Managing a sales organization can be tough. Especially these days. But one thing has and will remain the foundation upon which sales team success is built. Good Sellers!
The everyday management of a sales team is typically fairly well structured. You have are procedures for doing most things. There is training on how to do things. Performance metrics are tracked through time. Accountability expectations and ways to measure adherence exist. Basically, a sales manager can find some type of system to help manage most elements of running a sales organization.
Recruiting great sellers happens to be one thing that most organizations do not have a systematic approach to reaching defined goals. Why not? All the sales procedures and systems in the world will not help an organization succeed if it lacks strong performing salespeople. The converse is not true. Great sellers will figure out how to sell things and make money, even in an organization that lacks great structure. It’s what great sellers do.
So if you’re hiring salespeople like your father’s generation did, you are likely to have little success. And resumes are worthless for the most part. Prior industry experience is not an indicator of the ability to sell anything. We’ve all probably known, or have even hired, someone from within our industry who bounces from job to job, failing at them all. You can stop this by implementing a sales recruitment strategy that takes emotion out of the equation.
First, you must always be pushing candidates into your pipeline. Next, use profiling to make sure they have characteristics found in top performers. Then interview only those candidates who match your desired profile in a structured way that allows you to compare one candidate against another. And always have a compensation strategy that will attract real closers and keep them working for you for a long time.
If you’d like to learn how to double your success in sales recruitment, click HERE.
