Another good article from the new Selling Power newsletter – Open Minds Open Doors. The topic here is Hiring Salespeople From Outside Your Industry. If you follow that link, you will see that this topic is of great importance in our world.
From the article:
“I believe the way the market is today, finding the perfect combination of industry knowledge and sales experience may not be possible for many companies,” says Hardin. “With the unemployment rate at an all-time low, candidates are not as abundant as they were three years ago.
Companies will have the greatest long-term success by hiring candidates who possess the necessary sales skills and then training them about the product and industry. There are a lot of good salespeople out there, and companies are passing them up.”
Amen to that. The rest of the article reads like a commercial, but the above quote is exactly correct. In my post from earlier today, I quoted a stat that 53% of sales hires end up being mishires (bad hires). I bring this up because we see this frequently – hiring managers are mesmerized by experience listed on a resume.
If you are hiring exclusively from your specific industry, you are at great risk for recycling mediocrity. Your company must be in a dominant market position to draw the top talent from your competitors. If you are anything less than dominant, I guarantee a myopic hiring approach is garnering mediocre candidates from the industry.
What if you were to hire candidates with dominant, transferrable sales skills from another industry?