39 Sure Fire Ways CEOs Can Perfect Sales Recruitment - Part 1

Top performing sales people are rare. Finding, attracting, hiring, and keeping them is more difficult than ever because the best are already gainfully employed. And the best salespeople for one company may not be what's best for your company. Shot gun approaches to sales hiring rarely produce worthwhile results and if you think slogging through resumes is going to get it done -- think again. More than 30 million people have secured a job by lying on their resume. And if they're lying about their selling skills, you'll want to know that before you waste your time, energy and money training them to do the impossible for you.

Here are the first 10 of 39 things you must do to perfect your sales recruitment and hire stronger salespeople for your company.

1. Get Clear About What You're Hiring

Often we see companies posting ads that neither attract the right candidates nor detract the wrong ones. Broad-stroked, general sales ads will bring you lots of resumes but very few of the right ones. You'll waste precious time and energy reviewing stacks of unqualified resumes and you'll probably end up inviting the wrong people in for all the wrong reasons. And if you end up getting more resumes than you can handle by yourself, you might even enlist the help of a few people on your team to help you. Then you'll have 3, 4, or even 5 different people all looking for what they think would make a great salesperson in your business.

Stop the insanity! Get crystal clear about what your new hire needs to be able to do. What skills do they need? What technical expertise? What kind of selling will they be doing? Write your ad and govern your hiring decisions by the specific sales criteria you need for the position you're trying to fill. If you have more than one type of sales position, you'll need to write a different ad for each one.

Forget the resumes for now and focus on skills and alignment. Get busy assessing each candidate's sales skills, uncovering their weaknesses, and looking for alignment between the candidate's competencies and your needs and culture. (Here's the assessment we use with recruiting clients. It is sales specific, designed for sales by sales experts and has been voted #1 for 4 consecutive years.)

2. Don't Settle for Less than You Deserve

The beginning of mediocrity in a company can be traced all the way back to the CEOs office. I challenge you to make a list of 10 things you're tolerating in your sales organization and ask yourself why? Why are you settling? What belief do you hold that, if you changed it, would allow you to go for what you really want and need?

Maybe you think you can't afford a better performing sales team or maybe you believe one doesn't exist. Deep down you know what you want. You built the company around that vision. Don't squander it. Find the money. Maybe it's time to cut the bottom 30% of the sales force to pay for a top performer who can leverage their talent and relationships and take you to the next level. Maybe it's time to get back to your vision and find a mentor or coach who can help you stay focused on what really matters to you. Whatever it is, get to the root of it and deal with it now. You deserve it. Your employees deserve it. Your customers deserve it. And your family deserves it.

3. Get Compensation Right

Sales compensation is a critical factor in building a high performing sales organization. You must develop compensation plans targeted to the specific types of salespeople you want to recruit and develop. Get it wrong and you could lose your star players to the competition or end up overpaying your duds. Get compensation right with the right candidates and you will break through barriers you never thought possible.

4. Get the First 120 Days Right

What you do with a new sales recruit in the first 90 to 120 days will set the stage for the next 18 months of success or failure. What should they accomplish on their first day, their first week, and within their first month? What training do they need (company, products, market, competition, sales process, selling methodology)? What coaching? Who will help shore up their weak spots (everyone has weak spots.)? Who will monitor their progress? How will you know they are ready? How will you measure their success at each stage?

5. Set Realistic Expectations

Drive productivity with realistic benchmarks and milestones your new hire needs to hit along the road to high performance. Great salespeople always want to know how they're doing so they can adjust their behavior, learn new skills, and stay on track. So help them by setting clear and realistic expectations every step of the way.

6. Give Them Clear Direction

Who, what, where, when, how, how often. If you feel like you're repeating yourself, great. If your employees are repeating your words before you can say them, even better.

Tell your new recruit how many calls you expect them to make. Tell them exactly how to make the calls, specifically who by role to call on, and what a good call sounds like. Tell them what a solid sales week looks like and what results a solid sales week yields. Tell them what resistance sounds like from prospects and direct them on the specific ways to effectively lower that resistance. Tell them about your sales process and what questions they need to ask at each stage of the selling process. Tell them how and why to advance a prospect through the specific stages of your selling process and have them document each and every step they take with prospects in your pipeline management system.

7. Hold Them Accountable

It's not enough to simply give direction though. You must hold salespeople accountable to the behaviors you expect. Remember the saying, "inspect what you expect." The best salespeople want to be held to high standards and will get better as a result of it.

You must teach your sales managers specifically how to drive accountabilityand this means establishing a level of accountability between you and your managers. Begin holding them to the management behaviors you expect and they will learn to do the same with their direct reports.

You can't manage the results, only the behaviors that drive the results. So decide what specific behaviors your new recruits must regularly exhibit and decide what happens when they don't. If you've done your work on #2 from this list, you'll know better than to simply tolerate it.

8. Manage Lagging Sell Cycles

If you want to have a high performing sales culture, your people need to know how long it takes to close a piece of business and what the steps are for doing so. Likely there is an acceptable average sell cycle for each of your products and services, a typical timeframe between the first call and when the client moves forward. And it's also likely that, past this timeframe, the chances of closing the sale significantly diminish.

You must have your sales leaders manage this process and you must be sure that your new recruits understand it. Clearly identify the life cycle of your sale, document each step and milestone of each stage in the process and create a timeline salespeople can follow to ensure that they are working with prospects optimally.

9. Anticipate Their Start-Up Challenges

Each company has a set of challenges new salespeople will encounter. What are yours? Clearly communicate them to your salespeople and to your sales leaders so you can help them navigate the challenges successfully. Where do new salespeople get stuck in the first 30, 60,90 days and beyond. What are the traps that kill an effective sales call? What are the moves the competition makes that have derailed newbies in the past? What are the training disasters you'd rather not repeat? What internal pushback do new salespeople get and how can this be avoided?

10. Upgrade Your Sales Management

Sometimes the biggest barrier to recruiting better salespeople is with your sales leaders. 83% of sales managers are not effective at coaching salespeople and most don't realize that coaching comprises 50% of a sales manager's job. Far too many sales managers have never been trained to manage and ended up in management because they were good at selling. Before they became sales managers they were likely managed by sales managers who never modeled good sales management because those managers lacked the skills. It's the gift that keeps on giving and it's killing your sales and your recruitment efforts.

Invest in your sales leaders. Evaluate their weaknesses and skills gaps and help them fix them. If you encounter resistance, find a way to help them through it. If they won't change or they're egos can't handle the changes, then you'll need to find replacements. My experience has shown me that many sales managers want to do better and will if given the chance.

Now some of you are wondering what impact sales management is having on your recruiting and what will make your managers more effective. You'll want to stay tuned and look for Part 2 of this article tomorrow.

In the meantime, please share your thoughts and best practices for sales hiring in the comments below. Your feedback is always welcome and I look forward to connecting through conversation here or through email at [email protected]. If you would like to master the art and science of sales recruitment, reserve your seat now for my next online workshop.

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