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The guess-and-check approach to hiring sales reps will never yield positive results, especially when attempting to scale your team during a labor shortage. These are uncertain times, and you need to bring more certainty to your hiring process than simply relying on reviewing resumes and conducting brief interviews. These methods don’t give you enough insight into applicants to make informed decisions, ultimately inhibiting revenue growth and in some cases, causing costly employee turnover.
Companies must shift their focus from experience to coachability, like one software company that achieved 338% annual revenue growth by hiring sales reps with no experience. They discovered several candidates who were fresh out of college but ended up being better hires than veterans of the industry!
How to Hire Sales Reps Like Your Top Performers
If you want to take a page out of their book, start focusing on applicants who possess soft skills that align with your sales teams, like empathy and adaptability. Industry experience only takes a person so far, but someone with the right set of soft skills can exceed expectations with the proper environment and training. If done properly, you can identify and hire candidates with the same mental makeup as your current top performers.
One way to identify the ideal applicants is to rethink your interview process. Are you asking worthwhile questions that glean important insight about an individual’s soft skills, or do you stick with the traditional script and go with your gut feelings? For example, you could evaluate someone’s adaptability by asking how they handled a surprising objection that blocked a sale. However, there will always be some level of uncertainty when trying to identify personality traits via resumes and interviews.
The only way to predict applicant success with pinpoint precision is with Sprockets’ hiring platform — the solution that the software company used to achieve remarkable growth with sales reps who had no experience. It identified key personality traits in their top performers, revealed which applicants shared similar mental makeups, and made it easy to hire the best candidates with a simple red-yellow-green scoring system. Ultimately, they were able to quickly scale their sales team during a labor crisis without sacrificing performance.
Hire the Best Sales Reps
Whether you’re dealing with a labor crisis or are just at a pivotal point in your business’s growth, you need to be certain about the new hires that you bring on board. Will you be among the 45% of businesses that fail within their first five years, or will you build a reliable, high- performing sales team that drives growth no matter what obstacles stand in your way? The answer is obvious, and the key is Sprockets.
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