Hiring Sales Professionals

Turning over sales staff is expensive. Most estimates on the actual cost of changing sales people are very high, and rightly so. Consider the impact. When sales people leave an organization it is typically preceeded by some degree of ineffectiveness. Sales may have been lost that shouldn't have been. Client relationships may have been damaged. Opportunities weren't discovered that should have been. Profits weren't as high as they should have been and on it goes. So, the opportunity cost incurrecd when a salesperson leaves are had to assertain and quantify but certainly significant.

Once the salesperson is gone, their pipeline has to absorbed by someone. Getting up to speed on the pipeline will take significant time. Deals could be lost based on the delay or the frustration of having to start the process over or not having the key relationships. Deals or clients might be lost because they follow the person that left. Again, the costs are hard to quantify but the potential loss is significant

Bringing on a new sales professional is also very costly. The hiring process takes several weeks or months. Interviewing pulls people away from other activities. Once someone is hired it take time and money to get them in a position to be productive. They require training on processes, systems, products, services, tools, etc. They have to get setup by IT and HR. Eventually, they get to building a pipeline and closing deals but that could take three, six, twelve even eighteen months depending on the products being sold.

If it is determined that the new hire isn't the right person and they leave or are terminated, all the effort was for nothing and the process starts again. The magnitude of the hiring process alone is a big enough deterrent to keep many companies working with ineffective sales people and lackluster results.

Thus, it is important to have a well-thought out hiring process.

The process involves first knowing what you want. Salespeople fall into one of four categories and you should be clear that we call from rookie to rainmaker. We need to know how to identify the type that has the characteristics that best match our requirements. Next, it is important to discover the future effectiveness of the candidate. This is done by understanding their approach to the Three Disciplines: the Discipline of the Plan, the Discipline of the Day and the Discipline of the Call. Finally, we want to make sure of various incidental criteria such as wheter or not the person fits our culture and can we achieve win-win on compensation.