Here’s what we often see from hiring managers or recruiters that focus on a wide variety of positions. They tend to look for qualifications in their sourcing activities. Obviously, this approach is warranted and required when sourcing for positions like accountants, medical personnel, IT, engineers and so forth.
But what about sales? What qualifications determine sales success? A college degree? 5, 7 or 10 years tenure? Industry experience?
The difficulty in sales is that there are so few, if any, verifiable qualifications that properly filter applicants out. The better approach is to list the skills that the sale requires. Notice I didn’t write “position?” The typical sale is what needs to drive the skills for the position. This is why our initial task, before sourcing candidates, is to profile the sale.
I can’t stress this enough, job descriptions typically won’t define the skills needed for a strong sales hire. They work for other positions, but sales is vastly different. I think this is where general recruiters get into difficulty. I’ll go further and say even experienced sales managers get in trouble here. Many of our customers tell us that they have tried to hire salespeople themselves without any tools or processes and it was just a crap shoot. All – all – of them have more than one sales hiring nightmare story.
Here is the crux of the problem when it comes to determining what is needed to hire the right salesperson – bachelor’s degrees and time in the industry do not predict success in sales. “Ability to develop territory,” “strong hunter” and “service existing accounts” are not going to cut it.
You need to understand the sale. There is a difference in skill sets needed if it takes 5 contacts to close 1 deal versus 55 contacts to close 1 deal. There is a difference in skills needed to close a 1 year sales cycle versus a 1 week sales cycle. This information provides the qualifications to determine sales success.
For instance, if the typical sale requires 75 calls (to suspects) that filter down to 1 sale and the average sales cycle is 2 weeks, you have to source candidates that have the ability to build rapport quickly, qualify efficiently and handle rejection easily.
Understanding the critical aspects of a typical sale is the starting point for a successful sales hire.