Stop Overpaying for Salespeople
Who NEVER Sell

 

Ramp Sales Hires Faster and Decrease Sales Team Turnover

You’re growing a business and that requires making more sales and winning new clients. Building out your sales team is as obvious path to the new revenue target you have your sights on, but that can get expensive.

So how do you recruit, on-board, and ramp sales professional as fast as possible without overpaying to do it?

After all this business thing is all about ROI, right?

You can start by avoiding the three hiring traps a lot of sales managers and business owners unknowingly fall into.

Not that managers and owners don’t mean well, but on the surface these traps sound like not just good, but great ideas. It isn’t until their business plateaus or is spiraling out of control that they realize that these approaches to recruiting and hiring just don’t work at scale.

The unfortunate reality is that when ensnared by these traps a lot of businesses – the smart ones – hit the brakes, scale back their sales effort, and settle back into the level of revenue where things were still profitable. The not so smart ones end up with a burdensome overhead that causes them to close their doors entirely.

Few and far between are the companies that can identify the traps of scaling a sales organization, stay clear of them, and build the kind of team that is not only profitable but diversified against both employee turnover and bad hires.

But you’re in luck, because this article will help you be one of the few that succeeds!

 

Hiring Traps That Kill Sales Velocity

These approaches to hiring sales talent sound like great ideas, but rarely produce top performers or drive profitable revenue growth long-term.

 

SALES HIRING TRAP #1

Headhunting Experienced Salespeople from other Companies Using a Higher Base Salary as Bait

Just like there is no strategic advantage to being the low cost leader if you have no margin left to turn a profit, attracting the best sales talent by being the highest paying employer has no advantage if the revenue they bring doesn’t justify their pay.

That’s not to say hiring experienced salespeople is bad idea, but hiring over qualified and under motivated candidates is. The over qualified candidates will leave for a better offer before you break even on the cost to recruit and on-board them. The under motivated ones will stay and that might be even worse than if they left.

The truth is that base salary only has to be high enough to convey the seriousness and professionalism of your company. Total compensation is what really matters.

Of course, getting potential new sales hires to believe they really have a chance at hitting or exceeding the total compensation figures you quote during the recruiting process is important too. Having a track record of reps who hit quota certainly helps, as does having a playbook from which new sales hires can work from to replicate that success.

If your offer and sales process are dialed in the way they should be, you should be able to inspire potential sales hire to think, “I’m going to MAKE A KILLING working here! And FAST!”

However, if you’re looking for someone to write your company’s sales playbook from scratch you’re going to scare off the true A Players. They know you’re not in the market for a salesperson, experienced top producers know you’re really looking to hire a director of sales on a salesperson’s salary.

They’ve seen it before. They might have even accepted a similar offer over the years and know better that to accept it again.

It’s the job of management to provide any easy to replicate path to sales success that can be implemented by a majority of the sales labor force. Hiring even the most successful and proven sales professionals doesn’t ensure they’ll have the experience or foresight to meet your needs.

Because again, there is a big difference between an A Player in terms of salespeople and director of sales.  Even the most tenacious and disciplined A Players among the sales labor market have a limit to what their skills and experience can accomplish.

To expect salespeople straight off the street to have what it takes to successful sell your offering as well as they were selling for someone is unrealistic. That’s especially the case if you don’t have a path to success laid out for them to follow step by step.

 

Sales Leaders Without a Playbook are Fighting a Losing Battle

There are only two kinds of sales professionals that will accept jobs with companies who have yet to write a winning playbook: inexperienced salespeople who have yet to learn that signing on with a company that doesn’t have a real process in place a death sentence, and the unmotivated candidate who would be happy making ends meet on the provided bases salary.

They first usually quits for an easier and more lucrative job with a company who has their act together, the second will stick around until you fire them. You’ll be lucky to see either hire be a profitable one for your company.

In fact, if you get lucky enough to find one of those inexperienced and rare sales professionals who has what it takes to meet the challenge of playing sales director on a salesperson’s salary, learning the job as they go, rolling with the punches, and writing your company’s sales playbook through a longer than necessary process of trial-and-error, it’s because they’re destine for entrepreneurship.

If you don’t make them a partner in the business, they’ll leave you too. Their likely to do so as the only one who can keep your sales machine running.

What will you do then?

 

 

SALES HIRING TRAP #2

Hiring Sales Candidates That are Already ‘Connected’ to Your Target Buyers

If potential hires are already connected and experienced salespeople in the space you want to own, why are they interested in forfeiting the pipeline of pending sales that they’ve worked so hard for at their to start over working with your company?

Is your product or service far superior and they’ll make significantly more money working for you in the long run?

Is your company more fun to work for?

Or…

Are they trying to save face by getting a new job before the get fired from their current gig for under performance or insubordination?

Are they chasing the higher base salary you have to offer because they just don’t what to work so hard anymore?

These are good questions to answer when evaluating a candidate who appears to be already connected to your ideal customer. Like buying a business with a current client roster, hiring someone with who has already established rapport with a number of your ideal buyers is a short-term play.

If hiring salespeople who are already connected is your only means of breaking into new accounts, salespeople will have a short shelf-life as part of your team.

So maybe a better question to answer is, how do you intend for your salespeople to consistently and reliable win the attention of new clients over the long-term?

 

 

SALES HIRING TRAP #3

On-Boarding People with a Technical Background to Fill Sales Roles

The logic here is that new hires with a technical background already have a sufficient level of product or market knowledge that they can make use of to win sales. The only flaw with that logic is that they don’t even have that.

I’ve seen this a lot with companies who hire engineering grads straight out of college.

First, they don’t really have much, if any real technical experience. Entry-level candidates only have entry-level experience (virtually zero) that they can apply to their jobs no matter what kind of degree they have.

Now, there is nothing wrong with hiring entry-level sales candidates to fill entry level sales roles. A great deal of engineering grads however, are expecting to earn a wage that is in line with entry-level engineering jobs, which is typically $15,000-$25,000 a year higher than an entry-level sales role.

The projected income ranges below are according Money’s reporting on a survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. The survey looked at the first-year income of more than 45,000 graduates.

My own experience tells me the income rage for entry-level sales roles are more in line with what this survey shows as the income of a graduate with a degree in communications. My experience also tells me that a competent (and even excellent) entry-level sales candidate would happily accept a similar offer from you.

Similarly, if the technical background of a potential sales hire was gained by actual work experience fulfilling the services (as an engineer, specialist, etc.) they’d be in charge of selling if hired, they’ll be stepping away from a rate of pay that was earned over years to enter the sales world. They’ll have to overcome the mental battle of a pay cut in addition to the ego bruise of not being awesome at their job.

For employers this presents the challenge of offering a competing salary to secure technical candidates to fill their sales roles or trying to convince those same candidates that lower pay today sets them up to make significantly more money over the duration of their sales career.

While the pay cut aspect of this equation can be overcome with time, the question is if timing is in your favor as an employer. When you pair a cut in pay with the ego bruise of the job mastery a new sales hire enjoyed in their previous career, it can wear on them and be a cause of turnover before they fully ramp as a sales professional.

The more technical the product or service that the sales hire is taking to market, the longer the sales process. That means it could take a good rep a year or more to ramp, fill their pipeline, and start hitting quota.

That’s a year before they – as the salesperson – start to feel like they’re a good at their job.

That’s a year before you – as their boss – know that they’re good at their job.

And what if they don’t hit quota?

If ramping a good sales hire takes an entire year you could be tying up significant portions of your payroll budget just to find out you’ve made a bad sales hires too. Not a fun idea as sales manager or business owner.

 

 

Stay Free From
The Traps of Hiring
Sales Professionals

 

So how then, can sales managers and business owners steer clear of these hiring traps that plague the sales efforts of so many companies?

How can you and your businesses avoid tying up their payroll budget betting on sales hires that will never produce?

How can you on-board, ramp, and start seeing a return on your investment in recruiting sales candidates as fast as possible?

How can you do all this while also diversifying your turnover risk among members of your sales team?

You can do all these things by separating the roles of lead-generator and closer.

 

 

Separating Sales and Sales Development

First of all, if you already have a highly trained and capable closer on your team, it could even be you, it’s in your best interest to have that person (or persons) in front of as many qualified prospects as they can possibly service on a daily basis, right?

It doesn’t serve you or them to require they generate all of their own opportunities. Not only will keeping them in front of viable opportunities make you more money, if will make it hard for them to be tempted by a competing offer – even if the base salary is a bit higher than what you’re offering them.

While it takes a great deal of product knowledge to properly diagnose a prospect’s circumstance, make appropriate recommendations, and customize a scope of service, winning the attention of a qualified prospect is significantly more simple. It’s something that can be taught to even the most novice sales professional in a short period of time.

Outbound prospecting and even filtering through unqualified inbound leads can be very time consuming. For this reason prospecting and qualifying is exactly where you should focus the attention of your less expensive junior sales talent, or your sales development reps (SDRs).

Once qualified as an true opportunity, your SDRs can hand accounts off to your more senior account executives (AEs).

Free PDF Checklist: Hire & Train Sales Development Reps… FAST!​

 

Diversifying the Risk of New Hire Turnover Without Increasing Payroll Budget

Sales is a profession notorious for having a high turnover.

Employers certainly contribute to this by making poor hiring decision, but until they’re in the trenches there are also a lot of people who just aren’t wired to sell day-in and day-out who think they can hack it.

Of course, people leave jobs every day for far too many other reasons to count. No matter who you are and how great you are at picking winners, you’re bound to experience turnover on your sales team.

By separating your sales team into SDRs and AEs you effectively simplify the role sales professionals play on your team. That means more people, with lesser work experience, will actually qualify to fill those roles and actually be able to successfully contribute to your company mission.

This also allow you to hire more manpower without necessarily having to increase your payroll budget.  After all inexperienced and less experienced sales talent will work for a lot less than accomplished sales professionals or technical folks. Sometimes for as much as half the base salary.

By increasing the number of people on your team you’ll be more diversified against turnover. When you have a team of 10 sales development reps (SDRs) generating opportunities for you, losing one unexpectedly isn’t going to cripple your chances of hitting your sales target for the month.

Plus, when you have to replace an SDR, compared to a fully trained salesperson who owns the entire sales process, the simplicity of the role a new hire has to learn means you can on-board and ramp significantly faster. Allowing you to break even and be in the green on ever sales hire sooner than you could have otherwise.

 

More Profitable Use of Your Most Skilled Sales Talent

Maybe you’ve already made it a practice to hire more experienced and/or technical sales professionals.

Moving forward you can make the most of your more expensive team members by feeding them qualified opportunities to service and close as new business.

Again, it’s in your best interest to keep your closers busy closing. It makes them more money, which mitigate the chances they’ll be tempted by offers from competing employers. It will also decrease the likelihood of qualified leads fumbling through the fingers of a less competent sales professionals.

In the unfortunate event you do lose one of your closers, having separated the sale and sales development functions among different members of your sales team, you’ll also have a whole staff of sales professionals trained in your image you can pull from to fill the gap.

 

Creating Your Own Pool of Sales Talent

In this way your SDR team serves as talent pool from which you can promote the most promising talent, and promoting from within has a few advantage.

First, before you commit any time and energy to training someone the more complicated and nuanced aspects of your discovery and closing processes, you’ll already have experience coaching and training the person. This will help you train them and help them learn from you more quickly. You won’t have to learn each other first. That will have already happened while they worked for you as an SDR.

Second, similar to the simplicity of the SDR role allowing you to on-boarding and ramp new hires really fast, training to bridge the gap from being on your SDR team to being a salesperson should be significantly easier too.

The new salesperson already knows your company and your value propositions. To jump from SDR to salesperson all they need is a deeper knowledge on your product or service and an education in how to manage their pipeline.

This ability to fill gaps in your sales team also makes the tough decision to let certain salespeople go a bit easier. Firing a team member is never fun, but sometimes it needs to happen. When you don’t have to worry about the recruiting and training of a new salesperson being a major time suck following a reps departure from your team, letting go of someone who really needs to leave because any easier pill to swallow.

Third, when you promote from within you build company loyalty. Employees are significantly less prone to leave an organization when they feel valued.

Being promoted, being given a chance to earn more money, and being deemed worthy of continued training are all ways employee justify their value within an organization. Your promotion of existing team members is like doubling down on your investment, but at the same time mitigates turnover and the possibility of losing all you’ve invested in that sales professional to date.

When hiring a salesperson off the street to handle end of funnel activities, not only is their training going to take longer and cost you more, but these new hires are also a bit of a wild card. You don’t know them, they don’t know you, and it’s so much harder to gauge whether they’ll succeed as part of your team.

Conversely, you’ll know from their work as an SDR if an individual is worth investing in and when. Not every SDR is professionally mature enough to become a salesperson and some take longer than others to be ready.

In that sense your SDR team serves not only as a talent pool, but as your proving ground for talent that will eventually become your closers of new business.

 

Recruiting, On-Boarding, and Ramping Sales Development Reps… FAST!

If the idea of hiring sales development reps as a feeder position to what you’ve traditionally consider to be sales, you might be at a lost for how to recruit and evaluate potential SDR hires.

You might be asking yourself…

If as a sales leader I’m supposed to grow raw sales talent into salespeople, how much less experienced can they really be and still be worth training?

Can an SDR candidate be too experienced?

What am I really looking for in an SDR hire?

What am I not looking for?

If you are in fact asking yourself any of these questions, I encourage you to download a free copy of the checklist I use when helping sales managers and business owners add their first SDRs to their sales teams. Click HERE to get you copy now.

 

This Free PDF Checklist Will Teach You…

•  How to know if your business is ready to hire SDRs.
• How to find the very best sales talent to set your appointments.
• How to quickly disqualify bad SDR hires before they waste your time.
• How to on-board and ramp new SDRs faster than your competition.
• How to maximize your ROI on every SDR hired.

Ready to make more sales?

Click HERE to Download
FREE Checklist