With sales teams experiencing an average turnover of 10% every year, it can be challenging to find the talented staff that you need to build your team. Salespeople are ambitious, and that ambition can often drive them to seek alternative employment at a company that they consider more promising to their career plans. The result is that in a market where UK unemployment rates are hitting a forty-year low, competition for the best candidates is rife: today’s recruitment sector is candidate-driven.
With competition rife, many companies are turning to graduates to pick up the slack in their teams. Though they might not be as experienced, hiring graduates that show sales potential could be a huge benefit to your team, bringing in fresh blood, a new perspective, and buckets of enthusiasm to the task. And with a 3rd of graduates are considered ‘overqualified’ for the job they’re currently doing, there’s no shortage of skilled new professionals to source and mould into the next generation of star sales people.
Here are some of the benefits that come with hiring graduates for sales roles:
They’ll do new business
Bringing a fresh pair of eyes to your sales team can pay off in sourcing new business – sometimes from unexpected areas. While those who have experience – and have established themselves in the industry – might be unwilling to seek out new clients, people who are just starting out will want to make a name for themselves. Indeed, with 91% of millennial employees citing rapid career progression as a key motivating factor, it’s clear that ambition, and the desire to do well, factors highly into many graduates’ work ethic – which will in turn benefit your sales team.
They’re very enthusiastic
One of the best things about hiring graduates is their enthusiasm for the job: from learning about the product to learning how to handle customers, what seems mundane and ordinary to you or to your colleagues will be brand-new to them. Having come straight out of higher education, they’ll be eager to get stuck in – and given that they have fewer ties than the rest of their older colleagues, like families, they’ll be able to work longer, uninterrupted hours without rushing off for things like the school run. The result? An eager workforce who are willing to pitch in and get things done.
They bring new ideas
Fresh from university, graduates are effectively a blank canvas, ready for you to mould into the next star sales person. There are benefits to their inexperience: given that this is their first sales job, they won’t have any established routines or ways of doing business already in place that they’ll have to relearn on starting with your company.
Instead, they’ll be full of questions. Graduates are curious, and they’ll be used to questioning how or why things work thanks to a lifetime spent in education. This inquisitive approach could pay off by shaking up established methods of doing business, introducing new ideas and new sales tactics to your workforce. Though you need to train these new hires, you should also embrace the fresh pair of eyes that they bring with them: after all, looking at things through a different perspective could be the thing that lands you a major deal.
They are tech savvy
Perhaps one of the biggest benefits to hiring graduates for sales roles is their ease with almost all forms of technology – in fact, 53% of Millennials have revealed that they’d be more likely to accept a job if their employers use the same technology as them. Having grown up with everything from smartphones and iPads to televisions and Xboxes, this new generation of workers are inherently at home with many forms of technology, which pays off in the workplace, too. They might need some training on certain systems, but they won’t take long to pick it up – which, in turn, means that they’ll be trained, and hitting targets, that much quicker.
They will get social selling
What young adult these days isn’t active on multiple forms of social media? With more than 1.4 billion users on LinkedIn alone, your new hire will understand just how important social selling is when it comes to scoping out and connecting with potential customers. Though Facebook and Snapchat might not be your channels of choice, their experience connecting and talking with friends and family through them gives these young professionals a starting point, from which to apply their knowledge of social media to selling products to customers across a variety of channels. For people that have grown up using the internet, picking up new approaches to selling will soon become second nature – especially as over 40 million students and recent graduates are actively using LinkedIn already.
They’ll bring energy back to the team
Being around people with high energy levels is infectious, and will boost your team’s morale, as well as their enthusiasm for the job. By injecting some fresh blood into the office, and by investing time into organising company away days, team meetings and work socials to integrate the new starter into the workforce, you’ll also enthuse the rest of your colleagues – which should pay off in with increased effort, and, hopefully, hitting their targets on time.
Sell smarter with our help!
In today’s competitive recruitment market, investing in professional recruitment advice will help you source the best candidates for the roles that you need. We can help: to find out how to supercharge your sales recruitment process, contact us here – or check out our other blogs here.
