Hard work creates opportunity and there is still lots of time to find and close net new deals. Since December marks a great time to work hard towards a strong finish for you and your team, we have compiled the ten best ways to make sure your team hits target by year end:
Communicate the Importance of the Target to the Team – all the reasons for hitting the targets may be patently obvious to every senior manager in the company, but may not be obvious at the rep level – they are more focused on their own day to day work and deals, regardless of whether they are on target. Even if the team has heard the message fifty times, it never hurts to say it again. And like a coach cheering their team on in the fourth quarter when fatigue may be setting in, you need a rallying cry (or several) to keep the energy levels high right to the finish.
Put extra focus on key deals and territories – for smaller deal sizes, review overall pipelines and daily plans to capture a high percentage of the opportunities. For enterprise sales, review the best deals that each rep has in their funnel – determine which are the most important deals, and make yourself available 24/7 to help close whatever needs to close – often reps can’t get the attention of senior management – now is the time to make sure they can. In either case, don’t be limited to what’s in the CRM as many of the good deals somehow don’t make their way in. Don’t neglect the rest of the pipeline.
Don’t let anyone quit – often there are reps who feel like they won’t make their number with only a few weeks left in the quarter. Unfortunately they stop working hard to hit their targets, especially with Christmas falling at the end of the quarter and clients taking time off. Sales leaders can’t afford for anyone to give up and try to sandbag next quarter…..watch for defeatism on your team and work with them to stay motivated to keep pushing to close deals. Encourage them to keep prospecting and act as if there is still 6 months left in the year.
Make sure everyone is practicing good discipline and work habits – with holiday season parties going on at the end of the year, reps might be staying out late at night and then coming in later missing key selling hours. You can’t afford to let them do this. You need your reps to be well rested and ready when they come into the office and you need them to start early finish late.
Reach out to all existing customers – customers are often not aware of your targets, so now is a good time to let them know you are prepared to offer the best deals for repeat business and timely purchases. You can also remind them that prices may be going up next year and buying now may in fact save them money.
Watch out for Excuses – top performers don’t make excuses, they keep fighting to succeed all the time. If someone on your team is making early excuses about why they can’t hit their numbers, you need to have a chat about expectations and their career. Of course you don’t want them to conceal issues either, so you need to make sure you are constructive so you can help them advance deals and be successful.
Monitor Activity Volumes – are calls, meetings, proposals, etc. in line with typical ratios required to hit targets? This can be your clue to deteriorating effort. Jump on any sign that people are not doing the work that leads to results.
Track Deal Slide – What percentage of forecasted deals are sliding into the next quarter? Often reps dismiss deals early in the quarter assuming they have plenty of other deals to work. Time kills deals, so any that slip may in fact be dying. Jump on these to understand why they are slipping and what you can do to close them before quarter end.
Keep the focus on the revenue target, not the news – the news easily puts negative thoughts in the heads of your reps or distracts them from what is important, which in turn it doesn’t put them in the right frame of mind to be positive in front of customers, and instill their confidence and trust. Focus on the customer and the sale. There is no certainty in the outlook and won’t be for the foreseeable future. Get over it.
Have fun – nurture the friendly competition, the bonding that occurs across the team, and smile as much as possible knowing that you are doing everything you can to win. Your customers will appreciate it and reward you.
Last point – don’t forget the importance of prospecting. It is vital that you are set up to succeed in Q1 next year by starting with a strong funnel.
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.
We have written about the importance of persistence in selling before (see The Not So Fine Line Between Persistence and Stalking in Sales). Knowing that it plays such an important role in helping to win accounts, here are some quotes to inspire one of the core most important traits of selling – persistence.
Incredible salespeople relate and provide detail, focusing on benefits rather than features.
Inspired to push your sales limits? Discover how our expertise can keep your momentum going strong!
“Energy and persistence conquer all things.”
– Benjamin Franklin
“Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.”
– Thomas Jefferson
“Knowledge will give you power, but character respect.”
– Bruce Lee
“I play golf with friends sometimes, but there are never friendly games.”
– Paul Hogan
“The real excitement is playing the game.”
– Donald Trump
“Yesterday’s home runs don’t win today’s games.”
– Babe Ruth
Why can a former shoe salesperson become the top seller on a software team? Sales is in the blood and an inescapable skill.
“Ambition is the path to success. Persistence is the vehicle you arrive in.”
– Bill Bradley
“When it’s time to go home…make one more phone call.”
– Frank Pacetta
“Because power corrupts, society’s demands for moral authority and character increase as the importance of the position increases.”
– John Adams
“I know where I’m going and I know the truth, and I don’t have to be what you want me to be.”
– Muhammad Ali
“Where you start is not as important as where you finish”
– Zig Ziglar
“The most unprofitable item ever manufactured is an excuse.”
– John Mason
Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.”
– Albert Einstein
The best listen to consumer concerns versus discussing the product or service. Making a sale requires listening and emotional intelligence.
“If you set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing.”
– Margaret Thatcher
“As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.”
– John F. Kennedy
“Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but such echoes are truly endless.”
– Mother Theresa
“Excellence is the unlimited ability to improve the quality of what you have to offer.”
– Rick Pitino
“The sure-thing boat never gets far from shore.”
– Dale Carnegie
Good salespeople know which dialogues to entertain and which to leave alone, keeping focus on consumer needs and then fulfilling them.
“Make a customer, not a sale.”
– Katherine Barchetti
“The customer’s perception is your reality.”
– Kate Zabriskie
“The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works.”
– Jeff Bezos
“Whatever we expect with confidence becomes our own self-fulfilling prophecy.”
– Brian Tracy
“Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.”
– Oprah Winfrey
“Show class; have pride; and display character. If you do, winning takes care of itself.”
– Paul Bryant
A good salesperson sees the forest through the trees and success despite immediate odds. Great salespeople run marathons rather face short challenges.
“The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed.”
– Henry Ford
“There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.”
– Beverly Sills
“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
– Michael Jordan
“Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.”
– John Wooden
“The best sales questions have your expertise wrapped into them.”
– Jill Konrath
Success means working smarter, not harder, and building successful, profitable connections. Each day brings new opportunity to strengthen existing connections and open new doors.
“Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.”
– Dale Carnegie
“Hire character. Train skill.”
– Peter Schutz
“Formula for success: rise early, work hard, strike oil.”
– J. Paul Getty
“It is not your customer’s job to remember you. It is your obligation and responsibility to make sure they don’t have the chance to forget you.”
– Patricia Fripp
“A sale is not something you pursue; it’s what happens to you while you are immersed in serving your customer.”
– Unknown
“To satisfy our customers’ needs, we’ll give them what they want, not what we want to give them.”
-Steve James
A good salesperson is a magician, a step ahead of the audience, knowing what amazes. Great products and services sell; but, great salespeople provide experience.
“The better I get, the more I realize how much better I can get.”
– Martina Navratilova
“Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes but they never quit.”
– Conrad Hilton
“Football is like life – it requires perseverance, self-denial, hard work, sacrifice, dedication and respect for authority.”
– Vince Lombardi
“Success is 99% failure.”
– Soichiro Honda
“A dream is just a dream. A goal is a dream with a plan and a deadline.”
– Harvey MacKay
“You are what you repeatedly do. Excellence is not an event – it is a habit.”
– Aristotle
*Banner photo used and modified under Creative Commons. Original photo
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.
The Vice President of Sales has the primary responsibility of delivering the right revenues; be that defined as a hard number, growth target, profit target and/or a market share goal. Secondary responsibilities include: Recruiting, Backfilling and Helping His/ Her Sales Team, Building the Sales Strategy, Devising Sales Tactics, and Creating and Selling Deals Him/Herself.
The following job description provides a baseline for any company that employs or is seeking to hire a VP Sales.
Job Description: Vice President of Sales
Company Overview
In order to ensure a powerful and enticing overview, be sure to communicate:
Company offering in a unique and compelling way (including specific products and/or service)
Marquee customers that a candidate may recognize
Headquarters and areas of operation
Annual revenue
Awards or achievements earned by your organization
Current and expected growth rates
Company culture including details on what a candidate could expect on a typical day
Company values
Details on the compensation plan
Location of position
Metrics – How success is measured
Your organization’s strategic goals for the new hire should come immediately after the overview section since they are the ultimate benchmark in determining whether or not the prospective candidate would be up to the task. Begin the section with the key metrics that indicate how your company measures performance in this role. Adding specific information such as numbers and percentage goals to the description will not only help potential candidates understand how challenging the role will be for them, but will force your hiring team to clarify the expectations attached to the new hire.
Examples of goals that are typically assigned to a VP Sales include:
Revenue (most companies if they could only have one goal achieved, would pick revenue)
Sales growth
Profit
Cost of sale
New market penetration / market share
There are many more detailed types of metrics such as ratio of new business vs. repeat business and turnover rates as well as less traditional and sales 2.0 metrics such as lead response time, rate of contact, and even social media use, but generally all plans have revenue as the top most important goal.
Responsibilities – The role’s activities
Responsibilities outline what the opportunity will be like on a day-to-day basis for the potential candidate. A compelling job description states measurable tasks that are tied to the organizations’ sales strategy and corporate objectives. Qualified candidates for a VP Sales position expect that they’ll be accountable for key performance metrics, so consider taking an opportunity in this section to add numbers that will demonstrate how challenging and exciting the opportunity is.
Examples of responsibilities in a VP of Sales job description include:
Develop plans and strategies for developing business and achieving the company’s sales goals
Create a culture of success and ongoing business and goal achievement – possibly more important than the first item on this list
Manage the sales teams, operations and resources to deliver profitable growth
Manage the use of budgets
Define optimal sales force structure
Hire and develop sales staff
Become known as an employer of choice and a sales force that top sales people want to join
Define and oversee sales staff compensation and incentive programs that motivate the sales team to achieve their sales targets
Define and coordinate sales training programs that enable staff to achieve their potential and support company sales objectives
Manage customer expectations and contribute to a high level of customer satisfaction
Define sales processes that drive desired sales outcomes and identify improvements where and when required
Put in place infrastructure and systems to support the success of the sales function
Provide detailed and accurate sales forecasting
Compile information and data related to customer and prospect interactions
Monitor customer, market and competitor activity and provide feedback to company leadership team and other company functions
Work closely with the marketing function to establish successful support, channel and partner programs
Manage key customer relationships and participate in closing strategic opportunities
Travel for in-person meetings with customers and partners and to develop key relationships
Experience – Proof the candidate is an A-player
Hiring managers frequently use experience as the core selection criteria when evaluating sales candidates. Relevant experience gives some indication of a particular candidate’s ability to perform certain tasks and can encompass a number of elements including buyer groups, technology, geography or territory, sales cycles, and deal sizes. Companies seeking a great VP Sales focus on experience that is aligned with the desired selling and management tasks stated in the responsibility section of the job description.
Examples of experience that may be included in the VP of Sales job description include:
Successful experience building a go-to-market strategy and corporate sales plan
Successful experience building and growing a channel
Successful experience selling _______ (product/service or related product/service) to _____ (buyer/group).
Successful experience closing __-figure deals
Successful experience monitoring and evaluating sales rep progress against stated expectations, in addition to aligning and changing behavior with performance expectations
Successful experience managing a team of __ + salespeople
Experience managing key customer relationships and closing strategic opportunities
Successful experience utilizing a CRM to manage team sales tasks, pipeline, and closing data
Successful experience hiring and onboarding sales representatives
Successful experience building and managing a territory (include geography if necessary)
Proven experience working within a __ (small, medium, large) company environment
Experience providing status reports with market and customer feedback to the corporate leadership team
Demonstrated ability in all aspects of sales leadership
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 is no surprise that recruiting top performing sales professionals in New York City is no easy task. Top sales people in the Big Apple do what New Yorkers do best – make money, and lots of it. To be the best of the best, requires competing and winning in arguably the most cut throat and fast-paced selling environment on the plant, where “no” or “maybe next quarter” is never an acceptable answer.
In the land of “time is money”, ‘A’ level sales people don’t spend much time considering career options or looking for work, but instead are busy pounding the phones, building relationships with key buyers from Chambers St. down to State St., and closing deals with Fortune 100 companies. This reality has given rise to one of the most common questions VP of Sales and HR Mangers are faced with when attempting to recruit in Midtown Manhattan: “how and where can my organization find ‘A’ level sales talent in New York?”
The solution should come as no surprise…
Finding top sales professionals in New York takes a significant amount of time, effort, and resources. Hiring teams must first have a concrete understanding of the skills, experience, and DNA that is required to excel in the organization’s unique selling environment, and utilize those requirements to guide the recruiting plan, including the individuals that will be targeted and how the opportunity will be presented. Not to be forgotten in this process is the impact the compensation package attached to the role has. It should influence and dictate the level of professional a hiring team targets as well as the companies they are sourced from.
What further complicates the recruiting process in New York is that there are over 100,000 sales people in Manhattan alone, with +75% of them not hitting quota year after year. This abundance of sales people creates an artificially large talent pool that is heavily diluted with ‘B’ and ‘C’ level sellers, making assessment even more arduous.
Given the reality that top sellers represent an extremely small percentage of the total sales population, particularly in New York, there is a very small likelihood that traditional recruitment efforts will yield the ideal candidate an organization wants and needs. Committing to a rigorous and structured sales hiring process will mitigate hiring risk and keep a hiring team focused on searching in the right places and for the right people.
Networking Helps Exposure to Sales Talent
It goes without saying that networking and referrals are one of the most effective ways to get exposed to high achieving sales people. Why? Because top performers are looking for something, customers.
Therefore, in order to compliment other sales recruiting efforts, here are 8 sales networking events in NYC where there is a good chance of meeting some great sales people:
NYC Enterprise Sales Meet-up: The NYC Enterprise Sales Meet-up is a group for sales people in the NYC metro area selling to large companies and involved in complex sales cycles. The ultimate purpose of this community is to create an environment where like minded professionals can not only network with peers, but learn from other industry leaders about successful selling methodologies. This group, in particular, is great for Sales Managers in the software space looking for talent that can sell complex solutions.
NYC Business Networking Group: The NYCBNG has been hosting business networking events for sales and business professionals alike for 7+ years. With more than 300 events since its inception, NYCBNG has earned a reputation as one of the premier, all around business networking groups in NYC. In fact, NYCBNG won the coveted Top 100 Small Business Influencers Award in Leadership in 2011. Membership is free, which makes it one of the busiest, and well attended business networking groups in all of the United States. While not sales specific, top sellers can be spotted attending NYCBNG events.
Swap The Biz NYC Business Networking Group: Swap invites business professionals from all boroughs to connect, share experiences, and learn selling techniques from industry leaders. With sales professionals from Fortune 500 companies, right down to late stage start-ups and everything in-between, this group is perfect for hiring managers to connect with sales professionals from a variety of selling environments.
NYC Start-up Enterprise Sales: The NYC Start-up Enterprise Sales group is targeted to professionals who are currently employed at small tech start-ups selling into large organizations, agencies, or involved in complex sales cycles of any kind. Sales/Business Development pros, founders who sell, “growth-hackers”, and anyone responsible for bringing in revenue or users to a small stage company attend these meet-ups, which makes it an extremely attractive group if adding talent that has thrived within an entrepreneurial environment has been identified as a hiring requirement.
Networking for Professionals’ High Speed Networking: This networking event is all business and about meeting as many professionals as possible. What’s great about this particular event is that attendees have access to attendee lists; including position and title prior to attending, enabling participants to conduct research and identify high quality targets.
New York Business Expo and Conference: Conferences such as the NYBEC present a unique opportunity to network with fellow sales professionals while learning new sales strategies along the way. One of the underrated aspects of networking at conferences in particular is that it exposes candidates from across the country. This is particularly important when recruiting for remote roles, or if there are plans for expanding into a new territory outside of the New York City or Tri-state area.
Manhattan Chamber of Commerce: The Manhattan Chamber of Commerce (MCC) is a vibrant business membership organization comprised of a cross section of 10,000 business members and subscribers ranging from sole proprietors to large corporations and multi-national firms. While this is a paid membership organization, it offers a great way to connect with entrepreneurs, sales leaders and executives from throughout Manhattan.
Whine & Dine Networking: The Whine & Dine Human Resources Networking Group was founded in 2003 with a simple concept – to advance professional and social networking for Human Resources professionals without the burden of excessive rules or requirements and to support the HR community everywhere. With more than 10,000 members across the east coast, it has become one of the hottest networking groups for HR leaders to meet new talent.
By attending these events, hiring managers have a unique opportunity to meet with ‘passive’ candidates in an informal setting, where candidates can be evaluated against hiring criteria without even having to mention the opportunity at hand. Moreover, developing relationships with established professionals enables hiring managers to more quickly and easily respond to future hiring requirements and gain access to their own networks of contacts. Our team, are, of course, proponents of the ‘ABR’ or ‘Always Be Recruiting’ philosophy, since having a strong talent pipeline, especially in New York, is critical to the long term success of any business.
To your sales hiring success!
P.S. Are you frustrated by high sales turnover, poor rep performance and missed sales targets? This FREE eBook detailing the 10 most costly sales hiring mistakes is the answer.
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.
A few years ago, sales expert Colleen Francis and I were talking about how persistence is a double edged sword that can help but also hinder sales results. Now a recent experience reminds me that the line is not always so fine at all – sometimes the line is very clear.
Persistence is an important contributor to sales success. Research shows that 40-50% of sales people give up pursuing a prospect after one rejection. Yet another 20-25% of sales people give up after hearing “no” twice and by the time a prospect has provided 4 rejections of a proposal, a full 90% of sales people will have stopped pursuing the sale.
Some people might be annoyed by the notion of follow-up calls from a sales person after an offer is rejected, but research indicates that 80% of non-routine sales occur after a prospect has rejected a proposal four times! Furthermore, more than 60% of sales occur more than three months after a prospect asks for information and 20% of sales will take 12 months to occur, so it follows that sales people who achieve superior results are often the ones that simply keep pursuing opportunities long after their competition have given up trying. Simply put, it can pay huge dividends to be persistent in sales.
When you consider that 80% of prospects say “no” four times before they say “yes”, the inference is that 8% of sales people are getting 80% of the sales. Robert Clay, founder of Marketing Wizdom – Why 8% of sales people get 80% of the sales
My own selling experience over the years supports the theory that persistence pays. I have won many sales after an initial rejection and in fact had many prospects tell me that appreciated that I got back to them multiple times after an initial dismissal of my proposals. In some cases, I have even developed strong personal relationships with people who claim they got to know me as a result of my tenacity.
Double Edged Sword
Staying in touch with a prospect that initially rejects an offer can be very useful, but if the “don’t give up” research is taken literally, a sales person will end up doing more damage than good.
As an example, I recently had an ongoing interaction with a services vendor who was following up after a meeting with me. The vendor sent several emails and left phone messages asking me when I would meet with them again to entertain their proposal. I responded by indicating that I was too busy at the moment, but would follow up when it was a priority. Afterwards I received several more calls and emails to which I did not respond.
Some people might have been put off by this point, but I let it go on because I think his heart is in the right place (trying to serve me) and because a part of me appreciates the effort. Then, after about 10 unanswered messages over the course of a few weeks, some of them literally hours apart and some of them quite blunt in challenging my decision not to buy his services, I decided to inform him that I felt he was either not listening to me when I communicated my priorities and/or he didn’t care. His response was to send me a long email justifying his selling tactics by explaining that experience has taught him that he knows better about his customer’s best interests than they do. He also said that he would refrain from contacting me in the future until I contacted him. I didn’t reply, but he broke his commitment within one week by sending me another unsolicited email.
Obviously this is an extreme case of over-persistence, but it serves to illustrate that there is a point at which there are diminishing returns in pursuing a potential buyer. Instead of winning a sale, repeatedly asking me to buy has only served to ensure that I call one of this sales person’s competitors when I need the services he offers. And I am likely to use him as an example of how not to sell.
No Means No
In my own selling activities, I have always been careful to listen to what my prospects are telling me and to be respectful of their wishes. There is a big difference between “not interested right now, but maybe later” and “not interested now and not ever.” The latter response to an offer is an absolute NO which requires that pursuit be terminated.
Sometimes there is no fine line between persistence and stalking – too much is too much. After a proposal is rejected, it is up to the sales person to determine when there is still an opportunity with a prospect or not, but acting with respect towards a prospect can help keep opportunities alive. On the other hand, if a prospect feels that they are not being heard, that they are being pestered, or worse yet, that they are being stalked,then the chances of making a sale drop considerably if not completely.
People Buy From People
To use persistence to drive more sales, a sales person has to treat people the way they want to be treated rather than putting the sales agenda before that of their prospect. In between rejections from a prospect, a sales person has to build the relationship and create trust with the prospect. Then, and only then, when a prospect changes their mind about a purchase, will they be likely to say yes to the sales person who stayed around after the other sales people gave up.
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.
Recruiting high achieving sales professionals onto your sales team is no simple task for a few simple reasons:
They are rare,
They are employed, not looking for a new job, and are constantly receiving offers from competing employers.
Overcoming these challenges takes significant effort and commitment, but the investment is justified by the superior results that top sales talent delivers.
Leading employers understand the value of attracting great salespeople and leverage many tactics to tilt the odds in their favor.
Here are the Top 10 Factors for a Successful Sales Recruitment Project:
1. Ensure Decision Maker Alignment:
Before approaching and engaging candidates, it is critical that your hiring team is aligned on the hiring criteria that all candidate’s must possess in order to be considered for the role.
It is imperative that the decision makers involved in the hiring process be united around:
The key performance metrics and success criteria associated with the role and;
What the long term expectations for the new salesperson will be.
Having a concrete understanding of these requirements from the start enables the hiring team to be more efficient and results in engaging the right salespeople, faster.
2. Create an Ideal Candidate Profile:
Once you and the rest of your hiring team are 100% aligned on the role’s KPIs, working to construct the ‘ideal candidate profile’ becomes one of the most important factors that will determine the success of your recruiting project. This profile, which paints a picture of the perfect candidate and breaks down the required competencies into 3 sections (skills, experience, and DNA), should direct not only where you look for candidates but also influence how you evaluate them.
3. Properly Articulate the Opportunity:
In order to attract the best, you must be able to present the opportunity as just that — an opportunity for the candidate to advance their career and achieve their financial objective. Many job descriptions include both a list of duties and qualifications, however Peak endorses job descriptions that are focused on key metrics, goals, and quantifiable objectives (for an example, check out our Job Description of an Account Executive).
We strongly advise, however, that you don’t let your opportunity profile (we don’t support the use of the word ‘job description’) speak entirely for the role. Instead, have direct managers and senior company leadership speak to candidate about what makes this an exciting role that a candidate cannot pass on.
Identify the opportunity for professional and personal growth that can take place, and if your company isn’t a name brand, articulate how it is disrupting the marketplace and working to become one of the world’s top companies. As Aaron Ross correctly states, “ignoring softer but more powerful forms of rewards such as respect, appreciation, and fun,” represents one of the fatal mistakes CEOs, Sales VPs, and HR executives make when hiring new talent.
For more information on what attract companies need to do to attract top sales talent. Read this article.
4. Be open to different backgrounds:
We often find that job descriptions are created that require candidates to have certain qualifications. Experience tells us that the typical hiring requirements of most firms have little to do with sales success. In fact, some of these “need to have” conditions adversely limit the pool of candidates and reduce the chances of making a great sales hire.
Put your focus on the exact profile that determines success within your selling environment and set aside unnecessary metrics or qualifications that might allow under-qualified candidates to enter your hiring process. And remember that the right sales DNA — character and behavioral traits — often outsell the right career credentials, so be open to salespeople who can achieve or exceed your targets vs. the ones with the right resume.
Since top salespeople get a lot of attention from potential employers, they will quickly lose interest in an employer that doesn’t fight for their attention. You risk compromising your chances of hooking the best sales people if you act like they are lucky to be in contact with you.
Do court the candidate. Do not fail to proactively express positive interest, cancel interviews (or not show up at all), not follow-up after the interviews, provide little or no positive feedback, make the candidate wait a considerable time before meeting them, and/or anything that says that making a great hire or hiring them is not a priority.
Great salespeople are actively and gainfully employed and aren’t typically looking for new opportunities. It takes time to not only find the best, but convincing them that making a career move would be in their interest is a difficult task in and of itself. Not to mention the time it takes to further assess them to ensure they fit with your selling environment. Unfortunately, there is no quick way around this, but the return on your investment is considerable so it literally pays to be patient.
7. Embrace Regular Communication:
Regular and open communication with your internal and/or external recruiters about changes in hiring requirements, the quality of candidates you are seeing, or even about things such as your availability to interview candidates can make or break your sales hiring efforts. When communication is made a priority in your recruiting plan, necessary changes can be made in real time and solutions to challenges can be actively developed and deployed.
8. Embrace a Structured Interview Process:
Most interviewers prepare for interviews in the moments right before an interview takes place. This introduces the risk that lack of preparation, mood, and other emotional or irrational, non-related factors will compromise an objective assessment of the candidate. By having a set interview process that asks strong sales specific questions, you mitigate the risk that arises from an unstructured, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants interview process.
9. Provide Above Market Compensation:
While financial compensation is not the only factor when top salespeople consider a change of employment, it is certainly a major factor and often the most significant. Enticing a top performer to leave an employer to join your company will often require paying at or above market. Ensuring that your team has agreed upon a compensation package that is inline with the market (and not overly complicated) makes it easier to land ‘A’ level talent while saving you time and effort.
World class employers understand that the best salespeople will only work for them if they are able to articulate how the salesperson will be set up for success. This means being able to demonstrate:
How other reps achieve targets and how they have performed against their sales targets to date;
A structured on-boarding process that establishes key accomplishments to be met over the first 30,60, and 90 days;
Mapping out what new hire development and support activities will be undertaken to ensure the rep becomes productive as quickly as possible;
Providing training on your organization, products, the market, sales systems, branding and marketing strategy, tools and support.
Take these factors into consideration prior to engaging in your sales recruiting project and commit to not cutting corners, and your chances of success will increase tenfold.
To your sales hiring success!
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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.
Stacking a sales team with great talent is one of the toughest jobs a sales manager will face. The constant pressure to meet immediate goals creates a natural barrier to being patient and waiting for the right person. Participating in a discussion on LinkedIn recently reminded me that many sales managers don’t believe that great sales people even exist, and that, as a result, recruiting should be pushed down their priority list.
Running to Stand Still
In my early days as a sales manager, selling large enterprise level web content management solutions for GlobalX back in the mid 90’s, we worked our butts off to compete with very well financed start-ups such as Vignette, Opentext and Interwoven. My team had a mixed bag of reps – some at and some below targets, but I spent a lot of my time managing some under-performing reps on my team and trying to train them to be better. Some days I was helping my reps focus, other days it was helping them create account plans and sometimes it was literally helping them write properly. The time I invested in these reps usually didn’t translate to better sales numbers and because I didn’t know any better at the time, I wondered if I was simply a poor manager, not able to inspire the right results in my team.
I probably wasn’t much of a sales manager, but the point I am trying to make is that I really had no clear idea whether the problem was me or my reps. Looking back, it is clear to me now that it was a combination of both, but I had not set myself up to succeed because I had not been careful to hire sales success DNA onto my team.
Naively, not only did I not realize hiring sales talent was a priority, but I also didn’t realize that hiring great sales people was an option. Whenever we tried to hire someone, we seemed to attract a certain caliber of sales people applying for our positions – either journeymen who were out of work and had no choice, but to accept the risk of a start-up, or hot shots who knew the Internet (a key thing in the early days) but who had no track record of success. For me, it seemed replacing the weaker sales reps I had would only result in hiring the same types over again and bring about the same poor performance and management challenges.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that my refusal to be proactive about sales hiring was taking a huge toll on our sales numbers.
Reactive Sales Hiring is Painful
At any point in time, there will always be a percentage of reps on any team that are missing their targets. Even on the best teams there are typically 20% of reps below target. In some companies the number is much higher. In any event, a savvy sales manager expects this and factors this into their sales projections, but what do they do about reps that are consistently missing targets? My approach has always been to try all ways to motivate the employee to get better before cutting bait. I would rather develop a sales person I already have on my team and know than invest the big effort in finding a new one. But at a certain point, if I can’t motivate the right behaviours and results then I will accept that we aren’t meant to be together and I’ll trigger a separation.
It makes little sense to spend the time and money training and developing your sales team when the people in whom you are investing do not have the capability for sustainable improvement. ….“Mishiring” is an epidemic. Depending on the industry, ESR estimates that somewhere between 20 and 33 percent of salespeople do not have the capabilities to be successful at their jobs. Investing in sales processes, training, attractive incentive plans, technology, marketing support and strong products and services to sell will not do much unless you have a team of qualified sales professionals with the right attributes. (Check out Dave Stein’s article If You Want Sales Training to Work, Get the Right People on the Team)
Avoiding Inevitable Change
Too infrequently in practice, is the “hire slow, fire fast” philosophy followed. Many sales managers will hang on to reps long past the point where it is time to let go. Sales people are an optimistic bunch, so in some cases there may be honest hope to turn things around, but hope is not a good strategy. If a rep is consistently mediocre or worse, the pressure to make a change will mount over time until eventually making a change is unavoidable.
When a performance problem has been permitted to persist for a long time, ultimately forcing a rep to be released from their employment, the sales manager is often more desperate than ever to find a replacement who can generate much needed sales ASAP.
You can’t train employees to be great people. Hire great people. And they’ll take care of your customers. It’s that simple.” Cameron Herold – You Can’t Train Employees to Be Great
Proactive Sales Hiring
Going back to my own early experiences in sales management, I will admit that I placed a low priority on sales recruiting, treating it like a fire that needed to be fought every now and then. I was conditioned to expect poor results and also felt that the level of effort was out of line with the return.
Hiring great sales people is an arduous process. First you have to get exposed to the right people, which requires effort since they are working and not looking at or responding to job ads. Secondly, you have to convince the sales person that what your company offers is better than what they currently have, and you will have to deal with some skepticism. Thirdly, you have to deal with the reality that some have non-competes, and lastly you have to wait while they resign from their current employer which may involve a long termination period, handoffs, staying to collect quarterly bonuses and/or closing maturing deals. This all takes time and time is something the sales manager who needs to make a quick hire does not have. Simply put, if you have to make an immediate hire, then hiring the best sales people is going to be a frustrating experience.
That is to say, recruiting great sales people will be frustrating if you have to hire quickly unless, you have established a system for attracting sales talent even when you are not hiring. Such a system needs to include ways to get the attention of high achieving sales sales people, passive candidates, who are actively working for other employers. Most of the things you do to attract top sales talent are also the same things you do to attract great customers:
Becoming known as en employer of choice
Great PR
Direct recruiting
Hiring a specialized recruiter to target top sales talent
If attracting strong sales people is a primary driver of sales success (which most experts agree), then shouldn’t recruiting be a top priority?
As I gained experience as a sales manager, I came to realize that by hiring a better breed of sales people, I would spend less time managing in the weeds, and could more effortlessly deliver my numbers. But this took effort. It takes a commitment to hiring and regular investment in attracting the right people to sales team. In my case, that meant it was on my list of things to work on every week and we worked hard to address the areas mentioned above to attract great sales talent.
What amount of attention to sales recruiting is the right amount? When I recently asked the EVP of sales in a national telecomm company, he told me that he spends 90% of his time working on deals contributing to the current quarter’s goals and 10% of his time on strategy and future planning which includes sales recruiting.
Sales expert Colleen Francis, on the other hand, is more explicit about the priority of hiring on the sales manager’s list of responsibilities:
You say it to your sales team all the time: “ABC. Always Be Closing.” Well, as a sales leader, I’d recommend that you adopt a slightly different mantra for yourself: ABR: Always Be Recruiting. 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.” Recruiting Great Sales People
The right answer probably has a lot to do with your company’s programs to attract talent. A large, established company is likely to have the profile to attract a steady stream of job applicants and an HR department actively working to recruit on behalf of the sales manager, while a sales manager in a smaller company may have to do the recruiting themselves and should be on the lookout for good sales people 24/7.
In either case, if a sales manager doesn’t make sales recruiting a top priority, then they are likely be disappointed with the quality of sales hires they are able to make. And a sales manager that cannot consistently attract great sales people is unlikely to be able to consistently deliver great results.
To your success!
Photo Credit: nocas via Compfight cc
Running to Stand Still
In my early days as a sales manager, selling large enterprise level web content management solutions for GlobalX back in the mid 90’s, we worked our butts off to compete with very well financed start-ups such as Vignette, Opentext and Interwoven. My team had a mixed bag of reps – some at and some below targets, but I spent a lot of my time managing some under-performing reps on my team and trying to train them to be better. Some days I was helping my reps focus, other days it was helping them create account plans and sometimes it was literally helping them write properly. The time I invested in these reps usually didn’t translate to better sales numbers and because I didn’t know any better at the time, I wondered if I was simply a poor manager, not able to inspire the right results in my team.
I probably wasn’t much of a sales manager, but the point I am trying to make is that I really had no clear idea whether the problem was me or my reps. Looking back, it is clear to me now that it was a combination of both, but I had not set myself up to succeed because I had not been careful to hire sales success DNA onto my team.
Naively, not only did I not realize hiring sales talent was a priority, but I also didn’t realize that hiring great sales people was an option. Whenever we tried to hire someone, we seemed to attract a certain caliber of sales people applying for our positions – either journeymen who were out of work and had no choice, but to accept the risk of a start-up, or hot shots who knew the Internet (a key thing in the early days) but who had no track record of success. For me, it seemed replacing the weaker sales reps I had would only result in hiring the same types over again and bring about the same poor performance and management challenges.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that my refusal to be proactive about sales hiring was taking a huge toll on our sales numbers.
Reactive Sales Hiring is Painful
At any point in time, there will always be a percentage of reps on any team that are missing their targets. Even on the best teams there are typically 20% of reps below target. In some companies the number is much higher. In any event, a savvy sales manager expects this and factors this into their sales projections, but what do they do about reps that are consistently missing targets? My approach has always been to try all ways to motivate the employee to get better before cutting bait. I would rather develop a sales person I already have on my team and know than invest the big effort in finding a new one. But at a certain point, if I can’t motivate the right behaviours and results then I will accept that we aren’t meant to be together and I’ll trigger a separation.
It makes little sense to spend the time and money training and developing your sales team when the people in whom you are investing do not have the capability for sustainable improvement. ….“Mishiring” is an epidemic. Depending on the industry, ESR estimates that somewhere between 20 and 33 percent of salespeople do not have the capabilities to be successful at their jobs. Investing in sales processes, training, attractive incentive plans, technology, marketing support and strong products and services to sell will not do much unless you have a team of qualified sales professionals with the right attributes. (Check out Dave Stein’s article If You Want Sales Training to Work, Get the Right People on the Team)
Avoiding Inevitable Change
Too infrequently in practice, is the “hire slow, fire fast” philosophy followed. Many sales managers will hang on to reps long past the point where it is time to let go. Sales people are an optimistic bunch, so in some cases there may be honest hope to turn things around, but hope is not a good strategy. If a rep is consistently mediocre or worse, the pressure to make a change will mount over time until eventually making a change is unavoidable.
When a performance problem has been permitted to persist for a long time, ultimately forcing a rep to be released from their employment, the sales manager is often more desperate than ever to find a replacement who can generate much needed sales ASAP.
“You can’t train employees to be great people. Hire great people. And they’ll take care of your customers. It’s that simple.” Cameron Herold – You Can’t Train Employees to Be Great
Proactive Sales Hiring
Going back to my own early experiences in sales management, I will admit that I placed a low priority on sales recruiting, treating it like a fire that needed to be fought every now and then. I was conditioned to expect poor results and also felt that the level of effort was out of line with the return.
Hiring great sales people is an arduous process. First you have to get exposed to the right people, which requires effort since they are working and not looking at or responding to job ads. Secondly, you have to convince the sales person that what your company offers is better than what they currently have, and you will have to deal with some skepticism. Thirdly, you have to deal with the reality that some have non-competes, and lastly you have to wait while they resign from their current employer which may involve a long termination period, handoffs, staying to collect quarterly bonuses and/or closing maturing deals. This all takes time and time is something the sales manager who needs to make a quick hire does not have. Simply put, if you have to make an immediate hire, then hiring the best sales people is going to be a frustrating experience.
That is to say, recruiting great sales people will be frustrating if you have to hire quickly unless, you have established a system for attracting sales talent even when you are not hiring. Such a system needs to include ways to get the attention of high achieving sales sales people, passive candidates, who are actively working for other employers. Most of the things you do to attract top sales talent are also the same things you do to attract great customers:
Becoming known as en employer of choice
Great PR
Direct recruiting
Hiring a specialized recruiter to target top sales talent
If attracting strong sales people is a primary driver of sales success (which most experts agree), then shouldn’t recruiting be a top priority?
As I gained experience as a sales manager, I came to realize that by hiring a better breed of sales people, I would spend less time managing in the weeds, and could more effortlessly deliver my numbers. But this took effort. It takes a commitment to hiring and regular investment in attracting the right people to sales team. In my case, that meant it was on my list of things to work on every week and we worked hard to address the areas mentioned above to attract great sales talent.
What amount of attention to sales recruiting is the right amount? When I recently asked the EVP of sales in a national telecomm company, he told me that he spends 90% of his time working on deals contributing to the current quarter’s goals and 10% of his time on strategy and future planning which includes sales recruiting.
Sales expert Colleen Francis, on the other hand, is more explicit about the priority of hiring on the sales manager’s list of responsibilities:
“You say it to your sales team all the time: “ABC. Always Be Closing.” Well, as a sales leader, I’d recommend that you adopt a slightly different mantra for yourself: ABR: Always Be Recruiting. 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.” Recruiting Great Sales People
The right answer probably has a lot to do with your company’s programs to attract talent. A large, established company is likely to have the profile to attract a steady stream of job applicants and an HR department actively working to recruit on behalf of the sales manager, while a sales manager in a smaller company may have to do the recruiting themselves and should be on the lookout for good sales people 24/7.
In either case, if a sales manager doesn’t make sales recruiting a top priority, then they are likely be disappointed with the quality of sales hires they are able to make. And a sales manager that cannot consistently attract great sales people is unlikely to be able to consistently deliver great results.
To your success!
Photo Credit: nocas via Compfight cc
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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.
A few days back I was having a conversation with a B2B startup exec who is in the process of building out a sales team. The company provides a tech solution to a niche market and the primary trait the company is using to filter potential sales candidates is experience selling technology to the market being targeted – the strategy being that such a salesperson would possess a network of contacts which enable them to generate sales very quickly.
The Rolodex Sales Hiring Strategy
The desire to hire someone with a great network and book of business is pretty common. At Peak, this requirement is a part of probably half of the B2B sales recruiting inquiries we receive. Can anyone blame an employer for wanting to hire someone who can generate sales immediately upon being hired? It often works. Particularly in industries where relationships are paramount and there is limited turnover in buyer organizations. Good luck getting a construction company or a military supplier to hire an account exec without industry experience (I have learned first-hand it can be folly to try).
But there are many sectors that are less static and in which buyers change jobs and employers regularly. How much value is a rolodex worth if “friendly” buyers are regularly replaced by buyers who may have allegiances with alternative vendors? The answer is not much unless there is concerted effort to maintain relevant contacts in every customer organization.
Moreover, in many companies procurement processes such as open tendering and selection committees strive to select vendors based on merits and thus neutralize the explicit value of relationships. When a sales person changes from one vendor to another, deep relationships with buyers may be useful for opening the door, but won’t help in closing business unless the offering is superior to that of the competition.
And perhaps the largest challenge inherent in hiring someone with a specific resume and set of experiences, is that it considerably narrows the pool of talent upon which to draw, which in turn creates a sellers (as in candidate’s market). Using the defense industry as an example, Peak has been involved in several searches for account executives selling into the defense sector where our customers needed us to find sales people who had sold very specific products and services to very specific customers. We successfully recruited the candidates, but when the number of sales people in the world who qualify for a specific position can be counted on one hand, the recruiting employer is going to have little negotiating leverage with the candidate on matters such as compensation and may have to compromise on key issues such as culture fit – at a certain level the employer has to take what they can get, since the number of candidates simply isn’t large enough to be picky. This may seem like an extreme example but it is not grossly out of line with the situation that many employers will face where there will be a total of 10 or maybe 20 sales reps who qualify with the right resume.
Sales DNA Hiring Strategy
The alternative to hiring based on experience is hiring based on sales DNA and here’s what I know from close to 30 years of sales and management experience: sales DNA almost always beats the resume. With the exception of rare instances, some of which detailed above, where domain experience and relationships are critical and hard to acquire, the right DNA, meaning personal character traits, find a way to get the job done.
Sales DNA almost always beats the resume
When we study the character traits of top performing sales people across different industry sectors, we see traits such as ambition, competitiveness, sense of urgency, confidence, perseverance, optimism, resilience, ability and desire to influence others. These intangible, but highly critical traits are what drive high achieving sales people to be successful. They are what allow top sales people to make good judgements, create good luck for themselves and capitalize on opportunities that average sales people miss.
These are also the traits that allow a door to door dictionary sales person to beg their way onto a software sales team and then become the number one sales person in a matter of months. True story. These are also the traits that allow a person selling shoes come into a company selling VOIP systems and become the perennial sales leader. Another true story. These are also the traits that enable a person with a tech sales background to come into a construction company desperate for new sales and drive new sales growth. Yet another true story.
I have seen this story played out countless times. The right sales DNA finds a way to succeed. The right sales DNA acquires the requisite knowledge quickly, figures out who they need to know and makes the connections. While they may not have a rolodex in theory, they are able to get to the buyers and influencers and find ways to make themselves indispensable, ergo building the relationships they need.
The biggest upside of hiring based on sales DNA is that the talent pool is exponentially larger than if hiring based on sector experience. So rather than being limited to a small number of candidates that qualify, an employer is in a far better position to hire someone that fits the comp plan and more importantly, is a fit with the employer’s values and culture, which is the primary basis for a long and successful relationship with a sales hire.
DNA vs. Resume?
Every sales situation is unique and each sales manager will know whether their sales team members really have to have the sector experience in order to be successful, but in my experience, more often than not, sector experience is not the determining factor in who is at the top of the sales team leaderboard.
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.
There is a lot to like in the latest book we are reviewing, Nonstop Sales Boom, by Colleen Francis.
First of all, this is not simply a sales book. This is a book about avoiding the boom-bust cycles that are a major stress on many businesses and creating systems that will drive consistent business growth over the long term.
Second of all, this book is not written by a sales consultant who sits on the sidelines theorizing. Having worked with Colleen in several accounts, we know that she rolls up her sleeves and applies these systems and techniques to deliver real results.The book picks up where Francis’ last book, Honesty Sells, left off and there is a theme of transparency and partnering with customers to make real contributions to their success. Over the years, I have read hundreds of sales books, and the value of integrity is critical for me to appreciate any of a book’s contents. Life is too short for tricks, manipulations or anything other than helping others be successful, particularly paying customers.
There is a mix of classic and progressive sales advice in this book, but where Nonstop Sales Boom book really excels is providing common-sense and actionable advice in the context of a modern sales world where buyers have unprecedented access to information which translates to leverage over competing sellers.
Booming Companies
Francis argues that top performing sales teams and companies share several key characteristics:
They view customers beyond the current transaction
They are driven by metrics, beyond the most basic ones such as quota
They ensure that 80% or more of the sales force is at target – underperformers are coached or removed
They rigorously manage, monitor and renew product and service lines to create exceptional customer experiences
They consistently meet forecasts
Business Growth
Sales leaders and business owners interested in long term growth, will find a couple of key concepts presented in the book:
Sales Radar – to compliment the sales funnel, the Sales Radar, characterizes prospects more holistically as business growth opportunities rather than the way they are traditionally tracked, as individual transactions. There are four quadrants in the Sales Radar – Attraction, Participation, Growth and Leverage – and the book is organized around each of these concepts.
Ubiquitous Prospecting – Never more relevant than now is the adage that people like to buy, but don’t like to be sold. In this context, driving demand and creating the conditions for buying are critical. Colleen presents a model for companies and sales people to achieve high visibility with ideal customer prospects, including direct methods such as cold calling and email as well as indirect methods such as social media and speaking.
The book rounds out with a section on the organization and support required for ongoing sales growth. Francis expresses the importance of enforcing a high performance culture, suggesting that “sales managers who do not enforce high performance are the worst performers of all” and that sales managers need to be diligent about weeding out under-performers from the sales force – “find the best, remove the rest.”
With lots of real world examples to support her ideas and actionable advice, Francis’s book is a must read for sales managers and business leaders interested in achieving long term growth and success.
Find Colleen Francis on the web at Engage Selling and on Twitter at @EngageColleen. You will also find her book on Amazon via the link below.
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.
We see it all the time. A great sales candidate meets with a prospective employer who rejects the candidate and elects to hire someone else. Oftentimes the reasons are legitimate – such as poor cultural fit – but many times, there are no logical reasons for the decision not to consider the candidate who would in all likelihood otherwise be a strong producer.
When reliable sales talent is in such high demand because it is so important to the success of any business, excluding great sales candidates from the hiring process for the wrong reasons is a real issue. There are several reasons why this happens:
Top Performing Sales People Are Different – If you spend any time with sales people who consistently perform at or above targets, you will quickly see they are different than the average sales person. The over-achievers possess higher drive and ambition, are more competitive, and exude confidence. While these are the traits that lead to sales success, they can be misinterpreted as liabilities, as Joseph Skursky noted in his post, Sales Thoroughbreds: The Key to Winning New Business, “the very nature and intensity of a hunter’s personality frequently turns off some recruiters and people in HR.”
Top Sales Talent Is Rare – As Colleen Francis points out in her book, Nonstop Sales Boom, only 20% of reps consistently hit well above their targets. Since the vast majority of applicants and the majority of sales people employed are average or below average sales people (see John Kearny’s post, Is Your Talent Hurting Your Sales Initiatives?), hiring managers are often not conditioned to spot them and instead are looking for more of what they are used to – average sales people.
High Producing Sales People Are Employed – Great sales candidates are not sitting at home waiting for a call from a new employer. Sales people who are consistently at or above target are busy producing sales for another employer. And being paid well to do so. Any employer trying to recruit one of these may find that they may not be as enthusiastic as another unemployed candidate who desperate for a job; any job. Often enthusiasm is mistaken for ability and a hiring manager focuses on the sales person they can easily hire rather than the sales person that will produce the desired sales results.
Broken Hiring Processes – In many companies, the hiring process is disjointed. Multiple people are involved in the hiring decision without clear and shared hiring criteria. This leads to confusion about the traits the employer is seeking and some great candidates can get nixed because someone misunderstands the hiring needs. Furthermore, it is often the case that people involved in the interview and hiring process have no formal training on how to interview or select candidates (in case you need it, here are some tips on how to interview sales candidates). As sales expert Dave Stein points out, “a key to successful hiring is objectivity. Hiring salespeople on gut feel, the old-fashioned way, doesn’t work.”
It takes a lot of hard work and effort to attract and hire great sales people. High producing sales organizations know that the odds of attracting sales talent is greatly increased when top performing sales people are immediately recognized and given the attention they deserve.
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 is no surprise that recruiting top performing sales professionals in New York City is no easy task. Top sales people in the Big Apple do what New Yorkers do best – make money, and lots of it. To be the best of the best, requires competing and winning in arguably the most cut throat and fast-paced selling environment on the plant, where “no” or “maybe next quarter” is never an acceptable answer.
A few years ago, sales expert Colleen Francis and I were talking about how persistence is a double edged sword that can help but also hinder sales results. Now a recent experience reminds me that the line is not always so fine at all – sometimes the line is very clear.
Stacking a sales team with great talent is one of the toughest jobs a sales manager will face. The constant pressure to meet immediate goals creates a natural barrier to being patient and waiting for the right person. Participating in a discussion on LinkedIn recently reminded me that many sales managers don’t believe that great sales people even exist, and that, as a result, recruiting should be pushed down their priority list.
We see it all the time. A great sales candidate meets with a prospective employer who rejects the candidate and elects to hire someone else. Oftentimes the reasons are legitimate – such as poor cultural fit – but many times, there are no logical reasons for the decision not to consider the candidate who would in all likelihood otherwise be a strong producer.