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Top 10 tips for recruiting sales people:
Recruiting the right sales people can be the making of a company – but getting it wrong can be very costly. Here are our Top 10 Tips to ensure you achieve the sales success you desire for your business.
1. Don’t believe everything you’re told. Sales people are trained to sell – and if they’re any good at all – they sell themselves very well. Check – Check and Check again. Use external assessments to get an objective view of their capabilities; be thorough in checking their previous ‘successes’; the more rigor you put in up-front – the more success and fewer problems you get later.
2. Negotiate. Sales people are going to try and negotiate themselves a better financial deal and less work. Don’t be afraid to put forward your proposals – if you hire someone, their approach and views need to align with yours – or it will all end in very expensive tears.
3. Remember why you’re hiring them. You want to grow your revenue, maybe improve customer retention and satisfaction; maybe find new customers; maybe even enter a new market. Make sure that what they want to do matches your goals and your expectations of them – or they won’t want to get out of bed in the morning.
4. Listen – they have choices too. If you really want the best people, they have to know that you will listen to them as well and if necessary, work with them to do what needs to be done to ensure success for both parties. You’re not just hiring anyone; you are hiring an experienced revenue creation specialist. Let them know you value and want them, as well as their skills.
5. Ensure you are clear about what you want them to do. Define their Role clearly (e.g Transactional; Solution etc); write a detailed Job description, and when you assess them, make sure you are assessing them against what you want them to achieve for you. One sales job and one sales person is not the same as another. (See some examples of our Role descriptions here: (http://www.salesassessment.com/fit-4-role-definitions.html)
6. Ensure they are clear about what success looks like. There is nothing more frustrating for a sales professional than not having clear objectives. Without a target (not just financial) to aim at, they could go anywhere. By being clear before you hire them, you will ensure the person who takes the job is clear about what is expected from day one and can have a flying start to their new career.
7. Make it a career – not just a job. Sales people are not only motivated by money. Ensure that, as part of the assessment programme, you discover what motivates each individual – and increase their desire to perform by pushing their ‘hot buttons’.
8. Develop their skills. Although you hire them for their skills today, the expectations of your customers are always increasing. To create your future success, you need your sales people to continuously improve their skills, aligned to the changes in your customers’ expectations. Steal a march on your competitor – train your sales team to be better than theirs.
9. When you hire a good one – ensure you keep them. It’s a costly exercise hiring a sales person in more ways than one. Understand from the start where they are aiming to go in their career and wherever possible create opportunity for your sales professionals to achieve their goals. Keeping a good sales person and developing them is far better for both parties than trading them in for a new one. They’re not cars.
10. Never stop investing. Good sales people need good markets and customers to sell to. You need to invest in creating new business opportunity for them. Sure, you expect them to find some of their own, but they also expect you to find some for them. Invest in marketing – it’s cheaper than losing a good sales person; and all the revenue they would have created; and all the costs of finding and hiting a new one; and all the time you need to invest to replace them…. Getting the picture? Good. Enjoy your success. If you want to be sure you are hiring the best sales people for your Role, contact SalesAssessment.com without obligation and chat through your needs with one of our experts. You can call, chat, or email us. Here are all the details you need:
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