Many businesses believe that the recruitment of quality salespeople is now easier than ever. Their logic, more salespeople looking for fewer roles, so filling any available sales roles should be easy.

Many businesses that previously had outsourced the recruitment process now are choosing to handle it internally. It’s seems like an obvious cost saving. With no need to pay sales recruitment specialists, the overall recruitment cost decreases.

I am going to introduce you to a counter-argument. I believe that recruiting top sales people is now not easier than before but actually harder than before. The principles of my argument are also pretty straight forward.

Firstly, it is true; there are more sales professionals in the market looking for sales roles. However in an overall sense, these people do not represent  better sales performance, they represent lesser sales performance. In terms of letting people go, businesses need now more than ever to hold on to their top sales performers. So to equate lots of available salespeople with lots of available good salespeople is misguided.

Here’s the second, but none the less important factor as I see it. What about the individual salesperson attitude to the risk of changing roles. If the top salespeople continue to be valued by their current employers, they will lightly view changing now as having much more risk (better the devil, you know)

We have some first hand experience of how difficult it is right now. Some of our own clients have decided to recruit internally. The reports so far have had a common theme, many CVs but with an overall poor quality. In the recent recruitment/head-hunting assignments we have continued to be involved with, a much larger part now involves reassuring sales people about moving during the downturn.

Businesses need to take a step back and consider all the factors before embarking on a course of action. What might seem obvious at first rarely is. Top 5% sales performers can deliver huge ROI.  A little investment in one now could be one of the very best ways of combating the downturn.

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It’s critical reading for purchasers and providers of sales training alike.

Tags: recruiting sales people, recruiting top sales performers, sales recruitment

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 12th, 2009 at 2:57 pm and is filed under Recruitment, Sales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.