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
In looking at the issue of CRM adoption – or the lack thereof – in many sales organizations, the highest priority must be to obtain buy in from users. This ought to be so simple to understand; yet, as we have seen in previous articles, companies often don’t take this priority seriously enough. Too often, the implementation of a CRM is viewed as being no different than any other type of software adoption process: get the best deal on the best package you can find, install and configure, train everyone on the buttons and apps, and get to work. Unfortunately, to the degree all of these decisions and processes take place without making a concentrated effort to gain the enthusiastic support of the main user group, there are very likely to be problems.
When implementing a CRM, the primary end-user is the sales rep. Certainly, other people will benefit from the powerful benefits of a well-deployed CRM, but it is the sales rep who puts in most of the hours on the tool, generates most of the data, and creates most of the value at the other end in the form of increased revenue generation. Therefore, the sales rep MUST perceive that the CRM creates value for them, or the process will collapse in a frustrating, expensive exercise in futility. After all, sales reps already have a system that they are comfortable with. Their initial reaction will always be, “If it is not broken, why should I waste my time and effort to try and fix it?” Therefore, you must carefully lay the groundwork for gaining their support long before you unpack and install the software.
If you want to create buy-in from the sales rep begin with these simple steps:
To whatever degree you can work closely with the users – so close in fact that they believe the new CRM is their idea and they helped create it – user buy in will be easy to achieve and CRM adoption will open at very high levels and only go higher once they see the amazing results they can achieve.
Baker Communications was recently recognized as one of the top ten Sales Force Automation training companies in the world. We know what it takes to make CRM and SFA work for your organization. In this series, we are sharing some of those secrets with you. In the meantime, if you would like to know more, visit http://www.bakercommunications.com/sales-training/.
Walter Rogers is the President and CEO of Baker Communications. Baker Communications is a sales training and development company specializing in helping client companies increase their sales and management effectiveness. He can be reached at 713-627-7700.
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