When we join a company as sales managers, one of the first questions is who will hire sales reps to build the sales team. That’s our job. We know how to hire sales reps. We’ll use recruiters if you prefer, but our process to find and attract qualified candidates does not require a recruiter’s expense. We lead and manage the process from advertising to offer letters, and you will no longer need to wade through hundreds of unqualified resumes. Our proven sales hiring process has helped us hire qualified sales reps who want to work for our client’s company. Your only additional cost is the placement of the advertisements on platforms.
We Use Attraction to Hire Sales Reps
When running a business, hiring sales reps is often an undesirable chore. If you’re not hiring sales reps frequently, the chore can be ignored and replaced with the hope that a star will walk through the door or a friend will refer you to the right person. The best way we have found to hire sales reps is to attract them, and I don’t mean to entice them with unrealistic potential or over-inflated salaries. I’m talking about having a sales department and team that will help us hire good sales reps. Good or great salespeople want a department that is organized, managed by a pro, works as a team, and where goals are attainable. A sales department that YOU are proud of. Our work as your manager is to build this type of department.
Have you ever noticed that the best professional sports franchises tend to attract good free agents year after year, and a losing franchise overpays for free agents who tend to underperform? Why is that? The franchise culture underpins the ability to attract good talent and affects the talent’s performance potential. The culture a salesperson performs within does have an impact on their performance. Hiring sales reps who will perform well starts with building a winning culture in your team and department, even if the team consists of one person. Our other services and the quality of sales managers we provide all contribute to building this winning culture.
How to Hire Sales Reps
Once the culture has been established and sales performance management practices have been implemented, we go to market to hire sales reps using our sales hiring process. Our Six-Stage Hiring Process requires a lot of upfront work, and that is part of the reason it is successful and efficient. The up-front work results in receiving the best candidates to review instead of being discouraged from reading resumes sent in by candidates who should not be applying. Below are the six stages we work through, but if you want to see more detail within each stage, click on the link earlier in this paragraph.
Stage 1: Document Your Expectations
Stage 2: Create an Advertisement for the Position
Stage 3: Create An Online Survey for Candidates to Complete
Stage 4: Create a Hiring Page on Your Company Website
Stage 5: Post on Job Boards and Share with Contacts
Stage 6: Review Resumes, Conduct Interviews, and Make a Selection
To hire sales reps efficiently and effectively, we attract them with the culture, company, and role, and then we keep them interested using our sales hiring process. The process is designed to build interest in working with us while the best candidates work their way through and eventually are offered the role.
The Best Place to Hire Sales Reps
We all want to know the best place to hire sales reps, and I can’t say where the best is, but we’ve had success with LinkedIn and Indeed. We’ll advertise on these two platforms to hire sales reps for most clients. That said, any other platforms that have quality talent will work. I’ve hired great talent on Craigslist and Zip Recruiter. For some industries, trade organizations have job posting boards, which can be excellent sources when looking for industry experience. One drawback I’ve found when using multiple platforms is that each has a different resume and candidate management system. If you use two platforms, you’ll need to manage both. While they offer plenty of options, they don’t always fit how we manage the resume screening and interview process. To solve this, our process funnels all resumes and interested candidates into our Survey and CRM, where our templates and candidate management process are all set. We often hear compliments from candidates on how engaging and in-depth our hiring process is. The best candidates appreciate the screening that allows them to begin answering questions and selling themselves.
Since we don’t always know the best place to hire sales reps for your business and industry, we encourage involving employees, clients, and service partners by sharing your opening. They are great resources for referring quality candidates. They understand your business and culture and will pre-sell any candidates before we interview them.
Who is involved in the interview process?
While we lead the resume screening and hiring interview process to hire sales reps, we always present final candidates to our client owners for final approval. Sometimes, we will include the sales team or other department heads in the interview process. It depends on each company’s culture.
Hiring independent sales reps
If we have experience and contacts in your industry, we can make inquiries and network to see if we can refer someone in, but we don’t have the time required to recruit independents. We help you define the right program and attention your independents need and would manage and hire a channel manager to serve your independents. We suggest a channel manager due to the unique needs of the indirect channel, and with the right person and effort, more sales can be realized through this channel.
Each company that sells through independents competes with others for mind share and effort to move your product. Ultimately, the companies with an obvious product advantage or consistent education and support will earn more effort and orders from independent reps. This is why a dedicated channel manager can pay dividends as they are part of the sales team accountable for channel growth and sales. We would manage this person as part of the sales team.
Hiring experience matters when hiring sales reps
Salespeople sell, and they can sell you on them if you are not an experienced interviewer and know how to hire sales reps. You can easily see and hear what you like and overlook the factors that will drive you crazy later. Our managers have the hiring experience to evaluate talent and instill confidence and trust in the best candidates. Developing a candidate’s trust allows us to have a more open and candid conversation with them. They open up, are honest with us, and stop selling us, which helps us evaluate candidates more effectively.
The best candidates also enjoy the open and candid relationship we quickly develop, which is another reason they want to join the company and work with us as their manager. It is said that people join and leave companies most often because of their manager. So, the last ingredient in helping us hire good sales reps is us. We help close the deal with the best candidates.