Your company needs its next sales star, and fast. But hiring any quality employee, let alone a game-changing salesperson, can be a challenge in this economic environment. How can you be sure the finalist lives up to your expectations while arriving in time to help you achieve your upcoming sales and revenue goals?
Start by looking to legendary salespeople like Mary Kay Ash or Kris Duggan for inspiration. They founded or helped scale sales-driven companies and changed the game in the process. Ms. Ash has sadly passed on, but Mr. Duggan is still at it today.
Once you have your inspiration, commit to understanding how they approached the sales hiring process, and how that approach differed from their competitors. Here’s some help in the form of five qualities Duggan looks for in his sales hires.
1. Demonstrated Results in Your Industry
Your next sales rockstar needs to have experience in your industry, if not your niche. As we’ll see, they need to understand how the businesses you sell to operate and the changes that could be coming in the near future.
This isn’t to say that you should only try to poach salespeople from direct competitors. Great salespeople can also learn on the job, and you should expect them to.
2. Deep Knowledge of Clients’ Business (And Pain Points)
Top salespeople know their clients’ businesses almost as well as their clients do. This helps them have the sorts of honest, in-depth conversations that demonstrate the value your product or service brings and turn prospects into converts.
Again, it’s not essential that you hire salespeople who worked for client businesses or sold to the same businesses for a competitor. But it’s important that you screen for sophisticated knowledge about your clients’ pain points (and a willingness to learn even more).
3. An Ethical, Humble Approach
Great salespeople have unwavering professional humility while still taking credit when due. They claim their successes, proudly, but only when warranted.
Above all, great salespeople are ethical. You might not think that a strong sense of ethics is vital to sales success because you hear (and see) so many examples of salespeople saying anything to close a deal. But weak ethics eventually catches up with you, harming your organization’s reputation and doing more long-term damage than it’s worth.
4. Willingness to Try New Sales Strategies
Every employee you hire should be willing to try new strategies and processes in their day-to-day. More than that, they should be enthusiastic about the prospect. Variety is the spice of life, as they say, and workers who try new things from time to time tend to perform better and burn out slower than those who remain set in their ways.
5. A Tech-Agnostic Philosophy
On a related note, your next rockstar salesperson should be open to adopting any and all new technologies that assist their work. In fact, they should take the lead on implementing new technology on the sales side of your business because they understand what’s likely to work (and what’s not) better than people outside the department.
Always Be Hiring
Maybe the most crucial thing to remember about sales hiring is that the work is never really done. Even when your company eases out of growth mode and stops adding net employees, turnover will continue on its sales team.
In fact, it could increase if the outlook isn’t great. You’ll need to hire new sales pros to replace the ones who move on, voluntarily or otherwise.
In other words, you’ll need to refer back to this sales hiring cheat sheet no matter what stage of life your company is in, or what’s happening in the broader economy. You’ll always need to be on the lookout for your next sales rockstar — because they could make all the difference.
