Articles

Much of your business's revenue comes as a result of the successful efforts of your sales team. It is vital to your company's bottom line, therefore, that you attract, retain and develop the best salespeople.

Every company that's committed to hitting ambitious sales targets requires talent that consistently achieves their quotas.

Here are some top tips to help Canadian sales, HR, and business leaders tune their recruitment processes and develop their ability to recruit the most impactful sales pros.

Process and Preparation

Recruiting is a pro-active process. It must be ongoing and continuous.

The secret to successfully managing people is to understand what they want out of their careers. Even when you're content with your team, you should be continuously looking to develop and grow it.

By developing the processes and business intelligence which gives you the information to know how to attract and retain salespeople, you'll be best placed to source and entice the top talent.

Stick to a Consistent Hiring Process

Sales leaders and hiring managers should have a solid understanding of the skills and attributes your best salespeople have, based on what’s been most effective in achieving conversions. By having this information, you can develop the questions and tests needed to ensure candidates have the skills which match the best talent already working at your organization.

ROI

While it might seem like a good idea to hire more salespeople, this is dependent on understanding the ROI of your talent acquisition and training efforts.

To determine the payback and to justify hiring decisions, consider the following:

1. Hiring costs: How much do you spend on your recruiting?

2. Training: How much time and money do you spend training a new salesperson?

3. Retention: What percentage of hires stay for over one year? 4. Career Development: How many stay long enough to move up in the organization?

Talent Acquisition

Thinking about outsourcing your hiring initiatives? Before engaging recruiters, establish your compensation terms to understand the payment plan and try to identify talent acquisition consultants who specialize in your vertical.

Employer Branding

Think you know where top talent is looking for new job opportunities? You might be surprised. Be open to trying multiple communication channels including social media, job boards, events and directories.

Employee Advocates

Referrals will always be one of the top forms of introductions. is the best way to market their company. Consider ways to incentivize your colleagues to 'sell' the benefits of working for your company.

Screening Candidates

Not interested in outsourcing to headhunters? In that case, you need to dedicate enough time to screen and filter candidates through resume evaluation and first-round phone interviews before requesting an in-person interview.

Screening will help save you from wasting time interviewing candidates who simply aren’t qualified for the position.

The Two-Sided Interview

We've already touched on some of the interview topics you should be posing as a potential employer. Don’t forget, however, that the sales candidate is also interviewing you. You must ready to sell yourself and the company’s vision.

Compensation

Found the right talent for your company’s sales team? The next step is implementing the best compensation structure. The specific tactics to best motivate and incentivise sales teams are unique to each company and dependent on many factors.

The Canadian Professional Sales Association along with Mercer (Canada) Inc. recently produced a study into sales compensation and what it could mean for your business. The results of the study are available in our new report with versions for sales professionals and for management.