How important is it for your salespeople to have a pipeline of prospects? Probably pretty important. How crucial is it that your salespeople continue to feed into that pipeline? Just as crucial! We all know that, in order for your organization to succeed, it is vital that your salespeople build, grow and maintain a solid pipeline. But what happens if one of those great salespeople leaves? Do you have someone on the sidelines ready to take that spot?

The first thing that we teach our Hire Better Salespeople (HBSP) clients is that it is just as imperative for you to have a pipeline of potential candidates as it is for your salespeople to have a pipeline of prospects. Most companies find themselves reacting to the loss of an employee as opposed to being proactive about it. When companies don’t proactively recruit new sales talent, they typically find themselves with a vacancy for a much longer time. For example, last year, HBSP partnered with a financial institution out of Cheyenne, WY and it took over 8 months to find a qualified individual partly due to the absence of a sales candidate pipeline. When this happens, you now have the daunting task, and added pressure, of finding a replacement... and quickly! But what happens when we rush things? Usually a mistake is made, right? Your hiring decisions and processes are not something to be rushed or else large, costly mistakes will occur. It doesn’t matter if things are going great or going terribly- a candidate pipeline has to exist.

So, what is the best way to build a sales candidate pipeline? Be a candidate watch dog! Start with the people you know. Typically, great people know other great people and are happy to refer them. Ask your family, friends and employees if they know of anyone who may be a fit for your organization. Networking events are also a great place to receive names and meet potential sales candidates. Once you gain a few leads, reach out and see if they would be interested in getting together. In no way are these conversations interviews- they shouldn’t be! Interviews are for applicants who are actively looking when you have an active opening. At this point, you are just trying to gauge interest and add potential sales candidates to your network.

Creating a candidate pipeline won’t solve all your recruiting troubles, but it’s the first place to start. If you are interested in learning more about how to Hire Better Salespeople, sign up for our free webinar—Ruff Realities About Recruiting. During this webinar, you will learn how to hire your next “top dog” using our proven process for searching, evaluating skills using a sales assessment, interviewing, hiring and onboarding new hires.

Webinar Details:

Thursday, July 27th at 12 PM EST

As the owner of Hire Better Salespeople, one thing I hear consistently from my clients in regards to hiring is “I’m tired of looking through the same set of resumes over and over again.” If you have had the same thought, trust me, you’re not alone. Resume sites are flooded daily with recycled candidates. So, how do you go about finding the new, fresh candidates out in the market place? This week, our guest blogger and one of HBSP partner’s, Chuck Smith, President of NewHire, explains why fresh is best and how to eliminate the rest.-- Tony Cole

I thought it was my mother-in-law, but it turns out to be Benjamin Franklin who said, “Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.” If you’ve had house guests who’ve overstayed their welcome, I know you will relate. But did you know that the same rule, more or less, applies to candidates for work?

How so?

When we are recruiting to fill an open position, our primary goal is always to find the right person for the job. In fact, we often mean “the right person for the job, RIGHT NOW!” It’s not so helpful if that right person were to be available six months before or six months after.

This is why so many people get frustrated searching for resumes online using LinkedIn, Indeed and Careerbuilder. These sites and others have built businesses based on the idea of aggregating candidate resumes. The sites claim that the ability to search 20, 30 or 100 million resumes is a benefit. I call it a bug. We shouldn’t care about everyone who ever placed a matching keyword on their resume.

We should only care about the actual people interested in our actual job right now. This is what makes the NewHire™ system of recruiting so powerful. Rather than asking you to spend your valuable, limited time going from site to site (at great expense for access) searching for matching candidates among millions and millions of non-matching candidates, NewHire™ brings the candidates to you. Small databases of candidates who have expressed interest in your job. These candidates are prescreened, pre-qualified candidates who have already answered many of the key questions you have for them.

NewHire was invented to help employers recruit and screen candidates for very specific, time-bound open positions. Stop searching resumes and start getting matching candidates with Hire Better Salespeople and NewHire.

Sourcing great, qualified candidates is only a piece of the very complicated puzzle. At Hire Better Salespeople, we work with our clients to: learn the intimate details of the position, build a compelling job attraction post, call on active as well as passive job seekers, assess applicants based on the specific job criteria, disqualify and vet candidates, provide initial interviewing support and administer onboarding and coaching for your new hire. Visit our site TODAY to learn more! 

The 3 Es

In the previous post, I identified 8 clues that would indicate that your sales organization has a sales growth problem (CLICK HERE to read the article and review the 5 clues).  In that article, I identified (in some detail) 2 of the 5 constraints to sales growth:

• Weak or lacking performance management
• In-the-moment coaching rather than coaching that changes behavior and improves skill.

I received some feedback that the previous article was tooooo long and so, instead of covering the 3 remaining constraints here, I will present them one at a time (and hope I keep you coming back for “the rest of the story!”).

Constraint #3 - Hiring salespeople based on the wrong criteria with the wrong processes and systems. 

To Hire Better Salespeople, you have to have a better way to attract better salespeople and a better way to eliminate those 90% that will not do 100% of what you need them to do.

As in the previous article, let’s first determine “IF” there is a problem (check all that apply):

• You have trouble finding enough candidates to choose from
• The candidates you interview all look and act the same
• When you interview candidates, you…
• Spend time establishing rapport
• Sell them on the company, the position and the opportunity
• Your turnover rate of salespeople that don’t work out is at least a 6-figure problem or 2-comma problem (#,000,000)
• When you evaluate the performance of the current sales team, there are people in the middle of the bell curve that are not performing like you thought they would or expected them to
• You feel desperate to fill seats
• Your recruiting is usually reactive

If you answered honestly and have 3 checks or more, then let’s agree there is a problem.

Several years ago, my son, Anthony, and a good friend of mine, Dave Zimmerman, went with me to NYC to watch the Bengals play the Jets.  We were guests of then general manager, Terry Bradway.  We met up with Terry the evening before the game just to catch up and introduce him to Anthony.  While we were in his hotel room, I asked him what was the most difficult part of his job. Without hesitation, he replied, “Player personnel - that’s the most difficult part of the job.”

He went on to discuss how he and the scouting staff spent Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays all over the country watching college games. Sometimes they attended two games a day just to find the talent they needed to compete and win on Sundays.  Unfortunately, Terry lost his job with the Jets in 2015. Terry is a great guy and a personal friend, but I cannot imagine the pressure and small window for success in drafting NFL players.

In the 2016 NFL draft, there were 256 players drafted.  There are roughly 15,588 student athletes playing on college campuses through out the US.  Two hundred and fifty six is 1.6% of all the college seniors.

I’m not suggesting that your hit percentage should be the same, but Geoff Smart, author of Who and Topgrading, suggests that it be at least 1 out of 20, or in other terms, 5%.

You may or may not notice the intentional use of the phrase “a better way to ELIMINATE those 90%” in the opening paragraph, but one of the keys to hiring better is to get better at disqualifying candidates!

In our approach to helping companies hire better salespeople, we find that it is critical to first change the mindset of the process and then change the process. The mindset that has to change from “find candidates that qualify” to “disqualifying candidates.”  If you work hard at disqualifying, then those that are left are more likely to be successful candidates.  Using this approach to hiring - in conjunction with using a predictive sales success assessment - will help you eliminate hiring mistakes!

I won’t go any further into the details about the process of eliminating mistakes here today except to mention one critical component – scorecards.  You should have in your possession a scorecard to evaluate talent based on the competencies that are required to succeed.  Specifically, that means the competencies, skills and behaviors needed to complete 100% of the job at an extraordinary level. The challenge here, of course, is to sort through the 90% of candidates that are incapable of executing what you need done 100% of the time.

Additional Resource: 

Download our free eBook - How to Hire Bankers Who Will Sell