Sales Management Success

8The Strategy for Hiring Future Sales Stars Strategy

LET'S FACE IT, HIRING new high-potential members for the sales team, often one of your timely priorities, really breaks down to two skills: (1) generating a large number of qualified candidates (recruiting) and (2) being able to accurately “read” a candidate's capability, goals, behavior, and past performance to predict success, and select him for your sales team. It sounds simple, but success is challenging according to retention data and the degree of success achieved by many of the sales team survivors. You should be shooting for the stars, and hopefully, you already are. This hiring strategy, if implemented fully, will minimize mistakes and enable you to select the best available people for your sales team.

In a perfect world, the sales manager has little turnover and successfully develops the salespeople that remain on board. Unfortunately, it rarely happens that way.

Sales turnover is a fact of business life, especially for salesforces where most salespeople lack proximity to the sales manager and daily supervision and are confronted with customer and quota pressures, long hours, and often travel feverishly. However, turnover is not necessarily bad, because termination of failed salespeople, if done early-on, has many benefits, both in terms of cost, time, and sales team morale. When it comes to salespeople who for any reason leave, we can assume they did not fit. Having said that, the successful sales manager must still ...