The recruitment and selection process for hiring top-performing sales reps can be difficult, especially since your sales team is crucial to your company’s success.
When it’s done well, it requires focused attention, specific expertise, and lots of time. Done poorly, and you risk a turnover and experiencing other consequences of a bad hire.
In fact, studies estimate the cost of a bad hire at 30% of a person’s first-year total earnings. And that doesn’t even include the indirect costs of a bad hire. In recent studies, 66% of employers experienced negative effects of bad hires, 37% said it hurt company morale, 18% felt it harmed client relationships, and 10% experienced decreased sales.
If you’re trying to prevent making a bad hiring decision, or have already made the wrong sales hire in the past, find out how to avoid making this mistake in the future and instead, find the sales candidate that fits your company and your culture.
DON’T HIRE TOO QUICKLY
Many employers make the mistake of getting excited about expanding their team and end up hiring the first sales rep who applies for their open position, even if they’re not an exact fit for their company.
Instead, you should take the time to first examine your company, the open position, and your product to really understand what type of salesperson you need to fill the position. And if the right candidate doesn’t apply, you should then reach out to passive candidates until your ideal candidates.
If you think you don’t have the time to spend searching for the right candidate or reaching out to passive candidates, then think again.
Hiring the wrong candidate will actually cost you more time in the long run. After making the hire, your leadership team will lose time on onboarding and training. Your employees will lose time assisting the new hire and even fixing their mistakes or shortcomings. And, after a bad sales hire, studies indicate a 41% loss in worker productivity.
At the end of the day, that’s a lot of unexpected time that could’ve been avoided by taking the time to make the right hire in the first place. If you still think you can’t afford this time upfront, then you should consider hiring a sales recruitment firm to do it for you.
CREATE A COMPETITIVE COMPENSATION PLAN
Today, top candidates have many options when it comes to employment and they are often interviewing at multiple companies at once.
A candidate is not going to accept an offer that is lower than they’re worth because they know they can easily find a company who will pay them what they deserve. The days of 100 percent commission and hiring ‘hungry’ reps who will work for anything are over.
Put together a sales compensation plan that’s capable of bringing in and attracting your ideal candidate. It’s better to pay for a quality candidate than trying to get a ‘C player’ for cheap.
Before you start your search for your sales rep, make sure you evaluate your hiring process, what your ideal employee looks like, and develop a compensation package that attracts the type of candidate you would like to hire.
DON’T HIRE BASED ON PERSONALITY
Many sales reps are very charismatic and conversational during interviews and tend to land positions because of their personality. However, sales reps are used to selling their product and themselves to clients or prospects and might not actually be the best fit for your opening.
Instead of making your hiring decision based on first impression or personality, you should use a selection matrix to objectively compare a candidate’s qualification to the open job’s qualifications and functions.
To begin, you will first need to determine which characteristics are essential for a top performing sales rep and assign each member of your interview team to a targeted dimension. The interviewer will then evaluate the candidate and ask them specific questions based on their assigned targeted dimension.
Not only does using a selection matrix help you to avoid hiring based only on personality, but it also helps you objectively compare applicants to one another based on established job-related criteria.
TARGET PASSIVE CANDIDATES
In today’s world of hiring, you won’t reach your ideal candidates by only posting jobs or prints ads. Instead, you should research and identify passive candidates in the area.
One way to do this is by targeting competitor candidates. First, identify a competitor company, then identify individual employees within the company who have positions similar to what you’re looking for in a sales candidate. Once you figure out who these candidates are and their contact details, you can then reach out to them to find out more about their background and discern whether they’re a fit for the position. Another way to reach out to passive candidates is to target candidates in similar industries or with similar job titles.
This process requires a lot of time and deliberate effort, especially since many of the candidates you will be soliciting will most likely be passive job seekers. However, it is one of the best places to start your recruiting efforts because these people already know the industry and the job.
DEVELOP A QUALITY CANDIDATE PIPELINE
If you want to hire a top candidate, you can’t rely solely on candidates, you need to reach out to passive candidates as well. However, not just any passive candidate will do.
Pipeline development is at the core of every recruiting process and can be the difference between hiring an A or a B player. A large pipeline of qualified candidates can be dwindled down through the hiring process to only the best of the best. From there, you can choose from A players and decide who will be the best fit for your culture and your team.
On the other hand, a small, poorly sourced pipeline will produce only a small amount of A players. You may find yourself moving B players through the hiring process simply because there’s not enough talent to choose from.
Instead, try expanding your search to include candidates with transferable skills from outside your industry or try sourcing from job boards you don’t normally use.
EXPAND YOUR SEARCH CRITERIA
Another error that could be detrimental to your recruiting efforts is being too narrow when evaluating candidates. Having too narrow of criteria can make even a large, well-sourced pipeline seem small and actually eliminate a lot of good candidates. Don’t focus on what specifics the candidate doesn’t have, but on characteristics that show they could be a potential top performer.
Identify candidates who have a similar title that you need, great tenure, and show a great track record of upward mobility. From there, keep an open mind and give the candidates an opportunity for a conversation. You may realize that someone who didn’t fit your original criteria is actually a perfect fit for the position.
INVOLVE YOUR TEAM
One of the biggest mistakes owners make is not involving their team in the hiring process. Adding your staff to your interview team will ensure the right questions are being asked. Also, who better to evaluate culture than the who work at your company?
Now, not everyone on your team will have experience hiring sales reps, but there are ways to help them interpret the candidate’s responses and behaviors.
So now that you know what can go wrong with a bad sales rep hire and how to avoid it, how will you move forward or make changes to your current process?
Do you have the time or resources to spend on all of the activities listed above, or does it make more sense to hire a sales hiring specialist to assist you?
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