Not many organizations can survive without good Salespeople, yet many continue to hire ones who don’t succeed.
If your company struggles with finding or keeping good Salespeople, you should consider these ten best practices:
1.The Sales Department, HR, and Management should all collaborate on the strategy formation for hiring Salespeople – you would be amazed at how often one of these key groups is left out.
2. Create specific job descriptions before starting the recruiting process.
3. Use results of Top Performers to understand what traits and characteristics you should be looking for – and don’t stop at personality, because how a person processes information is often the key characteristic for differentiating a successful Salesperson.
4. Combine the Top Performer results with the job descriptions – make sure they fit together.
5. Get second opinions and do background checks. Former employers often won’t say much, but you may be able to find someone who has worked with them before.
6. Don’t let a good interview override good job fit information. Salespeople are usually good at selling themselves, which doesn’t always correlate to selling your products. Comparing them to your Top Performers is key.
7. Focus your interview questions on areas that are important to the job. You’d be surprised how many interviewers go off track here.
8. Look for specific traits that are common to all of your successful Salespeople.
9. Taylor your on-boarding and training processes to their skills and behaviors to get them up to speed and selling quickly.
10. Make sure they fit the culture of your company – a great Salesperson with big character flaws is not a long-term win for you or your customers.
If you want to see how one of our clients took advantage of these best practices, click here.