In a good a economy like we are experiencing now, or bad economies, it is difficult to hire top performing sales people. Is it worth putting in the effort to hire the best you can hire?
Of course it is. You are at an advantage over your competitors if you do. You save a significant amount of money on effective hiring. Have you ever calculated how much a bad hire can cost you? Use this calculator, if you care to know.
Here are 3 tips:
- Be very clear about what you want the “sales person” to do. What set of skills must this candidate have? The skill set for an inside sales or Business Development Rep is different from an Account Manager or a sales person required to develop and close their own business. This may seem obvious, but the specifics are important in writing the ad and insuring the candidate has the proper critical core competencies. Take the time.
- Understand the assessment tools that your team is using. Behavioral, psychological and intelligence assessments are important tools to understand how a candidate will fit into your culture, or how to work with the individual, as well as understanding their basic intelligence. However, these have little to do with if a candidate WILL sell for effectively for your organization. We use and recommend the only predictive sales assessment on the market. It is designed for hiring the best candidates for a Sales Organization. More assessment information here.
- Hiring sales people is different than hiring an engineer, a finance person or an administrative staffer. Sales people are a unique group who can sell themselves, and need to be challenged during the interview process. You must treat all of the resumes you receive the same way to be EEOC compliant. This means when you use an assessment each candidate is assessed at the beginning, not just the ones you like at the end. Your hiring process needs to allow those screening and interviewing to control the process; gather the information that you need to determine fit and viability.
Action:
For our clients, we train and document a repeatable hiring process for sales people that the team can use to hire all future sales people. They use our assessment, minimize the time interviewing and screen candidates as the assessment weeds out the weak sales people.
If you want better sales people, you need change how you are hiring sales people.
If you are a CEO or Sales Leader and would like to determine if our assessment and sales hiring process is a fit, click here to schedule a business conversation.
If you want to learn and kick the tires a bit, we have faced paced live Webinar in November. Click here to register for free.
