A few years ago we were working with a large corporation that was having a difficult time finding strong salespeople. In fact, they were quite lousy at it and had assembled a weak team overall. This project was quite extensive in that we had to assess their current team of over 30 salespeople, 5 managers and 3 VPs. After that, we modified our hiring process to work with their existing HR department’s process.<\/p>\n
After many meetings, we were off and running on the sourcing side. We identified the strong candidates and went to schedule interviews with the hiring managers. Anyone who has hired strong salespeople before knows that you do not have an endless time frame to move them through your process. If you know they are strong, it is guaranteed that another company has figured this out too.<\/p>\n
Our problem was that we had a difficult time getting a workable schedule from any of the hiring managers. They had few openings in their busy schedules and were not going out of their way to make themselves available.<\/p>\n
We finally sat down with all of the managers and VP’s after struggling to get the first few candidates through in a timely manner. One of the managers said something I will never forget. She stated in front of everyone, “I am having a hard time with the interviewing because it is not a top priority. You hired me to increase sales in my division through my team. I do what I can to get through the resumes and assessments to schedule an interview, but it can only be a part-time activity at best.”<\/p>\n
This was a manager where we had served up the candidates and were conducting the interviews along with them. Still, she was having a difficult time fitting the interview activity into her schedule. Surely some of that was fluff, but she did keep a fairly hectic schedule with her team trying to hit an aggressive sales goal.<\/p>\n
When you spend your day sourcing, screening, assessing and interviewing candidates, you forget that other people are not primarily focused on these activities. Sales managers are responsible for increasing revenue through their team. Hiring is not an everyday, or even every week, activity for most of them. It is a task to be completed in the margins of their day.<\/p>\n
I read a poignant comment from a head football coach in the paper today. The reporter asked him about the status of a player who is holding out. The coach said, “I cannot worry about who isn’t here. I have to focus my time on the players who are in camp and working out.” Sales managers have to take a similar approach which explains the thrust of our business. We do the work of weeding out the weak and sourcing the strongest candidates so that the sales manager can focus their time on their current team.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"