Tips For Hiring Top Performing Sales People
Hope you had a great mothers day last weekend.
Below is an except from a report I am working on called.
“The 5 Biggest Threats Affecting Companies Who Employ Sales People and How
to Flip them to Your Advantage”
As you know, its the people that you have in your organisation that ultimately mean either the success or failure of each area of the business and it’s ultimate success.
And as you also are no doubt aware, today’s labor market is really really competitive.
As a result of this, so many of the business people I speak to from day to day are really struggling to find good people. (especially sales people).
They are often forced to simply put “bums on seats” or risk losing even more people through them having to work too hard to take up the slack of the under resourced business.
This spells disaster for client relationships, customer service and for overall sales and business results.
Ads on Seek and in the newspaper will give you people, but the respondents are often less than exciting and you get too few of them.
Some recruitment agencies are also good but then there’s is the added expense associated with them.
So what can be done about it? – how can we switch this change in our favor?
What I am about to recommend is an idea that has become absolutely crucial to get good people in today’s market.
It involves three very related ideas.
– The Virtual Bench
– Getting rid of duds fast
– Top Grading interview practices and behavioral profile testing
As you can see, things have most definitely moved WAY beyond the old “do you know anyone who’d be good” approach to new hires – that’s for sure.
The Virtual Bench
What I am recommending here is simply this. If everyone acknowledges that people are the companies most make or break asset. MAKE IT YOUR BUSINESS, to know who are the very best people in your industry. who are the future leaders coming up the ranks
AND MOST IMPORTANTLY…
Develop relationships with these top players REGARDLESS of if you have a vacancy or not.
Begin a “virtual bench” of STARS that you talk to on a regular basis.
Then, if a vacancy comes up you can call them and say “hey this has come up, if you’re keen it’s yours”. If you have 5 or 6 people, (how many you need on your virtual bench is going to depend on how many team members your business has) on your virtual bench at any given time, you will never have to worry about recruitment EVER again.
And best of all you will have your pick of the BEST people in your industry.
The best operators are already using this little known approach to having great people and I encourage you to as well.
Get Rid of DUDs fast
Don’t really need to go on about this one too much – although what I will say is that if your virtual bench is looking good this won’t be an issue.
What I will also add is that leaving a “bad egg” in your organisation is like a cancer that will infect your entire culture. As they say fire fast and you will be blown away at the change you see in your team as a result.
Here’s a great question to ask yourself about an employee in question.
“knowing what I now know about this person, would I enthusiastically hire him/her today?” If the answer is no – you know what you need to do.
Top Grading Interview and Behavior Profile testing.
Hiring is such a crucial thing, and yes you can hedge your bets – much more than you think you can with the aid of specific tools. The structure of the interview can work wonders for you here – I have a specific process that I have both used myself and have coached clients to use and with spectacular results. Its not just a luck thing – that’s total BS.
The other idea here is behavior profiling tools – there are heaps to choose from and some are unbelievably powerful.
These tools are MUST HAVES for attracting and sorting through staff in the current market.
There isn’t the space to expand on them right here, but if you want to know more, or want to be put on the list to receive the entire report once I am finished, contact me I am more than happy to share. 😉
Hope this help you out and have a great week.
Take care of yourself and the ones you love.
