How do leaders hire and keep the best salespeople?

Sales is one of the most essential functions of every company. With no sales, there is no revenue. With no revenue, there is no profit. The losses accumulate, people stop earning money, and companies go under.

Taking the most obvious meaning of sales into account, it is logical to assume that companies will spend a lot of time recruiting talented salespeople. However, a lot of companies are less attentive when hiring salespeople than when searching for employees such as engineers or finance employees.

This is mostly due to the fact that a lot of companies believe that “a good salesman will sell anything to anyone.”

Unfortunately, he will not. Sales don’t work like that. Selling components to hardware manufacturers over the phone does not work the same way as selling complex IT solutions to high-tech companies at all. Even though both processes are instances of "sales,” the skills required to conduct them are vastly different from one another.

It is not easy to find the best of the best; this is the case in every profession. But, unlike in other areas, salespeople have a very direct influence on the company’s profits. When a good salesman leaves the company, it is often very easy to notice. The average time of “replacing” a good salesman (sorry that it sounds so objectifying) in small and medium-sized companies is 2.4 to 4.3 months, while the average so-called lost opportunity cost is 37 thousand zloty.

Taking into account that finding the best salespeople can take up to a couple of months and that the costs of losing the best employees are very high, it is a good practice to have a strictly defined strategy for finding, hiring, and retaining members of the sales team in the company.

Here are six ways to achieve that.

1. Invest in training and build a brand as an employer

These days, your potential clients have access to more information about your company than ever before. The same goes for potential employees. Good salespeople will spend a lot of time browsing the LinkedIn profiles of their potential bosses and colleagues. If they are not impressed with what they find online, they will most likely not even accept the interview invitation. The first thing to do is to make sure that the whole organization gives a good first impression.

An effective way of obtaining the best salespeople is by training the already-existing lineup. Those that come to you with a certain amount of experience might stay, but they might also be lured by a more attractive offer from a competitor. And although not much can be done to prevent other companies from recruiting your salespeople, you can invest in your current sales team through cyclical workshops, training, and coaching sessions. This way, you build a brand for yourself as an employer. Remember that these days, employer branding plays an increasingly large role. Talented workers will want to work with you, knowing that they will learn a lot in your company.

The best workers are attracted by the best offers. The best strive for great success. And to achieve success, they need a work environment that allows them to do so. Invest in your sales team: provide them with autonomy, tools, training, and personal coaching, which will help them perfect their competencies in regard to identifying, understanding, and engaging future clients.

2. Hire the integrated

Apart from having the right skills, experience, and professional success, the best candidates should also match the organization and the team. One of the most important reasons employees leave companies is that they do not feel engaged within the company. And one of the most fundamental ways of engaging people is by creating an emotional bond with the organization.

It is worth noticing that success ‘so far’ is not always an indicator of future results. Assess the experience of each of your sellers, along with his or her skills and work philosophy, and make sure that your company’s culture and sales methods have the potential to let them grow. It is often a good idea to make sure that the company’s goals and the career paths of the salespeople are well aligned.

3. Take care of onboarding

When placing emphasis on the effectiveness of your trade representatives, it’s not very clever to leave anything to chance. Correctly implementing the newly hired—the so-called onboarding process (I have dedicated a whole article to this concept; you can read it here)—into the work environment can be one of your keys to success. Show the new employees what it’s all about: give them insight into the sales methodology, explain the expectations and goals, and give them the tools to fulfill them.

4. Optimize their productivity.

Many studies show that salespeople are unnecessarily distracted and frustrated by administrative requirements and other tasks not connected to sales. For someone whose day is completely filled with presentations, negotiations, lunches, and coffees with clients, paperwork is the absolute worst. It takes away the whole fun. It slows down and distracts. Hire someone who takes pleasure in working in an office (there are crowds of such people, and they are not expensive at all), and let the salespeople do what they do best.

5. Understand their motivation

Salespeople are motivated by different types of rewards. Although money is very important, other types of motivators are also highly effective. Almost everyone reacts positively to a kind word and recognition. Even rather small expressions can substantially strengthen the feeling of satisfaction among your employees. A luxurious dinner with the company’s top management or a prestigious, high-end training program in the USA can mean more than a raise.

6. Be quick to decide

Great salespeople (and those who have the potential to become them) are always in heavy demand, and this demand never fades. When you find a candidate who both has the required skill set and the personality traits that match the ones you need, be quick to make a decision.

If you wait to speak with a wider range of candidates or until the bureaucratic machine of your company finally spits out a decision, you will most likely come to notice that your pick has already been taken in by another company.

Take a look at our customized negotiation training and consulting services.

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Michał ChmieleckiMarch 16, 2018