The #1 Secret to Hire Great Salespeople?
Online sales job boards are almost completely a waste of time!
Why?
Because why would a great salesperson use an online job board to find a job?
They wouldn’t!
The top salespeople in every organisation are regularly headhunted by recruiters and competitors so they don’t need to look. If they decide to make a change – they simply pick up the telephone.
What kind of salesperson is spending afternoons, coffee breaks and evenings searching online job boards? The answer is the mediocre, average or below average performers. If you fill your sales team with mediocre, average or below average performers how do you think your business will perform?
So, what is the best approach?
Once your team has a talent profile for your ideal sales candidate, your team will need to start hunting for qualified candidates.
Posting jobs on job boards and hoping great salespeople apply is a waste of time and resources – sorting through hundreds of resumes of unqualified and underperforming reps doesn’t cut it.
Top salespeople are actively and gainfully employed. They are too busy hunting new business and closing deals to be browsing online job sites.
So how do you find these people? How to hire Great Salespeople?
By targeting companies with similar selling environments. That means identifying the top salespeople at companies that have the same buying group, budgets, and average sales cycles that your current sales team targets.
We also recommend communicating regularly with your network about the positions you are hiring for and the characteristics the ideal candidate should have. Send out regular correspondence with this information to encourage your contacts to send you referrals.
As recruiters, our entire focus is on search. We search for top performing employed salespeople and pitch them on the great opportunity at your firm. If you are doing your own recruiting you should take the same approach.
Think you can hire mediocre and train to excellence?
Think again. Training industry research has proven that mediocre salespeople do not benefit from sales training – they simply don’t improve because the attitude is not that of a winner. Sales training invested in top performing salespeople brings real results and a proven ROI. How to hire Great Salespeople? Hire the best by recruiting the best!
To your sales success!