The game of sales recruiting is a long and ongoing one that can leave you scratching your head wondering. It seems to be one of the biggest challenges facing door to door and field sales companies. The same questions are asked by almost every company, coming up time and time again.
Where do I find the best sales reps?
How should I pay sales reps to get more talent?
Are there recruiting firms I can use to find salespeople for me?
Where To Find Talent: Same Tired Question – Effective New Strategy
Before you get to making promises to anyone, you need to know where to look for top talent. Check out the 8 best places to recruit high performing sales reps.
Knowing where you can find qualified salespeople is step one in the actual recruiting process, but there’s a fairly large amount of work to be completed prior to getting there.
Sorry to be so blunt, but the truth is that most companies have a recruiting process that sucks. Above all else, it’s inefficient and comes with a high price tag due to the amount of time and energy that gets wasted. Improve your sales recruiting and quit burning dollars with these 5 strategies to start hiring salespeople more effectively.
What’s Attractive To You?
The recruiters and companies that seem to struggle the most typically haven’t completed the necessary requirements before they begin interviewing. This makes it difficult for everyone to be on the same page. You have to decide which qualities and traits your organization considers important for a potential candidate to have before bringing a single person in.
As an example, look for sales professionals who do the 10 things that require zero talent because if all else fails, you know they’ll always give their best effort with a good attitude. This is something you’d want to include in your ideal candidate profile when you build it, if you haven’t already.
When you create profiles of the type of people you’re looking for, it gives everyone in your company who will be interviewing candidates a guideline to determine whether or not it’s a good fit:
1. Does this candidate possess industry experience?
2. How many years have they been in sales?
3. What is their availability to start?
4. What is their salary range?
It’s not until you’ve accepted a few resumes and are ready to start talking to applicants where the real challenge starts.
Smoke & Mirrors
Most companies don’t have a problem getting people to apply; their struggle lies in finding the right applicants. “Poor hires account for almost 80% of turnover rates in business.” [Harvard Business Review] You have complete control of how you present the opportunity and your company when you’re in an interview.
Sales recruiting is just that: sales and recruiting combined. You’re selling the opportunity of working for your company, and you’re recruiting by looking for the best talent available on the market.
What you say during your conversation with a potential candidate will determine how they view the position. What most companies can’t do is make promises to their candidates. They may be able to talk about what a great culture they have or how good their managers are, but they don’t have concrete data they can use to back it up and guarantee results.
4 Promises You Can Make to Attract Quality Sales Talent
Promise #1
If you do “x” activities per day, you’ll make “x” in commission.
Some companies may have an idea about what this number may be for their organization, but it’s not backed up by data. How powerful is it to tell a candidate going through the interview process that if they can knock a certain number of doors, they’ll make a certain amount of money? You’ll get this number by using a sales tracking software.
In order to feel comfortable making this promise, you have to track everything your sales reps currently do, and what they’ll do going forward. The reason you can make this promise and not question it is because it’s backed up by data and analytics specifically from your sales team.
It’s not “industry knowledge” or something from a blog you read online; it’s directly from the results of your sales organization.
Just like you should be asking your current customers for referrals, you should be asking the same from your sales team. In sales, your current customers are your highest converting and cheapest leads. The same is true to your sales recruiting process.
Promise #2
You’ll make “x” dollars per door knocked.
This promise is especially effective to present to a candidate your company is looking to hire when the payment structure is commission only. When your company pays commission only, there is more risk involved for the potential hire.
You need to be able to offer something else other than just commission. If you understand the signs of a candidate who has a sales career vs a sales job, an advanced training program is certainly attractive.
Dollars per door (DPD) is a great financial incentive for the companies who don’t feel comfortable talking about training. It’s also good for the salesperson who’s primarily interested in the amount of money they’ll earn.
When you can tell this individual what they’ll make for each door they knock, it incentivizes them to put forth more effort. It will also set the proper expectation for the number of homes they need to visit in order to hit quota.
Dollars per door can be found by adding up the total number of doors a rep knocks and dividing it by the total commission they make in sales.
You’ll have to calculate this statistic for each person on your team to find the average. If your team is exceptionally good, it could be extremely beneficial to show the applicant a range.
“Our team makes $10.00 per door knocked, which is well above the industry average, and our lowest producing sales rep makes $8.00 per door, which is still higher than the normal average.”
Promise #3
If you do “a”, “b” and “c”, you’ll earn “x” amount of money.
What you’re promising the candidate is that if they do what’s required of them based on the data and metrics you’ve tracked with your sales team, they’ll make a certain amount of money. This is one of the reasons you need to stop being lazy and track every attempt.
The metrics from you available in your door to door sales app aren’t just for the sales team’s benefit, they also play a significant role in the recruiting department.
You’ll add up each sales rep’s income and divide it by the number of salespeople in your organization. This is your team’s average income.
Hopefully your sales reps make more than this, but showing candidates your company’s average income is effective for a few reasons. First, it will probably shock them how much your organization has paid out in commission, and that the company is invested in ensuring their success.
It will also help determine if this is the right opportunity for them. You don’t want to hire salespeople who will start off being unhappy because they can’t make the amount of money they want. Finally, you want motivated sales reps who know exactly what they’ll need to do the second they start with your company.
Check out what may be one of the easiest tricks to gain an unfair advantage when it comes to sales recruiting.
Promise #4
You’ll spend “x” amount of time in the field knocking doors
The final promise you can make to candidates is the amount of time they’ll spend out in the field, visiting homes and knocking doors. The goal of presenting this figure is to hopefully tell them that they’ll spend less time knocking doors than if they were to work for most other companies.
The average salesperson only spends 22% of their time actively selling, and works 50 hours per week. Knowing this allows you to show candidates how your organization provides them with the tools and resources they need to be more efficient. You can explain to them how your company has automated the sales process to allow them to double their selling time and make more money.
The only way you can determine this number is if you know your conversion rates. You have to know the number of attempts your team makes per lead, and per sale.
The analytics needed to make these promises is one of the 5 reasons you should always be tracking your team. They have to log all of their attempts, and the outcomes of those attempts, in order to measure your conversion rates and ultimately find the amount of time sales reps will spend in the field.
Wrapping Up
Sales recruiting is difficult. It takes a considerable amount of time and energy on your part to find the right hires. You can help yourself by using the information and analytics you have available at your fingertips.
Not having the metrics to determine what promises you can make to potential candidates is a tell-tale sign your company needs a sales tracking app. These types of promises will help you land sales reps with more talent over the competition because it shows you’re dedicated and invested in their success.
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