It’s no secret that recruiting sales talent is a is a challenge.
If you’ve gone through the interview process with multiple candidates and have finally winnowed it down to one final choice, it’s painful when your finalist turns down your job offer.
If you’re working hard to recruit the top 20%, this will happen.
It’s not only acceptable but inevitable. Part of recruiting the best is getting turned down.
Recruiting top sales talent is always competitive. They have lots of choices. But it shouldn’t happen too often because it burns through too many resources and takes too much time.
Every top salesperson will eventually quit. What’s even more painful is the best leave when they are on top, so if you’re not careful, you may not even see it coming. As the job market tightens, sales professionals have more and more lucrative and exciting job opportunities vying for their attention.
I was on the phone with one of my candidates yesterday. A true talent with an amazing track record of sales success hunting and winning new business. Probably not another person like him in the entire region --he is that good.
He went for an interview and was expecting to discuss an offer
Hiring is difficult. In some cases you’ll spend more time recruiting for someone than they will last in the job! But if you are struggling with your next hire, you could be overthinking things.
If you’ve noticed during the recruiting process ……
The position has been open for more than 6 months.
Sometimes an executives busy schedule is not his or her own. Let’s face it, “things happen.” Unfortunately, this happens to some busy hiring managers or recruiters more than others. When you are unable to consistently keep your calendared appointments, arrive late, or constantly reschedule there are both direct and indirect costs.
In good economies and bad, finding top talent is difficult. Think it's any easier for Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, or Google? Sure, they have distinct competitive advantages, but it still takes teams of recruiters interviewing around the clock to recruit and hire staff even for well branded growing organizations.
If you’re a sales leader, the fastest way to success is to recruit the right team members. Without the talent you need to succeed, you’ll find yourself with a whole new set of problems. Recruiting is hard work, and requires a top slot on your priority list. Now is the time to start looking for the talent you need to achieve your goals.
Isn’t it frustrating when you reach out to a recruiter to help you fill a role and you don’t see strong results? As a hiring manager or an internal recruiter, when you’re looking for top sales talent, your neck is on the line. You need to get roles filled with the right salespeople and you need to make it happen fast so you can hit your hiring and top line revenue goals.
If I want to bake a chocolate cake, I’ll pull out a recipe book. Then I’ll follow the directions and in about an hour and a half or so I’ll have a cake. If you just follow a recipe, you’ll get predictable results. Right?
Except every time I try to bake a chocolate cake, it never comes out quite the same. Sometimes they’re good , sometimes they’re burnt, other times they just taste like a cardboard sponge. (Not sure I’ve ever eaten a cardboard sponge, but you get the point.)
Are you recruiting top software sales talent and running into roadblocks? You’re not alone. The sales function appears to be an easy role to recruit for on the outset. Yet recruiting sales talent is one of the more difficult and time-consuming recruitment jobs around.
Hiring can bring out your worst fears. Especially if you’re a new manager or just starting with a new organization. When your first goal is to immediately staff up—your reputation hangs in the balance. Everyone’s watching...quietly rooting for your success or failure.
Are you still dealing with high-turnover, under-performers, and missed quotas? The greatest challenge of any sales manager is in the recruiting. Getting the right people, on time, with the right skills that fit the corporate culture is a challenge.
So how do you pick the best sales talent?
Losing out on good candidates to other companies? Wonder why you can’t seem to attract enough sales candidates to make a strong hire? It’s no secret that hitting your revenue targets starts with building a successful sales team. Recruiting the right players who are motivated to succeed will prevent the problems that hiring the wrong people create.
Getting and keeping your sales team in top shape requires an exceptional recruitment strategy. If you’re determined to win the war for talent, you must first win the recruitment battle. It starts with these seven strategies…Read More
The single biggest recruiting expense is time.
Never waste your time trying to recruit someone who is unrecruitable. The following guidelines will save you from murdering your own time. Hoping and betting on long-shot candidates will kill hours and weeks of your life. Save yourself from the misery and heartbreak that comes from counteroffer acceptance: Read More
With Q4 quickly coming to a close it’s time to step up your sales recruitment game as you look towards 2016. Now more than ever, top sales talent is hard to come by, and you’re not alone in the quest. With rapidly increasing numbers of counteroffers and top candidates receiving multiple offers, it’s time to tighten up your sales recruitment efforts. Read More
Why do we hire the people we do? Human psychology and science help explain our hiring decisions. Many of today’s hiring managers have had little to no training when it comes to hiring sales talent.
Therefore, sales managers rely heavily on the interview process and collective opinion to build sales teams. Trial and error has also been an employable strategy for the few companies that can afford it. This strategy calls for hiring as many salespeople as possible, assessing performance, and cutting the bottom 50%. -Read More-
John called me in the middle of the day. He’d just started a new role with a software start-up in San Jose, California. He sounded a little irritated, certainly not his usual upbeat self. As a sales recruiter who spends hours each day on the phone, I’m highly sensitive to slight voice inflections. I instantly knew something was wrong.
“I’m not sure this is the place for me,” he said. After a long pause, John went on to explain, “Yesterday two of the guys in my sales training class went to lunch and didn’t come back. The office manager Susan let on this wasn’t a first. Every time I step out of the office, my boss gets this tense look on his face.” Read More
Tony Hsieh, CEO of billion-dollar e-tailer Zappos, pays new employees $2,000 to quit. Almost all new hires take less than a few measly seconds to say, “No thanks!”
What about you? If I walked into your office and asked your newest hires if they’d quit for $2K, are you confident 97% of them would say, “No thanks!” like Tony’s?
Or would they sleep on it…?
If you’re like most companies, you have new hires that’ll leave for free. They won’t even need the allure of a $2K bonus. We could quickly run through the numbers and roughly calculate how much sales turnover is costing you, but it’d only put you in a really bad mood.
When you’ve worked hard to recruit top talent for your sales team don’t leave new beginnings up to chance. Read More
The first time I saw my boss, he looked at me with steely eyes, and told me to find the best talent for my clients, or pack up my desk and go home. I had 30 days to figure out this business and put up some numbers, or get out. A line of contenders a mile long wanted entry into this lucrative cubical kingdom, and if I couldn’t do it, I’d have to give it up to the next guy who was willing to make more calls, endure endless criticism, and review resumes until his eyes bled. This is when I quickly learned what my ferret of a boss already expected me to know about recruiting. Read More
When it comes to recruiting A-Players, there are a few tricks of the trade that will help you win top-notch sales talent. I’m not going to lie: recruiting top software sales talent isn’t easy. There are no silver-bullets and it’s just plain hard work. Although sales recruiting can be frustrating, using a few key strategies will give you a leg-up in the talent war and help you attract top software sales talent who will help you win new customers and increase top line revenue growth. Read More
It's no secret that now more than ever, sales recruitment is a constant challenge. Identifying and attracting the right people can be aggravating, frustrating and time consuming. Once you have made the time investment to vet a select pool of candidates, make sure you walk out of interviews with the information you need to succeed. Read More
The days are both long and short, the calendar is crammed with back-to-back calls and meetings. Another trip is right around the corner. There is staff to hire, performance reviews to give, forecasts to write up, and a dinner meeting with staff tonight. With so much to do, post-interview activities are easily rationalized away, and are often left undone at the bottom of the to-do list. The last thing you feel like doing is calling Mike, and telling him he isn’t a fit for the sales opening.
Let’s face it, it’s easier to ignore Mike, move forward with your top two applicants, and get ready for tonight’s dinner meeting. Although you may save time today by not following-up with Mike, or any of the other candidates you’ve interviewed over the years, the long-term consequences will be harmful. Read More
Since 2004 Optimal Sales Search has been helping companies accelerate growth by hiring high-performance sales and sales leadership.
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