When we talk about hiring top salespeople, we should start by reminding ourselves of the old adages:

• The 80/20 rule, 80% of your sales comes from 20% of your sales staff.
• Only 5% of salespeople are likely to ever become A Players.

The Challenge

Hiring the right sales talent is without doubt one of the most difficult challenges facing sales departments today. In fact, the track record of a great many businesses is very poor. High staff turnover combined with big recruitment costs, often weight heavily on already under performing sales functions within organisations.

Get it right and the ROI can be significant, get it wrong and the costs can be just as great. It’s an entirely risky business - which takes me to my first point.

Minimise the Risk

The first objective around hiring top sales talent is always about minimising the risk to the business.

You need to start by asking yourself questions like, how does our track record compare? Do we need help when it comes to hiring? And if so, what type of help do we require?

Help comes in various guises. You can hire a head-hunter to steal from the competition. You can hire a specialist recruiter or you can hire a consultant to advise and oversee the hiring process.

The Job Spec

The second place that many businesses can go wrong is in creating the actual job spec (description).

What requirements will you need this person to have? What qualifications will they require? What experience levels will they need and what type of experience will they need? Will the role require a new business developer or is more about account management? If it’s mixed, what is the mix?

Remember, the role should shout out off the paper to the right candidate.

HR

In many businesses, the HR department creates this description. With respect to HR people, they are often not well positioned to undertake the task.

In such cases, it is of vital importance that a member of the sales department signs off. I have seen job specs created by HR departments which in no way accurately describe the role.

It’s often a very good idea to run this spec past some of the more senior members of the sales team, to see if they feel it adequately describes their responsibilities.

Preparation

The next part of the process starts when you start to receive the CVs. Firstly eliminate those that don’t meet the criteria, and take some time to go through those that do. This is about preparing well for the interview stage.

Highlight points of interest and create questions that will encourage the candidates to prove what’s contained within their CV - these can form your probing questions when interviewing.

Keep an open mind, don’t be too ruthless in your culling at this stage, sometimes people who have little experience of preparing and writing CVs - won’t appear as great on paper as they will in person.

Lead questions

If you have gotten up to here right, the people attending the interviews should have the right basic ingredients to do the role. The challenge now is in deciding who the very best fit for the role.

It’s always a good idea to have a list of lead questions that will you will ask every candidate, and a scoring system - which prioritises necessary characteristics and experiences.

This scoring system should be weighted in favour of the skills that are most relevant.

The first interview

During the interview you will need to candidate to talk you through their sales process and sales returns to date.

How much was new business from new customers and how much was existing business from existing accounts? What level did they target within the organisation? And what was the typical sales cycle length? Make sure to ask for specific examples of situations and sales to back these up.

Stay away from “what if” questions, these invariably illicit favourable responses but demonstrate very little by way of evidence.

Scoring

After each interview, score each candidate - basing your scores of what has been demonstrated rather than interpretation or rapport.

While of course rapport is important in selling, too many interviewers use it exclusively. We tend to like people who are like ourselves. While this may work for our friendships - it will not be so dependable when it comes to hiring.

The second interview

When short listing suitable candidates for a second round of interviews, the tendency can be to go for similar people - this is rarely a good idea. It’s better to short-list candidates that have different rather than the same strengths.

How will they fit in?

The danger here is that the interviewer uses the second interview to just firm up, on their original impression - rather than treating it as an interview in its own right.

I would always advise clients to use the second interview to evaluate the candidate’s suitability in terms of the organisation and the people. How well would this person fit in with the existing team and people? Are they bringing something extra, or are there potential areas where there could to be problems?

Why do they want to work here?

This interview is also a better place to find out, why they are leaving their current role and what attracts them to your organisation.

Remember, there should always be a synergy in the answers to these two important questions.

Scoring round 2

Before they leave, voice any concerns you may have giving them an opportunity to respond. Again score each candidate immediately after they leave.

The result

You are now in a position to add up the scores, from both interviews and you should be left with a clear winner.

It’s not easy but make sure to learn from your mistakes.

Recruiting the best sales talent is rarely easy.

It’s about minimizing the risk to the organisation, while trying to find the person who will deliver the most reward. When it comes to hiring salespeople, there are no guarantees and mistakes will be made -no one gets right all the time.

However, it is in not learning from these mistakes, that companies really conspire to make the task much more difficult than it needs to be.

If a salesperson doesn’t work out, be sure to investigate fully, take responsibility and ensure that the same mistakes are not repeated.

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.

Review

We all know that recruiting the right salespeople can often prove to be a very difficult task, even for the very best sales managers. Topgrading for Sales, is a new book by Bradford Smart and Greg Alexander that will systematicly teach you to:

1- Hire top sales talent

2- Prevent costly mis-hires

3- Coach ‘B’ players into ‘A’ players

4- Spot and remove ‘C’ players

5- Exceed your sales quota

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Published by Niall Devitt, Btb Business Training

We recently recruited a senior salesperson for a top company in the construction industry. Needless to say, there was a lot of interest in the role and it carried a great salary and fantastic benefits package.

Eventually two outstanding candidates were short-listed, however it was proving difficult to separate between the two. After a final series of interviews the Sales Manager decided on the person he wanted and I was interested to find out why.

(more…)