Why Recruiting Should Be a Sales Leader's Top Priority

If you’re a sales leader, recruiting the right team members is the fastest way to succeed. Without the talent you need, 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.

“Yet no single activity will impact a company’s sales success more than hiring the right salespeople.”
— The Science of Selling, David Hoffeld

1. Great Salespeople Make Everyone Look Good

Hiring motivated, passionate professionals makes your job as a sales manager 10x easier.

Without the right talent, you’ll waste time. You’ll be busy with performance discussions, one-on-ones, and meetings about why your reps aren’t hitting their goals.

You can prevent the problems that come with bad sales hires through tenacious recruiting. That means taking an active role and doing what you must to get the best people on your team. It’s much easier to recruit average reps than the top 10%, for a reason.

2. Hiring the Right People Is Transformative

You can’t transform the unmotivated or unwilling into top producers.

Unless you enjoy motivating by fear, you’ll need to hire the passionate, optimistic, charismatic, and driven. They’ll also need the skills to succeed in your specific sales environment.

You’ll have a revolving door if you approach recruiting with short-term thinking. Turnover costs money, time, and future star hires.

When you’re recruiting, take the time to ask well-thought-out questions. Then listen to the answers to get as much information as possible before deciding.

When you get the right people on the team, you’ll notice your job is easier. You’ll spend less time coaching reps on filling the pipeline. Deals come together with greater predictability. Your forecasting is on the mark. And it becomes easier to meet revenue targets.

3. Recruit Consistently, and You’ll Hire Top Performers

Because you’re always looking for talent, you’re more likely to find moldable candidates with the right attitude and help them become exceptional. As you get better at developing sales talent, your reputation grows. You’ll become known as the leader who gets people promoted.

You’ll naturally attract ambitious sales talent, the kind that sees value in working for you and being part of your team. You’ll also get better at recruiting and at letting go of underperformers, because you have an active pipeline of sales talent. Experienced software sales recruiters can help you build and maintain that pipeline, and understanding key recruiting cycles can give you a real advantage.

4. Sales Is the Lifeblood of the Company

Great products, exceptional service, cool branding, none of it matters if your organization doesn’t have sales. It’s straightforward but easy to forget. If your team isn’t selling, it won’t be long before the company closes its doors.

As a sales leader, it’s your job to make sure you have the right people on the team. You must recruit salespeople who will help you protect the company’s cash flow.

Hire the best sales talent you can find. The problems created by not having the right people will start to disappear.

5. When Recruiting Is Your #1 Priority, You Hire the Best

If you’re always looking for star talent, you’ll have the chance to engage more of it.

You’ll remove the “perfect timing” roadblock and put your company in the market for superstar talent at all times.

There are no shortcuts for recruiting star sales talent. But staying in the market saves you time in the long run, because you won’t be hiring people who can’t close deals, can’t motivate themselves, or continuously miss their targets.

Recruiting Is Sales

First, develop your criteria for hiring top sales talent. Then build a pipeline, fill it with strong candidates, and move them through the recruitment process.

There are metrics you can use to measure your progress and accurately predict the pipeline you need to staff your team. Interview-to-hire ratios, second interviews, and offer-to-acceptance ratios are all predictive measurements you can track.

Recruiting for your sales team takes a lot of time and energy, and getting it wrong is extraordinarily expensive. Getting it right puts you on the way to repeatable growth. If recruiting your sales team is where you’re stuck, that’s the conversation worth having.