees who were regarded as “top performers” and those who had worked in previous roles, indicating that specific positions could serve as feeders for future highfliers.
Both of these findings have since been applied in how the bank recruits, measures performance, and matches people to roles.
The results: a 26 percent increase in branch productivity (as measured by the number of full-time employees needed to support revenue) and a rate of conversion of new recruits 80 percent higher than before the changes were put in place. During the same period, net income also rose by 14 percent.
Hiring: Select the Future Top Performers
“Big data can help me predict who will be a successful employee,” says Anne Robie, Head of Human Resources at StubHub.
/three-reasons-More and more, companies are using rigorous, systematic processes and tests to evaluate candidates after the resume screen. Why? Because hiring based on structured measures is more objective, accurate, cost-effective, and scalable than hiring on gut feel.
This is particularly true for the sales profession, where charismatic personalities often sway an interviewer. We’ve found that companies get the best results when they complement behavioral-based interviewing techniques by testing for a candidate’s Sales DNA using psychometric assessments. Sales DNA is a specific mix of skills and aptitudes that make a person uniquely suited for success as a salesperson, and is a better predictor of success than a resume with the right industry experience.
This is why world-class HR organizations are adopting online tools that test for aptitudes, cultural fit, and even soft skills such as leadership, persistence, and creativity.
A successful example is the Bon-Ton chain of more than 280 US-based department stores, which created a test to evaluate candidates. The test was based on a data analysis that pinpointed the attributes of their best cosmetics sales reps.
“[Bon-Ton] now screens potential reps using a test of cognitive ability, situational judgment, initiative taking, and other relevant traits. Those who score in the top half tend to sell 10 percent more product than the others and tend to like their work more. Since 2008, the chain has seen an increase of $1,400 in sales per representative and 25 percent lower turnover among them.”
Similarly, Xerox implemented a 30-minute online test using a hiring analytics startup, Evolv. Their goal was to reduce new-hire attrition, which had been an incredible expense for the company. The test successfully reduced attrition and even improved the productivity of call center agents by 3 to 4 percent.
Algorithms are HR’s friend, but data experts from KU Leuven in Belgium remind us that human discretion is critical and keeps algorithms sharp. Even the best algorithmic models operate in a constantly changing organization and market environment, and their average lifespan is an estimated 2 to 3 years based on benchmarks in customer analytics. So HR needs to monitor pre-hire effectiveness (which recruiting channels deliver candidates with the right profile, for example) and post-hire effectiveness (which recruiting channels provide the best candidates), then adjust the algorithm as soon as they see a dip in performance.
Technology and data: The new backbone of sales recruiting
Humans with HR titles aren’t going away. Rather, technology and data analytics are here to empower talent leaders to do their best work. When tech does the heavy lifting, HR has the latitude to apply their time more effectively. These systems also push us to reconsider our innate biases and traditional hiring criteria, resulting in more equitable hiring processes.
Professional networks, screening algorithms, evaluation tests, and the web at large are the emerging standard for recruitment. HR leaders that embrace them will take a seat at the table as indispensable strategic partners in their organizations.
Appendix
Companies that want to explore new recruiting technologies can start with the McKinsey Global Institute’s collection of emerging and established online talent platforms.
The pressure for HR Leaders to provide organizations with top performing sales candidates in short periods of time is on the rise. B2B sales reps typically onboard over 10 months with 24 months of average tenure. It is therefore of the utmost importance to hire top salespeople quickly and retain them long-term.
Being responsible for the overall recruitment process of new salespeople, human resource leaders are very familiar with the negative impacts caused by the lengthy time required when hiring new sales and sales leaders. These negative impacts can include: loss of revenue & market share, decreases in sales productivity, and lowered employee morale.
In this article, we will discuss the changes human resource leaders can make in their recruitment process. These changes will counter the negative impacts of vacant sales roles and shorten time needed to hire new salespeople.
We will provide tools that can be implemented into an existing recruitment process, which will:
Increase the pool of qualified candidates;
Reduce time to fill;
Improve hiring manager and candidate satisfaction rates;
Here is your ultimate guide to reducing your time to hire:
The Cost of a Vacant Role
Does your sales leader truly understand the cost of open headcount?
Having an open vacancy in your sales department for even one-day has a negative impact on your organization. With an average time to fill of 68 days and an average time to hire of 57.5 days — which has increased by 50 percent over the past five years — pipeline strength and sales revenue can quickly erode.
For example, if you’re looking to fill a vacant Account Executive role with an annual quota of five million dollars, you will be losing 787,600 thousand dollars over the 57.5 time to hire average.
To calculate your precise revenue loss potential, use the formula below:
“We have a 10 sales rep headcount on this team. We have 9 reps hired and currently selling, 1 headcount vacant. Because of this vacancy, every rep needs to hit over 110 percent of their quota for us to hit our team revenue target. Multiply that by our 4 sales teams – that’s a multi-million revenue problem for our company. Yikes.”
Understanding the negative impacts of open headcount goes beyond top-line revenue and includes sales force morale is critical. Potential decreases in rep productivity and absenteeism due to burnout are directly correlated to sales force understaffing.
Reps are often told to hunt and/or manage open territories and accounts all while tasked with delivering on their own goals and metrics.
With the average cost per turnover at 150 percent of the employee’s salary, sales and HR leaders walk a costly fine line when overloading reps that can’t sustain the necessary activity and behavior levels needed for success.
When reps aren’t set up for success, role disengagement skyrockets.
In fact, research shows that only 30 percent of US employees are actively engaged and passionate about their workplace. The remaining 70 percent are either disengaged or actively disengaged. Gallup estimates corporations lose between 450-550 billion dollars in revenue every year as a direct result of employee disengagement.
Improvement Drivers for Your Sales Recruitment Process
Understand Where Your Challenges Are in the Hiring Funnel
For HR Leaders, the challenge lies in improving team metrics like time to fill, time to hire, and time to start. The difference between these three metrics being:
Time to fill
The number of days between a job’s publication date and an accepted offer.
Time to hire
The time elapsed between engaging a candidate and them accepting an offer.
Time to start
The lag time between when a candidate accepts an offer and when they start.
To decrease your time-time-hire your team needs to have a thorough understanding of the differences between these three metrics. Understanding these nuances allows you to hone in on the areas that will have the greatest time decreases.
For example, you may find that in order to improve your time to hire, you need to decrease your interview time. If you find it takes too long for the candidate application process, then you can improve your time to fill.
Below we created a breakdown of a resume’s timeline as it goes through the stages of a recruitment process.
Top salespeople only spend an average of ten days on the market before being recruited for their next role. With organizations averaging a time to hire of 57.5 days, talent shortages are fueling hiring managers to make bad hiring decisions.
So how do you find a quality candidate while decreasing how long it takes to fill your vacant role?
Identify Your Hiring Stakeholders
HR needs to take a leadership position by identifying the stakeholders in the recruiting process. This will not only improve sales hiring speed but also quality. Depending on the size of your organization, these stakeholders can vary.
Small to midsize businesses You could have your CEO and/or Company Owner, and Sales Leader. Again, this may vary depending on the sales team you have developed to date.
Large enterprise organizations Depending on role seniority, you could have your HR Leader, your Sales Leader and their company peers, and your CEO. If it’s a simple Account Executive role, the recruitment process wouldn’t involve your CEO. For senior roles like VP of Sales, the CEO would typically be involved.
In your stakeholder list, include the following information:
The stakeholders (names and titles)
The order of their involvement in the process
The tasks they will be responsible for
The timelines associated with said tasks
This list is sent to all involved stakeholders to ensure they’re informed and understand what the recruitment expectations are. It is crucial they understand how important it is for the process to be time sensitive. Time can make or break the hiring of an ideal candidate.
For example:
If it is your Hiring Manager who conducts the candidate review process and selects who will come in for an interview, then list on the Stakeholder List Worksheet that they have two business days to review the resumes and decide who they want to speak with directly.
Having this timeline expectation on the worksheet, allows you to hold them accountable and address the issue if deadlines are not met.
By using this process, you can decrease your resume review process from the 25-days to two business days.
Build a Robust Sales Hiring Plan
What is your sales hiring plan?
Most organization’s will have an established hiring plan for all roles within your organization. The best sales hiring plan’s are tied to both the corporate strategy and sales strategies, and include:
Headcount budget (quarterly & yearly)
Hiring stakeholders (by role)
Advertising channels
Hiring timelines
Make sure you are tracking the sources of your hires and the sources of your most successful hires. You can then determine where most of your past sales hiring successes have come from.
Prior to leveraging different sourcing channels it is imperative to create a way to objectively measure sales candidates. An effective way to do this is to create a set of mandatory hiring criteria.
These criteria lay the foundation for subsequent processes including job postings, selection, setting realistic expectations, and compensation. By establishing hiring criteria, you increase the speed and accuracy of your recruitment decisions, and in turn decrease your time to hire.
When creating your hiring criteria, establish which ones are mandatory and which are additional bonuses. These mandatory criteria consist of skills and experience you would not be willing to provide training for upon hire.
The non-mandatory criteria is a list of skills and experience that would be considered an added benefit but would not negatively impact the candidate’s potential success.
“Rank your “must-have” and “desirable” attributes. Be mindful when creating the list, as too many filters will result in a restricted pool of candidates. Too few requirements will increase the pool but can leave you with a load of bad matches. Refer to this list when reviewing resumes and during interviews. This will make the selection process easier. A candidate with all “desirable” factors will not make the cut compared to the applicant with a list of “must-have” attributes.”
According to Forbes, to hire a quality salesperson for your organization you must establish your company’s vision and goals. Then find candidates who meet and solve the challenges specific to your organization. By establishing these challenges early on, you will avoid time wasted on unfit sales candidates.
To help you create your own hiring criteria we have included a worksheet for you to follow. Download it here.
Upon completing your mandatory hiring criteria you can refocus your energies to pursuing candidates through your most successful channels.
Since 62 percent of all passive candidates, who are presently employed and successful in their roles, obtain new roles through networking, it is critical to leverage your current top performers’ networks to find additional top performers more efficiently.
Research demonstrates that by leveraging Employee Referral Programs (ERP), you can drastically decrease your time to start. Referral candidates typically begin their roles 58 percent quicker than those found on job boards and career sites.
With the average employee having more than 150 contacts on their social media networks, you can easily add this channel into your hiring strategy and begin tapping into your employee’s networks before pursuing other acquisition tactics like posting job ads.
Choosing a reward for employees who participate in your ERP depends on what you think their top motivator is. With companies finding 40-60 percent of their hires through ERPs, monetary rewards tend to gain the most employee attention.
Google, for example, pays two thousand dollars for an employee referral, and has doubled this reward for further encouragement. However, what motivates Google employees to provide referrals is due to the fact that they enjoy where they work. This enjoyment has driven them to recommend other people to join their positive environment.
Build Your Virtual Bench
What do you do if someone leaves the company unexpectedly?
There will always be unexpected departures within the sales industry. With the application process typically taking 10.5 days, it is the organizations who are prepared that successfully recruit their new salespeople faster.
With 65-75 percent of candidates today being passive, it can take many months to build relationships and persuade top performers to join your organization. During this time, you have to educate them on your future strategies while also learning about their careers goals.
This process takes great effort, especially while under the pressures of providing top salespeople to your internal stakeholders fast. Having a plan in place is one that would eliminate this pressure while also meeting the recruitment timeline expectations of your stakeholders.
One preparatory measure you should have in place is a virtual bench. The concept of the virtual bench is often discussed when referring to sports. Scouts are always hunting for quality players yet the interactions between players and scouts happen long before a move.
This concept is no different when it comes to sales. Top quality players take the time to decide where they would like to take their career. They want to know that their next move is in line with their long-term goals. Having a virtual bench of A-Player salespeople you are constantly nurturing, gives you an edge with both time and your ability to beat your competition.
Your virtual bench should consist of 10 prospective candidates who you are reaching out to regularly to build relationships. These candidates should then become people you can contact to potentially join your company at any time.
Your bench should also contain ten influencers who may not want to join your company but can recommend a top performing salesperson to you at the drop of a hat.
By maintaining and effectively utilizing your virtual bench, you are eliminating the 10.5 days it takes for the candidate application process. As a result , you decrease your overall time to fill by 15 percent.
Eliminate Boring Job Descriptions & Replace with Career Opportunities
What are the makings of a job description that will attract and engage the right candidates?
Job descriptions that focus on the benefits of working for your organization will outperform those that focus on role requirements and tasks.
While you want to ensure that the prospective candidates meet all the requirements and can complete the necessary selling tasks, the goal of your job description is to captivate the prospective candidate by illustrating the career opportunity they can’t afford to miss.
Some simple ways to improve your job descriptions include:
Devise an EVP (employee value proposition) explaining how this new role would be a step up, versus a lateral move, to someone who is already doing similar work.
Instead of creating a list of mandatory skills and experience, which may cause top performers to opt out of the application process, make it a list of performance objectives for their first three months, six months, 12 months, and beyond. This will allow the prospect to visualize themselves completing these tasks and begin thinking about their strategies.
Include a section focusing on the benefits of working for your organization. How are you different from other organizations of a similar size and industry? You can do this by conducting a simple survey with your current employees to discover their favorite reasons behind working at your organization. Some anonymous survey tools you could use include:
Describe potential opportunities for advancement. This information will entice candidates to apply and pursue the role since they know they can progress and be part of an organization long-term.
Your job description is the first phase in your employee experience and is of the utmost importance. Your first impression with these top performing candidates is just as important as their first impression with you.
Many companies are taking their job descriptions beyond the traditional word document or PDF and are leveraging emerging technology.
Skill Scout is an example of an organization that produces short job videos that serve as “job posts in motion” so candidates can preview what the job is like and the skills they will require for success. Instead of reading a traditional document, they get a real life view into the organization.
SAP have begun using cartoons and video games to portray what life at their company is like. In fact, statistics show that job postings on Facebook that feature video get 36 percent more applications.
To help you create an enticing job description, we have created several templates for you to follow:
The initial screening process typically takes 15.6 days but there are tools you can harness to decrease this time. These tools also mitigate hiring biases, which can cause you to overlook top performers and make costly mis-hires.
These tests are objective, data-driven ways of evaluating your prospective candidate’s potential success in the role without lengthy human-to-human interaction.
Some of the most innovative ideas on the market today include cognitive technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI). For example, Olivia, is an AI software that moves candidates through an application process with sequenced questions. It automatically eliminates unqualified candidates and reduces the candidate screening time.
One company in particular, Ericsson, has taken their recruiting process one step further and has implemented a stage called “Candidate Care.” After applying and being screened for a role, unsuccessful candidates will receive an invitation letter to take advantage of the job placement portal.
The portal provides candidates the opportunity to improve their resume, boost their interview skills, and improve their job search skills. With 98 percent of candidates registering for the portal, it can be used as a pool of candidates to contact for future roles.
After implementing the automation process, human resources reviews the candidates the automation software has deemed as the top performers. They’re submitted to the next stakeholder with the 48 hour timeline expectation, which you established in the stakeholder worksheet.
Since computers are screening candidates based on objective measures, hiring managers avoid potential biases that come with person-to-person screenings. According to Business Insider, the risks of hiring based on gut feeling is high, with a 50 percent failure rate.
Therefore, if you hire 20 new salespeople in one year, ten of them will fail and be considered bad sales hires.
Here are the top three reasons why you should never hire on “gut” feeling:
The costs, both direct and indirect, of a poor sales hire, are astronomical.
The “gut” is an emotional response. The person in front of you may bring to mind someone you used to know, and this may spell a positive or negative ‘gut’ reaction that has nothing to do with the candidate’s qualifications. Even in an all day interview, it is impossible to thoroughly get to know a person. It is natural to use our own internal picture, our gut, of who this person is to fill in the blanks.
Salespeople are very skilled at making good first impressions.
Our gut reaction is not an avoidable factor. It is always there but it must be tempered with our brain. The next time you feel yourself falling prey to basing a decision on gut, ask yourself if you have the proof required to hire this individual.
For more information on how to find top performing sales people, download Sales Recruiting 2.0.
Additional Benefits To Automating Your Screening Process:
Flexibility and Efficiency Candidates can go through the screening process at any time. Scheduling and planning is not necessary, and it is available to them 24 hours a day. You are typically capable of turning the screening system on and off, while controlling how many applicants you accept.
Customization You can incorporate your mandatory hiring criteria, which you established via the worksheet above, for additional customization.
Candidate Tracking You can analyze the candidate data at your leisure and track the candidate information to keep for future roles.
Upon completion, the candidate’s information and answers would be recorded and sent to you accordingly. There are many pieces of software on the market to choose from, such as Sonru. They have created an automated video interview screening software that cuts your screening time down by 80 percent. As a result, you decrease your HR screening average from 15.6 days to two days.
Consolidate Your Interview Process
The interview process commonly takes 15.6 days, which accounts for 23 percent of the overall recruiting process. But employers that consolidate this process can reduce their interview time by 156 percent.
An effective way to consolidate your interview process is to schedule all in-person interviews on the same day. Simply provide your candidates with the date their interview will take place and one or two time options. This allows them to choose a time that works best or rearrange their schedule to fit the best time.
Some technologies you could use for interview scheduling include:
The odd candidate may be unable to come in on the day you have specified. Depending on if the candidate is active or passive, you may choose to find a day that fits both your schedules. If you’ve analyzed their screening results and determine they are a top performer, then bringing them in on a different day is to your benefit.
By conducting all your interviews on the same day, you can conduct a thorough apples-to-apples comparison while the information is fresh in your mind. You also decrease your interview process from the average 15.6 days to one day.
Leverage The Notice Period
When you’ve selected your successful candidate and provided them with an offer, you then begin the notice period. This time period commonly happens over the course of two weeks but can be longer. The time frame depends on how senior the person is in their organization.
There are many factors that impact a salesperson’s notice period, such as:
Not wanting to burn bridges
Needing to find and train someone to replace them
Being on the verge of closing a large deal
Wanting to wait to get paid their commission.
It is important to be conscious of these possibilities and maximize the time you have before they officially come onboard.
Beginning someone’s training while they are in their notice period is a way for you to decrease the amount of onboarding time required. You can provide reading material on your company, your clients, and your industry, so they are well versed upon arrival. If you have online training courses, request they do these courses in advance of their first day*.
Lastly, you can request some additional time outside of regular work hours to have one-on-one meetings to begin the onboarding process. You can use this time to sign paperwork, introduce them to clients, attend team building activities or anything else you deem as part of your onboarding process*.
*Note – these activities may count as active employment. Please abide by your local laws and employment standards.
Doing The Math
After taking the time to review your process and gather a thorough understanding of where you can benefit from time decreases, you have the potential to decrease your time to hire by an astounding 91 percent simply by implementing some effective tools and making minor changes.
How did we arrive at this number?
Based on the graph provided in the “Understand Where Your Challenges Are” section of this article we have established the resume timeline during an average time to hire, which is 57.5 days. Looking back on all the tools and strategies we suggested for implementation, we have been able to decrease each stage and as a result, decrease the average time to hire to 6.3 days.
(You can also calculate your new time to fill average by adding in the “application stage”, which takes an average of 10.5 days. By leveraging your network and nurturing your virtual bench, you can eliminate the time needed to post job ads and wait for applications altogether.)
By implementing these tactics and tools, you will deliver your internal stakeholders better sales candidates, faster.
Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.
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.
Sales teams that possess energy and confidence are successful. And, good sales leaders know how to keep morale high whether business is at a peak or in a slump. However, the majority of workers are not satisfied with their current jobs.
Research shows that 70 percent of workers are actively disengaged at their jobs. And, since poor morale is correlated with performance and turnover rates, it is an especially damaging drain on a sales team.
The best sales leaders understand that they need to maintain a high sales team morale in order to keep their reps motivated, and thus, hitting their numbers. However, sometimes it’s the smallest things that managers inadvertently do that have the biggest impact on their sales team’s happiness. That’s why at Peak, we put together an infographic with some of the most common ways sales managers kill sales team morale, along with actionable advice to turn it around.
Here are 9 ways you may be killing your sales team’s morale and how to turn it around:
Want to save this infographic? Download the PDF version:
Sales managers are the conductors of a company’s revenue engine. They create and nurture high performance sales teams, and lead them to generate hit revenue forecasts and meet customer needs.
To understand the responsibilities of a sales manager, it’s important to understand their position in the organization and the intangible roles and characteristics they embody.
In this article, we’ll discuss the high-level importance of a sales manager, also called a first-line manager or FLM, and then get specific by providing a complete list of typical sales manager activities and duties.
Hire a sales manager: Sample Job Description Template: Is your company hiring a sales manager? Attract better talent with this powerful job description.
First and foremost, let’s start with a high-level look at why sales managers are so important to an organization.
The value of a sales manager
To understand the value a sales manager brings to their company, ask this: Is it more important to have an excellent sales manager and average salespeople, or to have excellent salespeople under an average manager?
Consulting and research firm ZS Associates argues that it is more important for a company to have a top sales manager than to have great salespeople.
Average managers bring their sales representatives down to their level, whereas the best sales managers bring excellence to all their territories. A great manager who inherits average salespeople know how to coach, advise, motivate, or replace reps until they have created a high performance sales force.
Data supports the idea that sales managers have the power to drastically improve the quality of their employees. A study of top sales managers showed that their new sales hires, after 20 months on the job, performed better than the new sales reps hired by average manager (these were more likely to show declining performance over time). Why? Because top managers have the ability to identify and attract talented salespeople, as well as onboard, train, coach, and nurture them until they are effective producers. Research also showed a positive correlation between the amount of time a sales manager spends coaching their reps, and the reps’ ability to outperform neighboring regions coached by other managers.
Three roles of a sales manager
The topline objective of a sales manager is to meet company revenue targets through the activities of their sales representatives. In other words, they harness the power of their direct reports, driving sales force productivity and extracting the best performance from each individual employee.
A sales manager achieves this objective through a mix of approaches. For example they:
Are responsible for motivating and advising their reps to improve their performance, as well as hiring and training new sales representatives.
Achieve their objectives through effective planning, setting sales goals, analyzing data on past performance, and projecting future performance.
Ensure that the sales department works cross functionally with executives from other departments. For example, they collaborate with marketing to generate new lead sources and expand the target customer base, or with product and research teams to make sure customer needs are met.
A sales manager simultaneously plays three key roles:
People manager: Recruit, build and nurture a team.
Of these three roles, the #1 focus should be people management.
Some executives believe that a sales manager should continue to sell like other reps, just with higher-value accounts. However, a sales manager is most powerful when they enable their team of account executives. Their power and insight is scalable when they empower 5 to 10 reps that report to them, and more sustainable and long lasting as roles shift in the company. Successful companies minimize a sales manager’s selling responsibilities, placing the onus on the sales reps that report to them.
Characteristics of a top sales manager
A successful sales manager’s characteristics, skills, and aptitudes are different from those of a successful sales representative. In fact, most sales reps make bad managers. The key characteristics of a sales manager focus less on selling ability and more about the interpersonal skills that enable leadership.
Rather than “doing it themselves,” they teach and coach others how to do it, enabling the sales efforts of others. They develop their own leadership, hiring, and training skills while ensuring their team is using the correct selling behaviors and activities to meet their revenue objectives.
Typical characteristics, skills, and traits of a sales manager include:
Communication skills: they listen first and speak second. They don’t chastise in public or private. They are aware of the message they transmit to their team, how it’s delivered, and how it’s perceived.
Integrity and trust: they never ask their reps to do something immoral, illegal, or something that goes against a company’s core values.
Ability to build relationships with peers, cross-functional counterparts, and upper management: They are committed to helping others be successful.
Empathy and ability to understand customer viewpoint and customer service
Ability to unite a team under a shared vision and know what motivates each member.
Analytical skills: They use data-driven reports to spur sales coaching sessions and empower reps to take ownership of their opportunity pipelines. They understand pricing, margins, and discounting impacts.
The ability to prioritize and effectively manage time
What makes a good sales manager great?
Research shows that the best sales managers exhibit slightly different characteristics than average ones.
Top sales managers are more likely than average sales managers to be:
High achieving, ambitious, and results-oriented
Innovative, generating original solutions and lots of ideas
Decisive and comfortable making decisions quickly
In contrast, average sales managers are more likely to:
Be detail focused, methodical, and organized
Focus on following the rules
Solely make decisions based on facts, figures, and data analysis
(Source: ZS Associates [p. 14])
Qualifications
Typical qualifications for a sales manager include:
Demonstrated track record of meeting/exceeding goals as an individual contributor.
Successful experience building a territory from little or nothing
Skilled at building rapport, opening doors, and understanding business requirements of senior decision makers
Day-to-day activities of a sales manager
Here is a list of typical duties of a sales manager, including daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly repeating tasks. The exact activities may vary depending on industry, company, and team culture:
Managing people
Set targets, performance plans, and rigorous, objective standards for sales representatives.
Meet with reps one-on-one weekly to review performance, progress, and targets. [Weekly]
Deliver deep performance reviews for each individual rep once or twice per year. [Semiannually or annually]
Coach individual sales representatives one-on-one through phone work and prospecting help sessions to help them improve sales performance. [Weekly]
Participate in spontaneous sales call rides and planned field days. [Semimonthly or monthly]
Counsel, support, discipline, and fire underperforming sales representatives.
Develop a scalable sales process and ensure representatives adhere to it correctly.
Ensure that reps use sales technologies, such as a CRM, correctly.
Plan and implement training programs. Hold regular skills training sessions with internal or external sales trainers. [Monthly]
Plan and preside over weekly sales team meetings. [Weekly]
Hold team building events onsite or offsite. [Monthly]
Recruit, select, onboard, and train new sales reps.
In some cases, oversee regional and local sales managers.
Motivate and engage the sales team with monetary and non-monetary (intrinsic) motivational tactics, such as sales contests, lucrative incentive packages, prizes, and public recognition.
Unite the team: Ensure reps work as a positive unit and share their best practices.
Set a good example for the team. Work according to company culture and values, prioritize ruthlessly, use good communication, and deliver results effectively.
Managing customer needs
Maintain a deep understanding of customer needs and monitor their preferences.
Resolve escalated customer issues and customer complaints regarding sales and service.
Provide expertise when setting and adjusting pricing plans and discount rates.
Provide advanced negotiation expertise.
Connect company headquarters with customers and salespeople in the field.
Managing the business
Determine and assign sales quotas, targets, and/or goals. Project and forecast annual and quarterly revenue and for one or more sales territories.
Develop sales strategies to acquire new customers or clients.
Track sales team metrics and share them with company leadership.
Analyze sales data on sales results and develop plans to address performance gaps.
Collaborate with marketing executives to develop lead generation plans.
Prepare budgets and approve expenditures.
Monitor competition, economic indicators, and industry trends.
Advance one’s own professional and technical knowledge by attending workshops and other educational trainings, participating in professional societies and industry networks, and reading professional and industry publications.
How to get promoted from sales rep to sales manager
If you are a current sales representative who is interested in getting promoted to a sales manager role, prepare early. Here are some helpful resources to point you in the right direction.
20 sales experts share how sales reps can prepare to be promoted to manager.
“Leadership skills are significantly more important than sales ability to succeed in a sales management role. If you’re looking to make yourself more attractive as a potential candidate for a sales leadership role, spend more time developing your leadership abilities and resume than your sales acumen. Take on a tough project at work. Join a board of a nonprofit or ministry. Come up with solution to a vexing problem at your company. The harsh truth is that there is very little similar about an individual producer sales role and a sales management role. It seems counterintuitive, but getting better at your existing job isn’t preparing you to get promoted.”
“Actively share sales tactics, set up lunch and learn sessions or a sales book club, volunteer to coach and mentor newer reps, etc. When you demonstrate a willingness to coach and an investment in the success of your peers, you demonstrate your ability to manage and lead a team.”
Dive deeper into what it takes to be a great sales manager. Learn about three advanced focus areas: engaging a team, retaining sales representatives, and creating a positive work culture: 3 Skill Sets Only the Best Sales Managers Possess.
Hire a sales manager: Sample Job Description Template
Hiring a sales manager for your company? A powerful and accurate job description will help you attract higher quality job seekers, get closer matches to your ideal candidate, and set shared expectations.
This is a sample B2B sales manager job description, which you can customize for your own company with the free step-by-step template guide here:
Company X provides Target Customers with Company X offering. Founded in Year and headquartered in Location, we have accomplished Accomplishment A and Accomplishment B due to our unique offering. Currently, Company X is generating an annual revenue of X dollars and is growing at a rate of X%. In the next five years, Company X plans on growing to X employees and will be an estimated worth of X dollars. Our key clients include Customer A, Customer B, and Customer C.
We are looking to hire a sales manager to hire’s objectives in the Location area. In addition, travel is expected to be X% and the compensation associated with this position is competitive with the market and will be decided during the interview process based of skills and experience.
GOALS
Manage, coach and lead a team of _ salespeople
Increase market share North America distribution by _% by the year 20__
Drive $__ of new net revenue over the first fiscal year
Maintain sales costs within __% of the target identified by the executive team
Responsible for overall sales growth of __%
RESPONSIBILITIES
Work with the senior management team to set revenue and sales goals on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis
Increase customer satisfaction ratings by __% and create innovative programs for upselling
Work with senior management to devise and implement innovative go-to-market strategies
Become a mentor to the sales team and nurture relationships with each associate in order to help them achieve their goals
EXPERIENCE
Successful experience:
Selling _______ (product/service or related product/service) to _____ (buyer/ group)
Closing __-figure deals
Managing a team of __ + salespeople
Utilizing a CRM to manage team sales tasks, pipeline, and closing
SKILLS
Demonstrated ability to hire high performing salespeople
Strong ability to coach sales reps to higher performance
Ability to accurately forecast future sales volumes
Excels at selling intangible solutions into the B2B market
Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.
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.
Great salespeople do more than just consistently drive profitable revenue for their employers. They inspire confidence in customers and partners, increase brand trust, and contribute to a positive company culture.
And, these salespeople are rare, representing only 10 to 15 percent of the sales population.
If you want to accurately identify these top salespeople in an interview you need to know:
In this video we’ve compiled the top 5 ways top performing salespeople are different from the rest:
1. They spend their time selling
Peak’s survey found a major differentiator in how the best salespeople spend their time. While top performing salespeople – those who met or exceeded quota for the past three years – indicated they spend 19 to 23 hours selling per week, average salespeople only spend 14 to 18 hours, and poor reps less than 13 hours.
These numbers demonstrate that top salespeople are spending 36 percent more time selling than the rest.
Evidently, the best sellers are focusing their time on the activity that directly generates revenue.
2. They don’t give up easily
If you’ve read Peak’s eBook, Make the Right Sales Hire Every Time, you know that top performers do not give up because they hav/sales-resources/make-the-right-sales-hire-ebook/e a burning need to achieve, see rejection as motivation, and get excited by pressure.
When surveyed, the majority of top performing salespeople indicated that they attempt to contact a lead nine or more times before finally giving up on it. On the other hand, the average and poor performers indicated that they only attempt to contact a prospect five or six times before giving up.
Other studies support that the top salespeople are doing it right. According to HubSpot, 80 percent of sales require five successful connections.
3. They are driven individuals
Several sales experts have named drive or money-motivation as the trait that sets apart great salespeople from the mediocre ones.
When asked to rate certain characteristics from unimportant to very important to sales success, 81 percent of top performing salespeople surveyed rated “driven” as “very important” and listed it as the most important trait. Consequently, only 57 percent of the average and poor performers named being driven as very important to sales success.
Drive has been named as the most important trait common to the DNA of nearly all successful salespeople, and the vast majority of top salespeople agree with this statement.
4. They think critically
As sales continues to become more of a data science, critical thinking skills are now being named in several academic articles as an essential skill for a modern-day salesperson.
58 percent of top performing salespeople surveyed rated “critical thinking” as very important to their sales success versus only 40 percent of average and poor performing salespeople.
Critical thinking skills will continue to become more and more important to sales success as more companies start embracing big data. The best sellers use their critical thinking skills to interpret data, analyze findings, and ultimately demonstrate value to prospects.
5. They are independent
When asked how many hours per week they spend with their top salespeople versus average and poor performers, sales leaders surveyed that they spend 30 minutes less in contact with their top performers per week than their average or poor performers.
Studies show that autonomy drives employees to happiness, motivation, and performance. The best sellers take initiative and try to solve their own problems first before asking a leader for help.
If you want more insights on the behaviors and characteristics of a top performing sales person, download your free copy of the comprehensive study on what differentiates the best sellers from the rest.
To find these top performers faster, you need to incorporate quantitative and objective candidate assessment tools into your recruiting process. 
With executives admitting to making the wrong hiring decision 25 percent of the time, additional steps must be taken to ensure only the highest quality salespeople are hired. 
But the task of objectively evaluating the performance potential of a candidate poses unique challenges for Human Resources (HR) Leaders due to 
It’s common for companies to leverage their market experience when making sales hiring decisions. This decision involves using gut feeling, which is a subjective and emotional form of assessment. It is often used to examine candidates and find similar qualities to their other top performers. However, using gut feeling to find these similar qualities results in identifying similar emotional traits based on bias, versus identifying objective, skill-based qualities. 
An organization who successfully focused their efforts into only bringing in the greatest talent is Instagram. In 
Experts agree that measuring quality of hire is needed both pre and post-hire. Since recruitment quality measures directly correlate with post-hire performance metrics, sales assessment tests used pre-hire aid in determining quality of hire measurements post-hire. 
Keep in mind the assessment results you receive from candidates should account for 20 percent of your overall hiring decision. Your decision should also include data from their application, resume, in-person interview, reference checks, etc.
This concept refers to people’s ability to harbor bias outside of their awareness or control. 
To further see what kind of unintentional biases you harbor, 
2. Candidates spend 20 minutes playing a series of 12 games. These games give Unilever insight into different capabilities, including personality, communication style, and problem-solving. After completing these games, candidates get a report with feedback within 48 hours.
and final step in the process. 
Having an open vacancy in your sales department for even one-day has a negative impact on your organization. With an
Understanding the negative impacts of open headcount goes beyond top-line revenue and includes sales force morale is critical. Potential decreases in rep productivity and absenteeism due to burnout are directly correlated to sales force understaffing. 
If it is your Hiring Manager who conducts the candidate review process and selects who will come in for an interview, then list on the Stakeholder List Worksheet that they have two business days to review the resumes and decide who they want to speak with directly.
Make sure you are tracking the sources of your hires and the sources of your most successful hires. You can then determine where most of your past sales hiring successes have come from.
The employee retention rate of referral based candidates is significantly higher than those hired through other channels. 
There will always be unexpected departures within the sales industry. With the application process typically taking 10.5 days, it is the organizations who are prepared that successfully recruit their new salespeople faster.
One preparatory measure you should have in place is a 
Job descriptions that focus on the benefits of working for your organization will outperform those that focus on role requirements and tasks. 
Skill Scout
Automating your screening process involves using your choice of online software, which you would attach to your job ad. Some of this software could include 
The portal provides candidates the opportunity to improve their resume, boost their interview skills, and improve their job search skills. With 98 percent of candidates registering for the portal, it can be used as a pool of candidates to contact for future roles.
Upon completion, the candidate’s information and answers would be recorded and sent to you accordingly. There are many pieces of software on the market to choose from, such as 
When you’ve selected your successful candidate and provided them with an offer, you then begin the notice period. This time period commonly happens over the course of 
Beginning someone’s training while they are in their notice period is a way for you to decrease the amount of onboarding time required. You can provide reading material on your company, your clients, and your industry, so they are well versed upon arrival. If you have online training courses, request they do these courses in advance of their first day*. 
Average managers bring their sales representatives down to their level, whereas the best sales managers bring excellence to all their territories. A great manager who inherits average salespeople know how to coach, advise, motivate, or replace reps until they have created a high performance sales force.
Some executives believe that a sales manager should continue to sell like other reps, just with higher-value accounts. However, a sales manager is most powerful when they enable their team of account executives. Their power and insight is scalable when they empower 5 to 10 reps that report to them, and more sustainable and long lasting as roles shift in the company. Successful companies minimize a sales manager’s selling responsibilities, placing the onus on the sales reps that report to them.
successful sales representative. In fact, 
“Leadership skills are significantly more important than sales ability to succeed in a sales management role. If you’re looking to make yourself more attractive as a potential candidate for a sales leadership role, spend more time developing your leadership abilities and resume than your sales acumen. Take on a tough project at work. Join a board of a nonprofit or ministry. Come up with solution to a vexing problem at your company. The harsh truth is that there is very little similar about an individual producer sales role and a sales management role. It seems counterintuitive, but getting better at your existing job isn’t preparing you to get promoted.”
“Actively share sales tactics, set up lunch and learn sessions or a sales book club, volunteer to coach and mentor newer reps, etc. When you demonstrate a willingness to coach and an investment in the success of your peers, you demonstrate your ability to manage and lead a team.”