3Finding Top-Performing Salespeople
Hopefully, you now have some ideas about how to best evaluate candidates for your sales team. I wish I could tell you that is the hardest part of building a high-performing sales team. Unfortunately, it is not.
The hardest part of the hiring process is finding great salespeople to add to your recruiting pipeline. Sourcing great candidates requires tremendous time and effort, but it is a critical element.
Allow me to take you back to September 2007. It was time to scale the team. What did I do? I posted ads across every job board I could find. I received hundreds of applications from a variety of applicants. I probably completed about 50 phone screens and dozens of in-person interviews. I hired zero candidates. Zero!
At that point, I had an important revelation about hiring salespeople. Great salespeople never have to apply for a job. Great salespeople never need to pull together a resume. Truly great salespeople have multiple job offers at all times, even if they are not in the job market. Their old bosses are calling them, probably quarterly. “Can I take you to a ball game?” “How is the new gig?” “Are you still happy?” “Are you making money?” “Did they change the compensation plan on you?” “You'll never believe how good things are going over here.” “You have an open invitation to be on my team.”
Reflecting back on hundreds ...
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