Anyone who’s tried to find sales rep and recruit for salespeople before will testify that it can be a difficult thing to do well, or even successfully! Once the person is employed, it’s not always a guarantee that they will be a perfect fit for the organization, and in addition, there is likely to also be an element of training to enable them to learn about the different products or services.
However, perhaps for now we should rewind a little and try to understand some more about how to actually go about finding great salespeople in the first place. This blog post will hopefully shed some light on some of the more effective methods of searching for great salespeople.
Where are the Online Boards or Places that Feature the Best Salespeople?
Many companies will have experience of using Elance, SimplyHired, Monster, and the like to try to satisfy their recruitment requirements; often with quite a variation of results.
In recent times, these jobs sites have been swamped by additional candidates who are searching for work; you might at this point be thinking this is great for people looking to hire? Well, while it certainly does allow you (“the recruiter”) to see a greater selection of potential candidates, a word of caution should be heeded. Some of the drawbacks to this type of online recruitment can be:
- Having to search through a huge number of potential applicants can be a drain on the recruiter’s available resources.
- Some of the applicants don’t possess the skills or experience that their profiles suggest they have, making it much harder to find your future star performer.
- The fees structure can be quite complicated and is often higher than some of the other forms of online recruitment.
- Many of these agencies will want to get the maximum number of people shown to a potential employer; after all, they will only earn their money from making a successful sale. This often means that their criteria for showing the individual candidates favor them a lot more than it does the person doing the hiring.
- Very often the profiles of the individuals concerned are out of date, and perhaps not relevant to your search criteria — this again can lead to a water of valuable resource on the part of the recruiter.
This is not to say that going down this particular path won’t bring a level of success, it just might be that some of the other online recruitment processes may have an advantage some of these job placement agencies.
What about LinkedIn?
Standing slightly separate from some of the job agencies and boards is LinkedIn, as this is more of a networking site. Many hiring managers have found that when using this they can have a good level of success, sometimes this might happen as a direct result of posting a position on one of their job boards. However, an increasing number of recruiters have found that the best salespeople come as result of being connected to someone who is connected to them. This networking process can be a little slower paced than some others, but it does provide the recruiter with a fantastic opportunity to observe the potential candidates online professional behavior and get a real flavor as to whether or not the individual would suit their requirements.
The Spoken Word
In this age of high technology, the spoken word can be something that is easily overlooked; however, a great many companies have been able to recruit some of the very best salespeople by using exactly this method. Generally speaking this will normally involve a recommendation from an existing employee; the great thing with this is that the employee will normally only want to recommend the very best people, as they could face potential embarrassment in the event of recommending someone who wasn’t up to the standards required. On the whole this can be a super effective way of getting top salespeople, who in many respects might not have come forward otherwise. One of the drawbacks to this method is that it is not likely to produce that many people at any given time, so if a recruiter needs to fill a position in the immediate future then it might be better to consider some of the other methods.
Recruiters, Expensive or Not?
Trying to understand whether or not the recruitment process was expensive can be an extremely difficult thing to do. Different factors will need to be taken into account, factors that are in addition to the direct payment that is made to the recruiter.
So to gain a full understanding it might be relevant to consider the following points:
- How long the company had to search for the right salesperson — lost sales and revenue will be the main factor here.
- With the turnover for salespeople being as high as 40 percent, employing the “wrong” person can be a very expensive business.
Generally speaking, recruiters can be an expensive way of filling the hole that a company has in its sales team, with little or perhaps even no guarantee that the results will be to their liking. It has been known for some online recruiters to charge anywhere between $2,500 and $20,000 for help with filling a role; while this might be relevant for a $100,000+ job, it makes little or no financial sense for in trying to fill a job that will attract a salary of around $30,000.
Only Half of the Equation
Once a pool of candidates has been collected, many employers will think that the hard the work has been done. In some respects they might be right; however, regarding the task of finding the best salespeople then this really is only half of the equation.
The ability to be able to spot or indeed pick people from a pool of applicants should not be underestimated, with a large percentage of potential employers getting this part majorly wrong. When this happens all of the hard work and resource that went into developing the candidate pool just went down the tubes.
Picking the wrong person will not only result in a waste of the money regarding the direct recruitment fees, it will also provide the company concerned with the headache of the lost revenues and profits that have already been discussed.
Don’t wait until it’s too late!
Some companies treat the recruitment of the best salespeople as an ongoing process; in some ways this can be similar to the prospecting methods of the salespeople themselves.
The methodology behind this approach is quite simple, in that if the company simply waits until they have the position available then they will have to choose from the best people that have applied at that present time. This is very different from having access to the best people in the industry as a whole.
The recruiting manager will be able to speak to a good number of people that are perhaps happy with their current company; however, in sales things can change very quickly when any of the following things happen:
- New commission structures introduced
- Change of management
- Product ranges become unattractive
- Company faces financial difficulties
When these happen, the salesperson might feel that their income is threatened and in the process might well seek a move to a new and better company. Unfortunately the opportunity of speaking to these people is diminished if these things happen outside of the recruitment process; this is why many of the smarter companies now favor an ongoing process.
Even if the contact between the salesperson and the recruiter happens when the potential candidate is very happy with their employment circumstances, there will almost certainly be a time when things change and the employee concerned will want to consider his or her options.
Find Sales Rep: Hiring Great Salespeople — The Wrap up
No one ever said it would be easy to find the perfect salesperson, but by following some of the suggestions in this post then it might just make things a little bit easier. After all, the best salespeople will create a massive amount of income for the companies that employ them, with statistics reporting that less than 10 percent of a company’s sales force creates over 80 percent of the sales.
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