Hiring Great Sales People

I saw a quote that said, “If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional, wait until you hire an amateur.”

Hiring salespeople is not for the faint at heart. It takes work and not just by the HR department.

Sales leaders play a critical role in the process of filling out their team. And, ultimately, the buck stops with them. Seriously!

Can we talk about hiring salespeople?

You open to starting with something all sales managers are familiar with? The Funnel – the Hiring Funnel.  Much like the sales funnel… what comes out of the bottom of the “hiring funnel”? Right, what goes in the top!

As a sales leader recruiting and hiring is super important. It’s also super difficult!

What does your hiring funnel look like? It’s in your hiring playbook, grab your copy and follow along.  In mine there are 6 steps. Does that jive with yours?

Step one is recruiting. Recruiting is the top of the funnel. You know where the applicants go in.

If you’ve done much hiring you undoubtedly already know that it’s worthless to just toss people into the top of the funnel, they have to be the “right” people.  Which requires a LOT of pre-work.

Before you can recruit you need a solid “hiring template”.  The hiring template gives you guidelines for hiring the best available candidate by considering all of the elements that are indicators of high performance in your department or company.

Elements of the Hiring template are:

• Job description
• Primary Function Indicators (PFI’s)
• The model or candidate criteria (S.E.A.R.C.H.)
• A list of the Attributes of a Winner (Behaviors, Attitudes and Techniques)
• The Team Matrix
• A People Bank

No, you cant just go to the bank and withdraw people, but you do need a “people bank.”

The rest of the Hiring Funnel (post-Recruiting) includes:

• Interviewing
• Inventorying
• Assessing
• Decision Making
• Hiring

Then the work starts!

Have you found that hiring quality salespeople is a challenge?  Maybe it’s your process, you know, the Hiring Playbook.

I’ve been there, done that and learned the lessons the hard way. No more!

I think we have this dialed in. Would you like some help, a little help or a lot of help?

Let’s have a conversation, Sound Fair?

All the best!