How To Hire Top Salespeople

Only 24.3% of salespeople exceeded their quota last year, which puts sales managers under immense pressure to find ways to deliver their numbers. Top Performers recognize that spending 4 hours or more on sales-related activities and being experts in their roles are the keys to success.

There are three significant obstacles to building high-performance sales teams:

Top salespeople are rare. However, studies show that among people who sell products, 22% are top performers.

1. Top Sales Performers are hard to find. They are too busy selling and focused on their current role and objectives. Unless you have built a network and relationship with top performers and have a compelling reason to respond, they will not invest their valuable time to react to opportunities or engage in conversations that they don’t see any benefit.

2. Salespeople can be challenging to evaluate. Some individuals think salespeople sell themselves making it difficult to tell if they are rock stars. That has not been my experience as an executive recruiter and leader. 

3. Top Performers don’t interview or sell themselves during the interviews. Over the past 20+ years, I have interviewed and received feedback from hiring managers that high-performing sales professionals have not interviewed well to demonstrate themselves as top performers. In general, many candidates don’t interview well as it isn’t something they often do, and they feel uncomfortable with the process. In addition, top performers interview much less than most candidates as they stay in their roles longer or opportunities come to them through their network.

What’s the solution? 

Have a thorough interview process focused on the skills, attributes and desired outcomes you are looking for the individual to possess. It is also essential to ask questions about their current products, sales process, and sales results and, if necessary, have them complete a sales report (30-60-90) or demonstrate their sales ability in a sales role-play.

Network every day to identify potential future high performers within your industry or related industries to join your team. 

In today’s talent-scarce market, candidates have many options and opportunities; therefore, it is essential to qualify your ideal candidate without frustrating them with too many interviews and too long of an interview process. 

If you’re frustrated by turnover, low performance and missed sales targets and would like to discuss how we help our client consistently hire top performers email me at: linda.robertson@rhambiz.com