As you continue to scale your business, finding and hiring strong salespeople can be a challenge. If you’ve ever been impressed by a sales candidate during an interview only to be disappointed in their performance once they’re on the job, you also know how damaging it can be to make the wrong hire.
However, with the right tools for identifying, assessing, and onboarding top sales talent, you can bypass the pain of hiring salespeople who don’t deliver and make the right hire the first time around.
3 Tips for Recruiting Top Sales Talent
An effective sales team is essential to the success of every growing business, but finding the right people to drive sales growth is difficult for many organizations. A recent Vistage survey revealed that only 33 percent of CEOs reported their sales team had met its growth target for the year.
To attract and hire best-fit sales talent that can help you achieve your targets, consider taking the following actions:
1. Leverage the power of AI to assess sales candidates more effectively.
Using pre-employment assessments in the hiring process is nothing new. According to a TalentBoard report, more than 70 percent of surveyed companies reported using them.
For sales hires, assessments not only help you determine core sales skills but also identify candidate competencies in the following areas:
- Relationship management
- Conflict resolution
- Communication
- Negotiation
- Overcoming rejection
Now, with the help of predictive AI technologies, you can identify top sales talent with greater speed and precision. BizDevDNA’s AI-powered solution allows you to effortlessly screen and assess candidates for sales and persuasion skills, emotional intelligence, aptitude, and other indicators unique to your organization and sales process. As a result, you’ll have more relevant information about candidate fit to help you make a hiring decision.
2. Work with a trusted recruitment partner.
In a challenging job market, it can be difficult for any employer to find the right talent. This is especially true for recruiting top sales talent; many salespeople are savvy enough to ace the interview without possessing the combination of skills and experience your organization needs.
That’s where working with a recruitment partner can be invaluable. When you have a trusted partner to help guide your sales hiring practices, you don’t need to build your salesforce alone. You can identify proven salespeople while assessing their fit with your unique needs and hiring criteria.
With an experienced and proven sales recruitment partner like BizDevDNA, you gain the following benefits:
- Access to the top 10 percent of sales talent, including passive candidates who may not be looking for a new role
- Transparent flat-rate pricing that reduces your up-front recruiting costs
- A 92 percent accuracy rate on all new hires
- Unlimited replacement hires in the event a new hire doesn’t work out
- A six-month guarantee on all recommended candidates you hire
3. Adopt a robust onboarding program.
Great onboarding for new sales hires requires more than having them complete the usual HR and benefits forms. It also takes a structured onboarding program that ensures they receive a full introduction to your sales process, CRM systems, and goal-setting methodology.
Turnover among salespeople can be as high as 35 percent—more than three times the turnover rate for other roles. However, according to a Work Institute study, new hires with a positive experience in the first 90 days of employment are ten times more likely to stay with their employer than those who have a negative experience.
By providing great onboarding experiences that enable new sales hires to make introductions, get acquainted with your sales goals, and understand the path to meeting their quota, you can set them up for success and retain them for longer than you would without sufficient onboarding.
Overcome Sales Hiring Challenges With a New Approach
Recruiting top sales talent doesn’t have to result in a revolving door of new hires who fail to meet their goals. By putting the power of AI to work for you and enlisting the help of a recruitment partner who can guide you along the way, you can change the way you recruit sales talent for the better.
To learn more, book a meeting with a member of our BizDevDNA team.
