Sales Demystified: An Insider's Guide To Building Better Sales Professionals by Rangoussis Steve

Sales Demystified: An Insider's Guide To Building Better Sales Professionals by Rangoussis Steve

Author:Rangoussis, Steve [Rangoussis, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Hockeystick Growth Publishing
Published: 2020-07-21T16:00:00+00:00


Chapter 10

Sales Hiring

S ales hiring is the most influential driver of success [xxiv] . Hiring right yields top revenue growth, encourages efficiency in development, and raises the talent bar. Hiring wrong costs the company money, dilutes development efforts, and lowers the talent bar.

Identifying and executing on the process required to hire right is the crucial initial step. Incorporating onboarding plans incentivized with clear career paths is a comprehensive approach that turns mediocre hiring into world-class sales hiring. This comprehensive hiring process is the way to predictably hire top-performing sales teams.

Start with the unique characteristics of sales hires, which must fit the sales context. What needs to be sold? Thinking of buyer behavior, what attributes are necessary to be successful selling the product or service to the customer? Is the offering highly technical, requiring specialization? Or straightforward with a low level of complexity? What are the points of differentiation for the offering? What experi­ence, skills, education, and personal characteristics of the ideal salesperson are required? Is this role for new business development or to grow existing business? With those questions answered, a candidate profile will emerge.

Time for a thought exercise. A medical device company has a diagnostic machine that is a large capital investment. Similarly, the company has another product—software that optimizes patient care for new systems.

Are these repeat purchases or first-time purchases? Is the sales cycle short and simple, or long and complex? The answer: first-time purchases that have longer sales cycles. That requires sales hires to have knowledge of complex sales cycles and consultative sales skills.

Let’s do another. A company that makes a consumable product for machines (e.g., mill drills) has specialty store dealers as points of distribution to sell to end customers in metal fabrication crafts. Are these likely repeat purchases or first-time purchases? Long or short sales cycles? This scenario indicates a short sales cycle with repeat purchases. When accounts are making rebuys of the same product or service, sales hires should have negotiation and relationship-building sales skills.

Other considerations involve where the rep will spend the most time. If this is a field sales role, a sales rep with outside sales experience and a realistic expectation of time on the road (e.g., 70 percent travel required) should be included in the job description and the candidate profile. Will the position require that the rep communicate over the phone a significant amount of time? If so, phone skills and call center experience may be important.

The Fluidity of Hiring

Though the hiring process fundamentals remain constant, the candi­date requirements change depending on the sales context and the needs of the business.

Recruiting to backfill a fifty-person SDR call center with high turno­ver is markedly different from recruiting to fill two enterprise account executives several times a year, or even hiring to offset attrition versus hiring to actually increase and grow the headcount of a team.

A person selling a physical product is different than someone selling a service. A SaaS salesperson has to convince someone of a particular service to use by



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.