Many companies have a undisciplined approach to sales hiring: the approach changes depending on the urgency of the hire, the availability of candidates and the mood of the hiring team. It is no surprise that no more 50% of sales people meet targets in most sectors.

Look around and you will see a direct correlation between the amount of structure in a company’s hiring process and the percentage of reps at target. Structure leads to results.

As an example, one of our customers is a national-level company that invested in Peak’s structured sales recruiting system last year after having gone through several years of mediocre sales results. The problem could be traced back to an odd mixture of different types of sales people in the sales function – many of which didn’t have the traits required to successfully sell for our customer. Despite best intentions, there were no hiring systems in place, so across the company sales people were selected by hiring managers with no training and no clear or consistent approach to hiring winners.

Here is why a structured sales hiring process works:

1. Better Hire – having a clear picture of skills and DNA that are required as well as a standard set of screening and interviewing techniques will radically enhance the chances of consistently hiring the right person and this alone might be the only reason to structure your hiring process.

2. Saves Time – with structure, there is less time spent interviewing the wrong people, or second guessing assumptions and having more meetings than are necessary to make a hiring decision.

3. Stay on Plan – if the hiring process is ad-hoc, hiring managers are likely to modify the hiring criteria on the fly, which leads to hiring a person that doesn’t support the sales plan. Documented requirements and evaluation techniques act as a communication tool and keep everyone involved in the hiring process focused on making the right hire.

Even a little structure in the sales hiring process will have a positive impact on sales hiring results and a highly structured approach will virtually guarantee that a company makes the right sales hire every time.

To learn more about this see our guide Make the Right Sales Hire Every Time.

To your success!

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Eliot Burdett

CEO at Peak Sales Recruiting

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.

Connect:

Latest posts by Eliot Burdett (see all)

• 20 Of Our Favorite Books About Sales Management and Sales Leadership – October 20, 2023
• How To Make Progress On Your Sales Goal Without A Sales Leader – September 15, 2021
• Augment Your Recruiting Strategy During “The Great Resignation” – July 26, 2021

Some interviewing guru’s believe that the best way to evaluate a person’s suitability for a high pressure sales role is to put them in stressful situations during the interview process to predict how they might react in real world sales scenarios.

If you are accustomed to recruiting perennial top performers who are gainfully employed, then you face a challenging dilemma: do you roll out the red carpet to make them comfortable with you and want to work for you or do you put them through a series of hard tests which may result in a loss of enthusiasm about joining your company?

The answer is both. To make sure you hire a top performer you need to perform an accurate and objective assessment and you need to “romance” the candidate so they choose to leave their current job. How do achieve that balance?

Here are three ways to deal with this:

1. Use Assessment Tests – leave the tough profiling to someone else, by using personality/behavioral trait assessments that will independently and objectively characterize your candidates. Compare the feedback to your own notes to make the right hire.

2. Hire a Recruiter – Candidates know that companies that can afford a retained recruiter are often the ones you want to work for so they will let the recruiter perform their various assessments to qualify candidates. Once that work is done, you get a fully qualified candidate and you can focus on enticing them to leave their current role.

3. Develop Rapport and then Perform the Evaluation – When a candidate is inducted into your screening process, start with a warm somewhat neutral stance, build the relationship and let them know this is a competition and you want to know why they think they should be selected to join your company. Most top sales performers will react positively to this challenge and see this as an opportunity to sell themselves at which point you get to ask them tough questions or put them through hoops.

You have to walk a fine line to properly assess a candidate while developing a relationship with them. It can’t be all roses, but on the other hand almost all great candidates are going to be working and have other options and won’t want to join your company if you alienate them, so unless you have an excess of great candidates beating down your door, you will probably want to work on making them want to join your company.

To your success!

Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Job boards are one of the first places most organizations will search when they want to hire inside sales reps, but while job boards are a huge source of resumes and entry level candidates, relying on them can be a frustrating experience. As one customer explained to us, just sorting through the volumes of unqualified candidates can be exhausting and you are lucky if you find any qualified candidates at all.

The level of position often makes active recruiting cost prohibitive, so beyond placing ads and mining job boards, companies often wonder where else they can turn to find inside sales reps.

Recruiters are another option to consider, and companies can also look inwards for competent people in other functions that might be better suited to perform a sales role. For instance, customer support and field services might have employee with an aptitude for handling inbound sales calls and the outside sales team may have staff that are better suited to performing outbound sales and new business development activities on the phone.

In all cases, your challenge will be to evaluate the candidates to ensure they have the traits and experiences required to be successful in your inside sales position. For junior hires in particular, where there will be limited employment history to study, sales competency and behavioral tests can be useful. As always, the more structure in your hiring process, the more sales success you will experience.

To your success!

close

• About
• Latest Posts

Connect:

Eliot Burdett

CEO at Peak Sales Recruiting

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.

Connect:

Latest posts by Eliot Burdett (see all)

• 20 Of Our Favorite Books About Sales Management and Sales Leadership – October 20, 2023
• How To Make Progress On Your Sales Goal Without A Sales Leader – September 15, 2021
• Augment Your Recruiting Strategy During “The Great Resignation” – July 26, 2021

Whether you are a CEO or a executive level sales leader in your company, hiring the right sales leader for your organization can make or break your business. Get it right and they will build a strong team of achievers, increase company morale, and generate revenues profits and growth for the company. Hire the wrong person and in a best case scenario, company growth will stall. In a worst case scenario, targets will be missed, customers will leave, staff turnover will increase, and you will have a mess that could take years to clean up.

Here are the five things you can do to hire the right sales leader:

1. Consider the Right Candidates – Do you need a manager who will execute a plan leader who will bring vision and charisma to the organization. If you are seeking the latter, you will be faced with the fact that very people are leaders, which will require a more extensive search.

2. Don’t Get Sold – Great sales people sell. You need proof that the person you hire has delivered the results you want in a similar environment to the one they will be coming into – otherwise its an experiment.

3. Plan Ahead – Ask your potential candidates to show you the plan they will implement if they join your organization and what results will be achieved. The plan can always be tailored once they are on-board, but if your challenge is familiar territory for them, Pareto’s Rule will apply and they should be able to give you a good sense of whether you will be aligned.

4. Get the Compensation Right – Align the comp plan with the corporate plan. If you are trying to achieve rapid change then a highly leveraged plan might be the right approach, but might backfire if you want steady change and a long-term view from your sales leader. If you need profits, growth, and/or new customers, consider creating bonus schemes for these.

5. Give them the Autonomy – You are hiring the new sales leader to deliver results, which means they will bring in ideas that break the status quo. This may create discomfort for some people in the company, for instance cutting deadweight staff and reallocating resources. If you want the results they are promising, you need to step aside, let them execute on their plan and provide them the support they need to succeed.

To your success.

Image courtesy of jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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• About
• Latest Posts

Connect:

Eliot Burdett

CEO at Peak Sales Recruiting

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.

Connect:

Latest posts by Eliot Burdett (see all)

• 20 Of Our Favorite Books About Sales Management and Sales Leadership – October 20, 2023
• How To Make Progress On Your Sales Goal Without A Sales Leader – September 15, 2021
• Augment Your Recruiting Strategy During “The Great Resignation” – July 26, 2021