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Why Leading Sales Managers Start Their Sales Recruiting With a Compensation Plan

Sales recruiting is the biggest challenge most entrepreneurs face.

I’d like to suggest the reason for this failure — and why leading sales managers get sales recruiting right.

Let’s say you’re out to sell the dream account. When it’s time to close do you focus on what’s most important to them? Of course you do!

You wouldn’t consider talking to them about what’s important to you. You wouldn’t tell them to buy now so you can buy a new car or pay for your kid’s tuition.

Yet most sales recruiting ads — which is the beginning of the sales recruiting funnel, fail here big time.

Let’s step back. Ask yourself what makes a good salesperson?

Now of course they need to be persuasive and enjoy the process of influencing others.

But there’s one thing missing from this… their values. What gets the best salespeople out of bed in the morning?

A little trick I learned years ago from Bill Bonstetter is “Values Rule the World.” This is a key finding for sales recruiting.

So what are the key values of a top sales performers? According to Abraham Maslow, the father of American Psychology, salespeople are “high practicals.”

Salespeople want to figure out “where can I get control? In todays world that means “Where’s the Money and Where’s the Power?”

In your ad you’ve got to show them that your job is the key for them to reach their goals. And that is why the leading sales managers start with a Compensation Strategy.

Starting with your Compensation Strategy makes it easy to write the ad.

The converse is also true. Looking at most sales recruiting ads you can see why applicants are not applying.

We’ve put together a quiz that will help you figure out the best way to get your sales recruitment working. Click the button below and in a minute you’ll have our suggestion to solve the challenge of sales hiring.

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Talent Acquisition

Essential Sales Recruitment Elements

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!

Photographer: FILMon | Source: Unsplash

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.

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Talent Acquisition

AVERAGE SALE IS ONE METRIC THAT CAN MAKE THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN YOUR BUSINESS SURVIVING OR NOT AFTER CORONAVIRUS SHUT DOWNS. SO WHAT NOW?

It should come as no surprise to anyone that while the “reopening” of the economy is hopefully in its early stages, there are a lot of people who will still be hesitant to go out and shop for anything other than absolute necessities. Some will be flat out scared. Other than doing everything you can to reassure potential customers that your business is doing everything possible to protect their safety, there is little else you can regarding their emotional state before walking into or calling your business. You can, however, do a great deal to control their emotions once in your store or on the phone asking about buying from you.

Part of this will be done in a customer service context which is certainly very important. Equally, if not more important, will be how the reduced number of customers you’ll have the opportunity to sell are managed in a sales context. And a key metric that you are able to influence is average sale. This metric will be key to making up for part of the impact fewer customers will have on your business as you pull out of shut down mode. Pushing higher margin items will amplify the positive impact higher average sales will have on your business.

So, how do I increase average sale you might ask? It’s actually quite simple, though not easy. First and foremost, you need to have the best possible sellers taking on the mission of pushing average sale metric. You will need to make them aware of what products are high margin and/or good upsells related to what the customer is planning to buy. Superstar sellers will rise to the challenge if they are well compensated for achieving the goal.

My first job out of college, somewhat to my parents’ dismay, was as a waiter in a touristy seafood restaurant on the downtown waterfront. I learned a lot from that job! I was not the best waiter in the place, but I consistently had higher tickets than the others because I knew that, for the most part, I was going to earn 10-15 cents on every dollar I sold to the diner. Same thing works no matter what the business. If the seller is a real seller and understand what’s in it for him to push that average sale, you’ll both benefit.

These are anxious times for all of us but one thing I’m sure will help your business crawl out of the shut down more quickly is a team of REAL SELLERS who can take their orders knowing there is a big reward for them once the mission is accomplished. And there are more REAL SELLERS looking for jobs right now that there have been in the last decade or more.

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