How to recruit salespeople?

Recruiting salespeople is one of the most important tasks for any sales manager. Salespeople are responsible for establishing contacts with customers, presenting the company's offer, negotiating terms of cooperation and closing sales. To find and hire the best salespeople in the market, there are several steps to take:

1. Define the ideal profile of a salesman.

It is necessary to determine what competencies, experience, personality and motivation a sales candidate should have in our company. This can be done using tools such as psychometric tests, surveys or interviews with current salespeople.

Examples:

Personality:

• communicativeness and openness to information exchange
• innate curiosity about the other party (business)
• A focus on achieving the company's goals and then your own (business loyalty)
• ability to build, maintain and develop relationships 
• persistence, determination and resistance to stress
• proactivity and commitment to working with the client and for the company
• positive attitude towards sales activities (acquiring, persuading, negotiating, earning, do-selling)
• self-discipline and responsibility for the result
• empathy and emotional intelligence
• intrinsic ambition or the need to acquire (selling in some way should make the salesman happy and motivate him to continue)
• natural ability to mitigate conflicts, or the courage to face them
• management of one's own time in proportions that are able to bring him closer to achieving tasks and goals.

Expertise:

• knowledge of the product or service
• The ability to translate knowledge into a sales argument tailored to the customer
• Knowledge of competitors and their ways of operating
• knowledge of negotiation and persuasion techniques
• ability to present the product/service - always synchronized with self-presentation of one's own person
• knowledge of the customer's personality types and buying style
• Active listening and the ability to ask questions purposefully
• combining knowledge with the ability to face customer objections

2. Create an attractive job offer. 

In this part of the job ad, you should give the exact name of the position for which you are looking for an employee, e.g. heat pump sales specialist or IT sales representative. The ad must include a detailed description of the tasks that the person will perform. It is worth remembering that in each company the scope of responsibilities for a given position may vary, which is why this part of the ad is so important. By describing the tasks precisely, we will make people who are really familiar with a particular subject apply, and the candidate will be able to know the nature of the work and the possible course of the day, which will increase the chance that the ad will be of interest to the right candidates.

3. Utilize various recruitment channels. 

In fact, the methods of acquiring salespeople are practically no different from recruiting for other positions. However, it should be remembered that there are a whole lot of sales representatives on the market, and this certainly distinguishes this professional group in the market. Therefore, in order to identify the best, you need to focus on evaluation. Methods of sourcing candidates for this position include: advertisements on job portals, networking, and searches directly conducted by a professional company. Checking whether a person is suitable for the position requires the recruiter to know certain techniques. One of them is the ability to conduct a professional job interview to verify what a salesman has achieved in his previous work.

4. Conduct an effective selection process. 

An extremely effective tool for verifying competence, used especially in recruiting salespeople, are sales scenes. They allow us to take a "work sample" of a sales representative, through which we can get an idea of how much the declared work methods (recognizing needs, closing sales, etc.) are actually used by the candidate at work. The scene has another big advantage, and that is that it is the best way to verify the salesman's workshop. If we get the impression that he is coloring a bit when talking about his skills, we can arrange a scene in which we play a "difficult customer" with objections. Then we can check whether the candidate really uses sales techniques and can handle himself.

5. Provide adequate implementation and support for the new trader. 

Do you know what the trader is supposed to learn on the first, fifth and eleventh day? Do you know how you will assess the quality of the implementation? Do you know how to check that he or she is following the process? Do you only find out what kind of salesman he is when he closes the first quarter?

Even the best salesman will not perform well in his new role without a solid implementation. You should plan and conduct product and sales training for the new salesman, assign him a mentor or supervisor to assist him in his first weeks on the job, monitor his progress and performance, and regularly collect his feedback and motivate him for further development.

Recruit salespeople - make sure the candidate can sell.

An experienced and good salesman should make a great sale to us. The attitude of such a candidate should be fully professional, the statements substantive, the voice confident. Our first impression after the recruitment interview should be that this is the ideal candidate. If the candidate can't sell himself to us, it may be even worse with the sale of our products and services. 

During the recruitment interview, we observe not only what the candidate says, but also how he says and presents himself. The presentation, the statements, the documents provided, all testify to how the candidate will sell our products and services in the future. Also very important is simply the overall impression we have after the interview is over. There are people who can speak in an engaging way even about things that are completely uninteresting. If we equip such a person with the right sales arguments, we get a candidate for a super salesman.

Pay attention during the interview whether the candidate:

presents a confident but unobtrusive attitude?

speaks in a calm but not tedious voice?

shows interest in our statements, e.g. by asking meaningful questions?

tries to take the initiative, e.g. by asking questions, expanding his statements with interesting threads, skillfully interjecting into our speech?

does he display assertiveness, e.g. by presenting a different opinion or a different point of view on the issue under discussion?

Is he able to talk not only about his successes, but also about his failures? (Remember, a lack of failures is often a lack of experience according to the principle that only he who does nothing makes no mistakes)