When you first hire salespeople for your company, you hope you’ve made good choices. If you’ve used the Advanced Hiring System, odds are 3 to 1 that you’ve made some excellent hires. They begin to show their promise right away, and there’s a spirit of friendly competitiveness that fills the workplace with electricity—and customer orders.
Before you pat yourself on the back, however, you need to accept the challenge of keeping that momentum going. And it is a challenge. If the work environment becomes stagnant, your great sales force sometimes loses the energy that they started out with. After all, according to the system’s personality profile, you hire salespeople who are highly motivated, independent thinking, top performers, and they love a challenge. If they reach a point where the challenge is no longer there, they may lose some of the spark that has driven them to be top performers.
It’s called complacency, and it can lead to mediocre efforts if it’s not addressed. Of course it’s a worst-case scenario, but after you hire salespeople, if any of them get to the point where they have achieved all their goals, and they feel satisfied with the level of compensation they are receiving, they may begin to lose some of their drive to sell, letting someone else handle any extra leads. You may not see a drop in sales, but you won’t see the growth charts climb, either.
That’s one reason why it’s important for sales managers and employers to maintain a recruitment mentality and continue to hire salespeople—to infuse the sales team with new blood, new ideas, and new challenges. When there are more people competing for the money and the power, the true sales personality feels challenged to push on.
Many times, the need to hire salespeople on a regular basis stays consistent. Some of your top performers retire, so you need to replace them. Some of them move or move on, and some of them burn out. (Those are the few who somehow managed to slip through the AHS cracks.) There may even have been some duds whom you had to let go. In these cases, your turnover rate remains consistent and you just naturally have to keep hiring new talent.
But what if none of that is occurring? If you crunch the numbers, wouldn’t it be a good idea to continue to hire salespeople on a regular basis? Since you’re more likely than not to end up with another top performer, it will boost your sales figures, and make you more money than it will cost you. Not just because the new hire is bringing in more sales, but because the rest of the sales force is suddenly magically revitalized—they don’t want the “new guy” to steal any of their thunder.
If you need another reason to hire salespeople on a regular basis, how about this one? If there are any top performers out there, you have a better chance of snagging them before your competition does. That will leave the opposition team stuck with the B players. What a shame.
