Tl;dr - You expect your sales team to prospect continuously. You should do the same to find super sales talent. But that requires a process to manage it efficiently and make great choices.
A Single KPI to Measure Industrial Sales
Companies with weak salespeople rely inordinately on recurring business. Simply tracking your ratio of new logo (or new location) vs. repeat sales to the same companies/locations will help you gauge the health of your revenue and the strength of your sales force.
Certainly repeat sales to existing customers are important. Every company should cultivate those. They're lower cost to secure and to service. They make relationships stickier. So, it should be clear that the way to improve this critical ratio isn't to reduce repeat sales, but rather to dramatically increase the new ones. An appropriate target will depend on your industry, but I'd start with three:one new to repeat as a goal for a typical capital equipment company. Not only is the new business end of the business stronger, but all of the cascading high-profit replacement parts and training business grows too.
But 3:1 is unusual. Most companies don't come close.
Often the majority of sales are repeat orders. That reflects a weak sales function often caused by issues in any (or all) of sales process and sales methodology, sales reps, sales managers, sales process, and sales training. The symptoms may sound familiar: losing deals to the status quo and to "no decision" inaccurate forecasts and unreliable projections.
All need to be fixed. Often you can make significant progress with your existing team. But not everyone will adapt. Further, you'll lose reps as they retire, move with spouses who take jobs that require relocation, fall ill, etc. So gradually upgrading and growing your sales team requires hiring.
And just as predictable effective sales is built on a sound sales process, successful sales hiring is built on process as well.
Unfortunately, the sales hiring process at most companies is rather loose. That's because they don't do it often, and it relies on tools that simply aren't predictive. Here are common tools in the hiring process and their predictive value to gauge likely success.1
- resumes - 18%
- traditional interviews - 18%
- behavioral assessments - 20%
- personality assessments - 22%
- reference checks - 23%
- EQ tests - 23%
- sales skills screenings - 23%
- IQ - 51%
- structured interview with scorecard - 57%
- sales specific assessment that measures multiple competencies and attributes - 91%
We know from process optimization that if your inputs are low quality, the output quality is poor too. The tools have to support a repeatable and predictable process.
Inconsistent Sales Hiring Process
Here's how the normal sales hiring process works. It may sound familiar.
A rep leaves, you catch one lying and fire them or you finally part ways - often months or years after you should have - with a rep that just isn't performing.
You look at your schedule and see zero free time for strategy and other important business management functions, much less time to simply answer the mail. You groan because you don't have time to deal with this, but the territory is empty and you have to find a solution....fast!
So you create a quick job posting by basically copying a generic post or using a job description (if you've written one.) And, yes, it probably falls to you to do this. In most middle-market industrial manufacturers the sales VP or even the president is involved in this task. They can't hand it off to a robust HR department, particularly for sales hires.
You ask folks to help distribute it on LinkedIn and to their networks. You might check with a couple friends to see if they know of anyone in the industry. And you probably hire a recruiter - someone who's helped solve the problem for you in the past by getting you a warm body in a hurry. A sales hire that was average...but definitely better than an empty territory you figure.
Some resumes start to trickle in. And you start spending lots of time reviewing them (remember that they are 18% predictive) hoping to divine not only who's lying, but who can sell. And time spent on this is time you don't have to work pending deals in the empty territory, coach other reps, or run the business.
Next, you select some for interviews; blocking out already limited time on your calendar. You may interview by Zoom, relying on your typical sales interview questions, and then pay to fly folks in to spend hours meeting with you and your busy team.
You'll try to gauge their cultural fit and their sales skills (remember they are trying to sell you, so you'll have to dig to get past the facade.) You'll ask some of your colleagues to interview them as well. These traditional interviews are 18% predictive.
You'll identify a couple you like and think will be successful. But you don't want to make a mistake. After all, you don't have time to have to do this again! So wanting to be careful and objective you'll ask them to take some common personality or behavioral assessment...that's about 21% predictive. If the results disagree with your preference that's strongly formed at this point, you'll rationalize it away.
You'll make a final selection and then ask someone to check some references. 23% effective.
Then you'll take a deep breath, hope that you're not making a mistake like you've done before, make an offer, negotiate the package, hire someone and heave a huge sigh of relief that you can get back to your work.
If you're lucky they'll be average. After all, statistically the process you followed is limited by the most predictive tool you've used - 23% likely to predict actual sales success. If we look at it as the product of those tools (.18*.18*.21*.23 =) it's only .16% predictive.
The result is often average, just as you'd statistically expect.
There's a better way.
A way that helps you:
- identify and hire candidates more likely to be strong performers and ramp up quickly
- minimize the time burden and disruption for you and colleagues
- position the company to make important talent decisions without procrastination and fill openings quickly
The solution is a consistent and repeatable sales hiring process to drive an industrial sales recruiting program that is refined and run continuously.
Structured and Efficient Sales Hiring Process
You need your sales team to continuously prospect. Similarly, you need to continuously recruit to find new talent - to keep your pipeline full so you're prepared when you need to make changes or folks leave.
The problem is that most companies don't. They don't because it's time-consuming and inefficient - and the results are problematic anyway.
It doesn't have to be that way.
So how do you fix it? With a solid process.
- Make sure you've managed your company's Glassdoor presence. 50% of candidates go there first.1
- Properly and accurately define the job by collecting 360-degree feedback. 43% of sales hires say jobs were misrepresented.1
- Write a job description for your internal use and accountability
- Write a proper job posting that will appeal to the right people who will excel in sales roles in your market
- Post that in the right places; mostly online. Feel free to distribute it through employees, friends, business groups, etc. but remember that you'll run this continuously, so high-traffic online postings are best.
- Set up automation (or even a virtual assistant if necessary) to field the incoming resumes, respond to acknowledge them and outline your process, and invite every applicant to take a highly predictive sales assessment. Everyone. This supports compliance with regulations and many companies' programs of blind hiring to foster diversity.
- Only those that meet the requirements defined by your industry, market, and role will be invited for a brief phone interview. Use a calendar scheduling link to avoid wasted time of back and forth emails.
- Block periods of time (say two one-hour blocks/week) for brief (5-7 minute) phone interviews (or other neglected strategic work if no interviews are scheduled.) You'll use that to gauge specific, defined criteria which you'll score contemporaneously on a scorecard. These include how someone sounds and presents themselves, how they create rapport, and whether they push back when you end the conversation with an innocuous put-off just as a sales prospect would.
- After every session or two, take two minutes, look at the scores, and invite any who meets your minimum criteria after the phone interview for a Zoom interview.
- Prepare for the interview. This is the only place you'll have to carve out some time to review the resume, LinkedIn profile, and sales assessment report to identify areas that you need to dig, prod and poke to determine what weaknesses you'd have to commit to training and coaching to overcome.
- Conduct the interview using standard questions asked in the same order and same tone as well as specific ones that you've created in step 9. Just as with the phone interview you'll use a scorecard to capture real-time observations of how the candidate does.
- Let the interview settle in for a day or two. Then:
- If you don't have open positions and the person is a superstar (it won't happen often) then you can decide whether the person merits creating a role and then inviting colleagues to participate in another interview per below, or discussing growth plans with them and agreeing to stay in touch. This is how you'll build a bench of candidates.
- If you do have open positions, the candidate is very strong, and your hiring process involves other members of your team, coordinate those interviews and coach them on using consistent questions with a scorecard.
- When you're ready to hire someone it's time to switch roles. Now you need to sell them on your company, your opportunity and growth/income potential. That's the final interview. You need to sell them and close the deal.
- Set them up for success with a robust 90-120 day onboarding program and sales training mapped to your process and methodology.
This process will accomplish three important objectives.
First, you'll always be recruiting and doing so with a minimal time commitment. You'll be well prepared for changes that should or happen to occur.
Second, the quality of your hires will improve substantially because you'll identify candidates who WILL sell (not just theoretically can) and who are a good cultural fit. You'll develop higher trust in your decisions because they'll be better.
Third, the reps you hire will ramp up faster and contribute to your revenue targets.
Process Is Important
You've probably got well-refined processes for many important business functions. Hopefully your sales process is frequently refined and rigorous. It's time to do the same with sales hiring.
The two key takeaways are the importance of an accurate and predictive sales candidate assessment, and a defined, efficient process that runs continuously.
Interested in incorporating these approaches into your sales recruitment process?
I can help.
Sales candidate assessment licenses allow for unlimited screening for the specific criteria of your market, role, sell cycle, etc. They are fast and inexpensive to implement.
The process itself needs definition and training. I can take your team through it in a workshop format if you want to run it internally, or I can run a continuous sales recruiting program on an outsource basis.
It's time to stop making costly sales hiring mistakes, and procrastinating on important sales personnel decisions because you don't have time or energy to find new people.
1 - Andy Miller The Science of Hiring Quota Busting Sales Teams
