Everything You Need to Know About Sales Recruitment

No matter the size of your business, you need an excellent sales team to succeed. Recruitment is a vital part of this process, as having the right people in place ensures smooth operations. A good onboarding for these new hires is also crucial.

The Basics of Recruiting Salespeople

Different sales roles require different skills. For example, you need a different type of salesperson to sell a SaaS business than to sell cream puffs. Here are the key steps to successfully set up your sales recruitment process:

Define the Hiring Profile and Job Description

The first step is to define the hiring profile or identify the qualities and skills you want your sales representative to have. It's also important to have a clear job description outlining the sales role. You want your new hire to know exactly what their job entails. A good way to do this is to present your business and describe the specific tasks and responsibilities in the job ad or offer.

Remember, when recruiting someone, it's not just about their skills—they will represent your business!

Recruitment Tests: Once You Have Your Candidate

The sales recruitment period is trickier than it seems: you need to run tests to ensure you’re hiring the best reps for the right sales roles, helping reduce common issues like turnover and missed revenue targets. To build your list of tests, you can focus on the following points:

• Prospecting abilities
• Willingness (or reluctance) to make calls
• Closing the sale (one-call closing is always better)
• Self-starter (can take initiative without following a script)
• Teamwork skills

The Sales Recruitment Process: A Unique Approach

After preparing your job description and setting up the recruitment phase, you need to hire the best candidate.

Refine Selection with Team Interviews

You’ll receive many resumes, so you need to quickly spot the right candidates. Since many won’t fit your role, candidate selection is crucial for filtering out unqualified applicants or those who don’t meet your requirements.

The idea is to organize team interviews and ask the following questions:

• Do they sell themselves well? Observe the candidate’s behavior and attitude during the interview. Did they arrive on time? Are they well-dressed? Can they clearly express their skills and value?

• Can they sell our product? A salesperson might be good at selling themselves, but you also need to ensure they can work with your products or services. Ask them to start a trial period, handle a customer service interaction, or try to sell your product on the spot. This helps you assess their potential success as a salesperson in your business.

• Do they ask good questions? A candidate who asks smart questions to understand the job requirements is likely a good fit. Hire someone who shows critical thinking and seeks the knowledge needed to become a great salesperson.

Improve your onboarding

Welcome to the Business: Create an Onboarding Program for New Salespeople

Your onboarding program should assess how new hires fit into the company, provide training, and offer coaching and mentoring to ensure the new employee gets everything they need to integrate smoothly. This might include training on internal software and processes, coaching on your software sales process, or explaining products and services before asking the employee to sell them.

A solid onboarding program ensures the new hire is part of the organization before representing it to clients, which can greatly improve performance and engagement.

Our Tips for Future Salespeople Who Want to Recruit:

Let’s review some of the most in-demand sales skills we’ve observed:

Be patient: Patience is an essential sales skill because the best salespeople know how to wait for a lead. It’s important to know how to nurture your prospects and not rush them.

Excellent verbal communication: Strong speaking skills are crucial for sales roles, as candidates must think quickly, speak persuasively, and know how to have engaging conversations with potential clients.

Motivated: Clients rarely meet you in person, so salespeople need to be self-motivated. Smart salespeople use both inbound and outbound marketing to find and close deals and keep the perfect lead coming. Don’t waste time waiting.

A good storyteller: Selling is about telling stories. You want consumers to understand the benefits your product or service brings to their lives, so salespeople do this by painting a picture.

Can identify customer needs: Some say the best salesperson could sell a car to a rabbit, but that’s not the point. To succeed in sales, reps must understand who their customers are and what they need.