Joe Ellers: Hiring New Sales Talent
Control the factors you can to hire the best people for the job.
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Everywhere I go I hear of this problem: “We can’t seem to hire any good salespeople.” There are a lot of reasons for this problem. Some of them are not (really) in our control:
- Most people do not want to be salespeople.
- A lot of people who appear to be good, really aren’t.
- Truly good salespeople have no reason to want to
leave their current employer.
(The flip side of this is that a lot of people who are willing to leave a current sales job aren’t very good.)
Then, there are the parts that are under our control:
- We can try to find people who want to sell.
- We can be clear on the job we have and try to hire people with those skills.
- We can provide new hires with appropriate structure at the beginning to help them succeed.
- We can create a real sales training territory so that we can hire for an “easier” assignment.
- We can pay for what we want.
Find people who want to sell
Selling is proactively going out and finding either a current customer or prospect who has an opportunity that is either not being sold by anyone or is being sold by a competitor; identifying the right person or people who control it; and the doing the actions required to get it.
Too often, we present jobs that look more like “account management” or “account maintenance” of even “customer service.” If we present the job this way, a lot more people will agree to try it but they probably won’t pan out because the job you described—and they took—is not what you really want them to do. To improve your hiring practices, be very clear on what you really want and see if the candidates want to sell.
Be clear on the job we have and try to hire people with those skills
One of the classic hiring mistakes is to hire a “farmer” away from their current position and put them into either a “hunting” or “pioneer” territory.
Here’s how it goes: You know that Bill has a $2 million territory for your competitor. You hire him away and put him in a territory that is doing about $400,000 a year — and you are surprised when it doesn’t take off. Bill is unable to bring more than a handful of orders with him and he seems very reluctant to get out and call on customers to try and sell something. It’s because he really hasn’t done this in years.
There are three primary types of sales jobs:
Farming: Primarily maintaining existing business and trying to add a few other sales to existing accouts.
Hunting: Starting with an account base, then adding both new accounts and aggressively seeking to grow business in existing accounts.
Pioneering: Opening a new territroy for your company or launching a new product.
If you want a farmer, hire one. But if you are looking for a hunter or pioneer, then it would be really good to hire someone who has shown success at these in the recent (not distant) past.
Provide new hires with appropriate structure at the beginning to help them succeed
In many cases, the failure is not that you hired the wrong person — it’s that you brought them in “wrong.”
A classic hiring mistake is to hire a new salesperson and then let them go for it. Even veteran salespeople are a little uncertain about what to do in your company. The most successful sales hires include a formal “on-boarding process.” This would include a 30/60/90 day Activity Plan for new hires, some sort of training and regularly scheduled joint calls with sales management — even with veterans — early in the process to ensure that they are getting it.
Our approach is to literally set up a 90-day trial, where there are activity (not results) targets. It’s probably unfair to ask a salesperson to book $400,000 worth of new business in the first 90 days, but it is reasonable to expect them to call on all of the top 50 accounts and prospects in their territory. This kind of plan gives both the salesperson and the manager an objective set of fair measures.
And here’s another key point: if the salesperson is unable to accomplish their initial activity targets, they are highly unlikely to hit their results targets in the future.
Create a real sales training territory so that we can hire for an “easier” assignment
Trying to hire for an open territory is a crapshoot under the best of circumstances. Decisions made under time constraints tend to work out less often. One way to remedy this is to create an ROW territory and hire for that. ROW stands for Rest Of the World and means a territory consisting of C and D accounts. Ideally, you have at least one ROW territory and you use this to bring people in and teach them how to succeed in your business.
In most cases, these territories are break-even at worst. Sometimes, someone strikes gold in these discarded accounts. The real value, however, is that you always have a proven, trained professional ready to go if you have a vacancy in a senior sales territory. (There’s also some nice psychology for the senior team in knowing that you are training someone who can take over a spot). Every year, the pro sports holds a draft and brings in the best athletes they can find to challenge a lot of players — and ROW territory helps you to do the same.
The really neat thing is that if you promote your ROW salesperson up to a senior territory, you are now trying to fill an ROW territory — and this is not as urgent and less problematic if you make a bad hire.
Pay for what we want
I’m sorry to mention this one, but professional salespeople cost money. If you are looking for a good salesperson, you need to remember the following:
- Someone outside of your industry might be a good hire. (Teach them your product — they already know how to sell).
- Acknowledge that you are not just competing within your industry, you are competing against everyone hiring. (If a person can make more working as a UPS driver, for instance, than they can in your sales job — are you sure you’re offering the right pay?)
- Know your market; know your industry and know what you have to pay to get the people you want.
When it comes to hiring salespeople, there are some factors that you cannot control — and some that you can. Control what you can. CS
Joe Ellers, STAFDA’s sales consultant, has consulted with hundreds of companies worldwide and trained thousands of sales staff and managers over the last 25 years. Learn more at www.JoeEllers.com.
CONTRACTOR SUPPLY MAGAZINE
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