Building a good sales team that you can rely on needs to be approached in a serious and strategic manner if you want to minimise the chances of losing effective people too quickly and then having to start all over again. Developing new business is the result of developing relationships over a period of time with prospective customers, and the last thing you want is to be losing recently recruited people only to see them moving across to your competitors with newly acquired knowledge about your business and pipelines.
As a result, it is essential that you follow the three following rules to ensure that you can get as close to hiring the right people for the right job at the right time.
- Make sure you define the role properly.
Writing an appropriate job description that explicitly defines the sales role you are advertising is crucial to weed out unnecessary and unsuitable candidates and hone down on those who would be able to add value to the role.
The job definition should focus on the actual job title, its location, which the candidate will be reporting to, what the key tasks and responsibilities are, and what qualifications and experience you are looking for.
Your job description should paint a picture of what that role involves and allow the candidate to imagine themselves in the position, building on their confidence – inspiring and motivating them. It should give them a good indication of what will be expected of them on a day-to-day basis but also allow for some creative imagination in terms of personal and professional growth and development within your organisation.
While a job description will help you to define the role, be open to the responses you get. Don’t expect to get every box ticked. Look for the ones that tick ‘outside the box’ as well – they are probably the more genuine ones who will bring a degree of integrity and innovativeness to the role.
- Make sure you screen the candidate effectively.
The recruitment process today has a wealth of tools at its fingertips to help you screen applicants, quickly and efficiently. Technology through artificial intelligence, digital applications, and video interviews means that you have the ability to create a strong and accurate impression of a large volume of applicants. This allows you to effectively draw out the most suitable candidates through automatic digital screening, gradually reducing the pool to those who you want to invite in for the more time-consuming face-to-face interviews.
The software also allows you to build in ‘anomalies’, or those candidates that might not tick every box, but through a number of cleverly designed questions and potential answers, you’re given the information you need to know to understand their suitability and potential contribution to your organisations.
- Make sure you create a cohesive onboarding process.
Onboarding should not be a short-term process but rather one that is rolled out over a period of time to make sure that the successful candidate is absorbed into your organisation. During this process, communication is key – onboarding should be a two-way process in which the successful candidate learns and understands the way in which your organisation functions and also has the opportunity to comment and contribute their own thoughts in ways it can be improved. None of this will happen overnight and is part of an overall relationship-building exercise. However, the more ‘empowered’ a new starter feels, the more ownership they are going to take in building towards a successful future both for themselves and your company as a whole.
If you are looking to build a more effective sales team, contact us now to discuss what your recruitment needs may be.
