As a sales manager, your success will be determined more by the quality of the people you hire than by anything else. It is generally recognized that customers who stop using a vendor usually do so because of the salesperson managing the account. In today’s environment, you can’t afford to make a mistake in hiring; your success (or failure) at meeting or exceeding your sales goals rests squarely on the shoulders of the people you decide to bring into your team.
The major criterion for making good hiring decisions is simple to remember: know what you want. We will now focus on the strategies and skills all sales managers need to develop to not only decide what you want, but to recognize and hire it when you find it.
Interviews with sales managers in a variety of industries indicate that over 50% of all new hires for sales reps end up washing out of the program. This means that unless you are thoroughly prepared for (and highly skilled at) recruiting new sales reps, you have less than a 50/50 chance of finding the right person to meet your needs. In a business environment where aggressive sales growth is necessary just to stay even with the competition, poor sales rep recruiting could prove to be deadly.
Remember, given the length of time it takes to effectively train a new sales rep, combined with the length of the sales cycle, it usually takes at least six to twelve months before you can determine from experience whether the person you hired is able to fulfill your expectations. The financial penalty for guessing wrong can be astonishing: thousands of dollars in training expenses wasted, potentially hundreds of thousands (or millions?) of dollars in lost sales and margin, and sometimes maybe as much as one to two years of damage to the momentum of your sales team. With so much riding on your hiring decisions, it definitely pays to hire the right people the first time. The question is, how do you accomplish this?
Make sure you have a detailed job description that defines all the important skills and experience you’re looking for — the selling environment, the ideal candidate profile (are you looking for a race horse or a plow horse?), sales objectives and key performance metrics for the position. Often the whole process goes off track at this starting point. Until you know exactly what kind of person you want to hire and why, how can you possibly know whether you are getting the right person?
Maybe the human resources department will find you a good batch of candidates, but probably not. A person with a good sales rep profile — for instance, someone who thrives on the challenge of working on commission — is a rare find in a typical hiring pool. You will have better success if you initiate and control your own search. These days, however, your efforts should extend beyond just placing ads in the newspaper or on website bulletin boards. Such minimal outreach efforts are not likely to connect you with the most gifted sales reps, for the simple reason that they are already working, and probably aren’t looking for a new job! Unfortunately, most of the people who respond to general ads placed through normal channels will get you average applicants, who only have a 50% chance of succeeding. If you really want to boost your chances of hiring the people that best fit your profile, you will need to take a well-planned, proactive approach to recruiting top talent.
This effort requires a bold, aggressive strategy. You might start by identifying and directly approaching top reps working for the competition! Also, take full advantage of every contact you have in your industry network (including your customers) and ask for referrals. This is likely to be your most dependable resource, because statistics reveal that most great hires come through the informal network of those you know “in the business.” If these sources don’t produce what you are looking for, reach out to top reps in companies that are selling ancillary products to your customer base. Do whatever you need to do to identify and target great people. If you settle for whoever answers the ad, your chances of finding a great performer decreases substantially.
Many sales managers hire sales reps because they “talk the part” of a top sales performer. Be very careful here; just because someone can sell himself during the interview is not guarantee they can sell anything else. You are going to have to develop a process that will question and probe to identify the attitudes and skills that breed real success. Interviews with top sales managers reveal that they all look for candidates with some combination of the following traits:
Sales managers who want to hire the top people have to be prepared to do a little selling, too. How will you promote the value of working with you and with your company? What’s the company vision? What’s your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)? What’s your strategy to win in your market? What sort of growth and advancement opportunities do you offer top performers? What makes your company a great place to work? Are you just offering a job, or a real opportunity?
5. Be wary of candidate résumés that list percentage increases in sales results, as opposed to hard numbers. During the interview process, always collect a detailed sales achievement history from each candidate, by asking for a breakdown of their annual quota and results for the previous three to five years. This can be put together in a simple spreadsheet, listing the year, annual quota and actual achievement numbers. Top producers have this information and are proud to share it with potential employers. Underperformers will resist providing this information or claim they don’t have it.
Discard “personal” references, and insist on speaking to each candidate’s past three or four immediate sales managers. If they’re not listed, insist on talking to them anyway. If they can’t produce them, you must assume they are trying to hide something. A top sales producer is always glad to have you talk to his or her previous sales manager! When checking references, always verify sales achievement history data, along with rewards or recognition given.
If you truly want your sales team to excel, try to hire people that you believe are at least as capable as you are, and hopefully even better. The only way the company can achieve and sustain the kind of growth that will keep you ahead of the competition is for the people to keep getting better right along with the products. Nothing good can come from hiring people who can’t hit the highest mark. They will just hold everyone back. In the same vein, don’t hire people who only seem capable of meeting today’s challenges. Who knows what your sales reps will be called upon to handle two years from now? Hire people who can scale with the job as it changes into something completely different. You need people with the headroom to encounter any challenge and keep producing at a high level.
