There’s not a more nerve-racking feeling than the rush of needing to find quality sales talent, and needing that talent now. There’s a variety of reasons for this, but it seems like the door to door sales industry, more so than any other, is in constant need of new salespeople.
The 3 Most Common Reasons For Rapid Expansion
- The seasonality of door to door sales
- Fast growing companies
- The incredibly large amount of turnover
With the seasonality of door to door sales organizations comes the expansion and contraction of teams every six months or so. Some people are retained, others aren’t, but regardless of who is and who isn’t, you’re bound to hire by the masses soon enough.
If you’re a company that’s on the up & up, you already have your own set of challenges outside of recruiting. This is definitely the best reason you would need to double the size of your team in a hurry, but it comes with the same challenges nonetheless.
For whatever reason, it almost seems as if companies like to have that revolving door of salespeople on at full speed. Whether it’s not having the systems in place to hire, train and make a new rep successful, or not properly incentivizing and rewarding your current sales team, there’s an awful lot of talent walking out of companies these days.
8 Essentials Recruiting Strategies To Double The Size Of Your Team
#1 | Always Be Sourcing
The biggest bottleneck in hiring at volume, speed and scale comes down to sourcing. This is your proactive search for quality sales reps for the positions you have available. The goal of sourcing is to collect relevant data about qualified candidates, such as names, titles and job responsibilities.
Sourcing helps to identify potential candidates regardless of whether they’re actively looking for a new position or not. Sourcing is how you fill up your pipeline with potential candidates that appear to be a good fit for your company.
5 Sourcing Tactics:
- Social Media
- Referrals
- Data.com
- About.me
- Boolean Searching On Google
#2 | Get “Millennial-ized”
I know… this sounds weird. While there’s no one who loves to rip on their own generation more than me, it’s officially time to make your company ”millennial friendly.”
If you’re not aggressively working to attract millennials to your company, your recruiting strategy is going nowhere in a hurry. In just a few short years, millennials we total almost half of the workforce, with the generation accounting for 75% of it by 2030.
There are 4 things that this “participation trophy” generation cares about:
- They want to grow – even if it’s not with your company
- They want a coach – not a boss
- They don’t want to waste their time on the little things
- They want balance & democracy… and another participation trophy while you’re at it
There’s obviously more than this, but these provide a fairly accurate portrayal. So how can you use it to your advantage to accelerate your recruiting efforts?
Embrace a coaching culture, then brag about it.
This generation has overwhelmingly demonstrated that what they’re really after is opportunity. They’re not looking for an average job where they can spend 20 years and brag to their kids about the good ‘ole days. If it doesn’t keep their interest and provide growth potential where they can learn, they’re not sticking around.
- 78% of sales professionals said they would accept less money to sell something compelling
- 60% of millennials consider the most attractive perk to be growth opportunities
- 46% of millennials left their last job due to a lack of career growth [Glassdoor]
Help them learn and grow, and you’ll attract and keep them.
If you have a cool office, brag about that too.
We’ve experienced some massive shifts in cultural norms over the last couple decades, as the once powerful suit and tie no longer represents the people with a serious job like it once did. Instead, they’re more of a stodginess in many industries.
Of all the things millennials have denounced, there may not be a more hated work convention than cubicles. Thanks to the help of Office Space, these ratchet things now stand as a symbol of where creativity goes to die.
While I was born in the wrong time period, my fellow “Gen-Y’s” will flock to companies with a cool office like yours. Use this as a tool to your advantage in your recruiting efforts while making it known that it’s a place for millennials.
Make your company culture well-known that it’s geared toward millennials.
The best companies are honest about their culture. If you’re not trying to hire millennials, hey – more power to ya. However, there’s been a large shift of companies centering their culture around these individuals.
By broadcasting that you have a winning culture with a no complaining attitude, you’ll naturally attract millennials if that’s your focus. If it’s not, you’ll likely avoid them in many regards because most job seekers don’t want to work for a company where they don’t believe they’ll fit in.
Part of hiring the best has to take into account the best cultural fit, and by simply stating where you stand, you’ll see more applicants submit their information just based on the fact they think they’ll be a good match.
#3 | Supercharge Your Job Ads
Have you ever posted a job ad similar to this one? Not only does that just rock me right to sleep, but it’s highly doubtful you’ll attract the right type of applicants with something that bad.
With no mention of the type of sale, volume, price point, etc., how is a job seeker supposed to know if it’s the best door to door sales job for them?
There’s simply nothing being communicated that would be viewed as a benefit. It’s a commission only position with no draw or opportunity to earn money quickly. You’re going to be hard pressed to find talent with an ad like that.
Surely you already understand the importance of tracking your team’s sales activities by now. This will play a critical role in your ability to scale your team quickly because these same metrics and analytics are now your strength in recruiting as well.
Use the information from your dashboard to calculate metrics like your team’s dollars per door rate (DPD) rate.
Now you can get laser focused and detailed in your job ads and have data-driven proof with your claims, like in this example.
#4 | Offer More Than Just Commission
If you go look at any of the larger d2d or outside sales companies, you can guarantee they’re offering some type of incentive on top of just paying commission when a deal is closed. This is one of the ways they’re able to entice the professionals looking for a sales career vs a sales job that they’re the right fit.
How companies can afford to pay anything else other than commission is probably what you’re thinking to yourself, I’m sure. For starters, they know that the top talent in the industry wants to work for companies that invest in their success, and that includes financially when they perform.
1… Consider ramping new sales hires with a draw
Paying your new sales reps is not a requirement and you can still get your hires, but by offering a small ramp up stipend you will be able to pick from a larger pool of sales candidates and increase quality of applicants. If you would like to see more traffic with stronger candidates, then consider offering a recoverable or non-recoverable draw.
2… Provide a career path
As long as your sales process is real and the business is growing, then your 100% commission sales reps are proving their ability and closing deals. Have a growth plan in place to promote your top performers. It’s important to have growth opportunities and a career path for top reps. Retain top performers and continue to reward their performance.
Hiring salespeople who have the experience, passion, and drive to succeed is no easy feat. Understand that there will be challenges. Get serious about paying your sales reps based on performance.
#5 | Treat Great Applicants Like Great Customers
It’s not every day that a high quality candidate applies for your position. Treat them like you do high quality leads that come through your marketing and sales funnels. You wouldn’t wait three days to call a high velocity lead, would you? If you wouldn’t do it to a good lead, don’t do it to a good candidate.
You should be moving heaven and earth to accommodate these types of candidates. Focus on impressing them and treat them to the best hiring experience they’ve ever gone through. Recruiting is essential to achieving growth, making hiring top talent as important as acquiring customers.
#6 | Don’t Ignore Passive Candidates
Passive candidates are applicants who aren’t currently looking for a new role, but would be open to the possibility if an opportunity presented itself. These individuals aren’t on Indeed or Monster looking for your company, but they’ll hear you out if you they’re contacted.
Approximately 75% of the candidate pool is described as passive. Social media will become one of your best friends to find these applicants. Just because they’re not looking for you, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be looking for them.
#7 | Oh, Referrals
Your best source to not just find new employees, but find the people with talent is to look within your existing team. Think back to your sales process… customer referrals are your highest converting, cheapest lead source.
The same is true for recruiting referrals. If you’ve built a good team like you were supposed to, this becomes a network effect. When you create a culture of happy employees that are motivated in their work, they’re more inclined to refer their friends and colleagues to join the team.
#8 | Nurture Talent
Timing is everything, especially when it comes to recruiting. Whether it’s candidates who were referred by your current employees or people you’ve found through your own efforts, there’s always going to be applicants who aren’t ready to be a part of your team for one reason or another.
Put anyone you don’t hire into a nurturing campaign that sends a drip email 3 – 4 times per year. The emails can be extremely simple, but the goal is to remind people who you are and your company are. Check in with them to see how things have been going while making it easy for them to check out your career pages and connect with your company on social media for more info.
One Final Thing
Doubling the size of your sales team isn’t easy. It’s going to require a combination of recruiting new talent and keeping the talent that already exists in your organization. The approach you take needs to be exceptionally well-rounded because it’s going to take a considerable number of skills to grow this quickly.
To grow a team of any size requires a fairly large amount of time, effort and energy. If you’re not putting forth the level needed, you’re going to miss on the highest quality candidates. More importantly, your effort needs to be greater than before because what you don’t do, your competitors will.
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SPOTIO is the #1 field sales acceleration platform designed specifically for outside sales managers and reps to squeeze every drop out of their field sales efforts.
