CareerBuilder.com offers a short article titled The Cost of Leaving a Position Unfilled. Now that is an important understanding when it comes to hiring salespeople – the choice to do nothing comes with a price. First a reason that drives our business:
When you receive the green light to make a new hire, your company needs you to move on it right away. It is easy for a hiring manager to sit back and tell themselves, as well as those counting on them, that they will get around to beginning the recruitment process shortly.
Exactly. Most sales managers were not hired to spend the balance of each day hiring salespeople. These tasks, although important, take a back seat to the more pressing need of generating profitable revenue. Fair enough. The problem becomes more complex when an inefficient and unreliable process is used to hire the salesperson.
Facing the candidate search process can feel overwhelming if you do not hire frequently. Fight the temptation to procrastinate or to make claims that you do not have enough time to write a job description, sort through resumes, and interview potential candidates. Ironically, these are some of the reasons why you need to fill the open position as quickly as possible.
We help companies with this process by using a far more efficient, reliable approach that frees the sales manager up to focus on revenue generation. The approach listed in the article is time-consuming so I suspect most sales managers are not enthused about spending their time in this inefficient manner.
The rest of the article contains a fairly simple equation for calculating the cost of unfilled positions. Simple as the formula is, imagine what the dollar amounts are for open sales positions?