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STEVE HOYLE explains why trying to recruit great salespeople is proving tougher than ever – and what you can do about it

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y feature in the last edition of Winning Edge on the ‘promote or hire?’ debate attracted a larger than usual number of responses — it seems that there is a sizeable percentage of

managers facing this dilemma, and an even greater number of salespeople who are carrying around painful memories of being passed over for promotion.

The response from sales managers was overwhelmingly supportive of promoting from within whenever possible, but they often raised the question of how to find the good salespeople that we need today. Many recent client conversations have also focused on one of the major challenges facing sales leaders who are looking to expand and be more aggressive in the marketplace as their confidence in economic recovery grows, which is to find superstar salespeople who can spearhead their efforts, particularly in the area of finding new business.

It was also really interesting to read the latest Staffing Trends report from LinkedIn, which confirmed that sourcing candidates generally is the top issue facing recruiters. This report also contained the very interesting statistic that apparently 76% of job applicants viewed an employee’s LinkedIn profile six months prior to applying for a job at that company. A comment from one survey respondent also got me thinking: “Recruiting is becoming much more like marketing.” I was pondering the implications of these facts and comments when I visited a client who told me that they spent more money in finding and recruiting new employees than in acquiring new customers. It is a high-end, pure-play, professional services company, so perhaps for this type of business this is more appropriate than most, but even so, it still shocked me that it took this approach, especially compared with the practices of many sales directors that I come across — see David’s and Fiona’s typical stories below.

It is clear in both reading the various surveys, looking at the research done by people such as LinkedIn and Monster, as well as talking with a wide variety of clients, that the process of finding and hiring great salespeople is in the middle of great change.

The similarities with the marketing and sales changes that have taken place over the last few years are striking. A major strategic selling challenge that is being addressed by many sales directors is how to engage potential customers in earlier conversations, creating possibilities in the mind of the prospect before the competition, then nurturing those relationships so that you are best positioned to win eventual projects. How to go about ensuring you can recruit great salespeople in the future appears to be very similar. You need a candidate identification and nurturing programme that will use many of the techniques now used in marketing, including building your brand as an employer. You should

use multiple channels to identify individuals and manage a pipeline of both short-term potential candidates, but also people whom you can have a meaningful conversation with when the time is right. LinkedIn, together with increasing specialisation in sales roles, is changing everything, as it is now much easier to build networks and get information on individuals. A sales manager or director can do this directly, and if they can harness the networks of others in their team then this becomes very powerful. It is no surprise that many successful organisations are resurrecting the ‘refer a friend’ campaigns of the past, but this time with real incentives in place and making it easier for individuals to reference their LinkedIn network to help find great potential candidates.

Obviously, when trying to attract superstar salespeople, your interview process needs to be professional and efficient. Most importantly, your proposition to potential candidates needs to be crystal clear. I recently asked the VP of sales for a major telecommunications equipment supplier why great salespeople would want to join his company. The reply was incredible in its naivety: “Because we’re a major player and people always want to work for major players.” That may have been somewhat true many years ago, but in talking to many salespeople and sales managers at the point where they are considering new roles (as an interviewer, coach or friend) then certainly the better candidates need much more convincing. They need to be clear about the role itself, how they will be measured, and what’s in it for them in terms of financial rewards, career, lifestyle or whatever interests them. They want to understand where the company is heading, its culture and practices, how their personal situation could change, and the level of risk that they would be taking. In other words, crafting a strong generic

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DAVID’S DILEMMA David is the sales director for a medium-sized IT integration company, employing about 30 salespeople in four vertically organised teams. The business was very successful in the 1990s and up until 2008, then flatlined and became a little stagnant. David is very experienced and is now under pressure to grow the business more quickly. He needs to expand the sales teams, especially with really good new-business salespeople, and also some more account management specialists to replace a couple of individuals who have not been able to respond to the renewed pressure for growth.

David is being spectacularly unsuccessful in finding good people. He has relationships with a number of recruitment agencies that have served him well over the years. The types of candidate that they are able to uncover are what are generally called ‘hired guns’. They are experienced, having had a number of similar roles in the industry, generally staying just a few years at each employer. There were a number of CVs from people who looked good enough, but when David met the candidates face-to-face he realised that he would be hiring ‘OK’ salespeople, but not good and certainly not great performers. He wondered whether

or not his standards were too high, or perhaps his interviewing was not enabling people to shine. But he definitely felt that he already had enough ‘middle of the road’ salespeople, and really wanted to bring in some new blood that would raise the bar for everyone.

The one candidate that David was interested in was going to cost far too much, and even though David may have been able to get the salary agreed with his MD, he did not want to break the salary guidelines that he had in place for the whole team, and which he believed were good in the general marketplace.

David quite quickly came to realise that finding and attracting really high quality candidates in a short timescale was an almost impossible task. He reflected that in many ways it is similar to being short of business at the end of the year, with no pipeline and having to rely on a cold-calling blitz, which is expensive, distracting and offers no guarantee of success. He compared his recruitment situation with where he was two years previously with sales, when he had had to carefully redefine the company’s target markets and propositions, and then build a lead generation and lead nurturing system that constantly moved people from initial contact through possibilities to opportunities that would close.

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proposition to candidates, and then tailoring this to the individual, is increasingly a vital part of attracting the potential superstars into your sales team. This is in many ways mirroring what most sales directors need to do regarding new business acquisition.

Traditional recruitment agencies can still form a valuable part of the programme, but they need to be much more than simple finders of CVs — they will be working with you on the whole approach, and adding real value throughout.

To sum up, it is apparent that the world of recruitment is in the midst of great changes, and sales managers trying to recruit great people rapidly are facing enormous challenges. There are few quick fixes. Rather, what enlightened sales directors are often doing is to work with their HR colleagues to build a complete attraction and acquisition programme, focusing particularly on the passive potential candidates. These programmes will borrow a lot from what we have learned about the changing nature of B2B selling over recent years. Finally, it is interesting to note that all the anecdotal evidence points to many superstar salespeople being those that have been developed and promoted within the sales team over time — so, as well as putting in long-term fixes to their external hiring, sales directors are increasingly paying attention to how they grow and develop their internal talent for the future.

FEATURE HIRING

Contributor Steve Hoyle is a sales consultant, coach, trainer, interim manager and author, specialising in helping clients to grow the capability of their sales teams in complex B2B environments. He can be contacted at steve.hoyle@linksdev.net or on 07785 381563

THE CANDIDATES DESPERADOS: have been out of a job for a while and are desperate to take anything. They are available immediately and you can negotiate their package down, but if you do offer them a role they may end up not starting or leaving early once they get the job that they were really looking for.SEEKERS: are either out of work or have made the firm decision to leave their current employment. These active candidates will be registered with agencies, working their network and pushing CVs out to carefully chosen prospective employers. They are serious about wanting the right job and form the bulk of traditional candidates.LOOKERS: are in a job currently and are considering a switch, or at least ‘testing the waters’. They are passive candidates,

but easily persuaded to come along for a discussion/interview. They are more difficult to identify and may take some persuading to join you. They are often found by headhunters, making them an expensive source of candidates, but they can also be acquired through good networking.PERSUADABLES: are very comfortable where they are, but if you can present them with an interesting and rewarding proposition they can be persuaded to have an informal discussion. Often successful in their current role, they should be nurtured within your ‘people pipeline’.STAYERS: will be very difficult to get out of their current role and would demand very high inducements to move. Probably best left for the moment or, if they are really good, to nurture as very long-term possibilities.

FIONA’S FUNNEL When Fiona took over as sales and marketing director at her medical equipment supplier two years ago, she came to the conclusion that she personally had to focus on the fundamentals of having strong propositions, a well thought out go-to-market plan, great people and strong sales discipline.

In terms of having great people, she had inherited a team that was making target ‘there or thereabouts’ but not growing the business quite as aggressively as her boss wanted. She decided that there was no need to take immediate action, but that over time she had to start improving the skills and motivation of the team. She put in place a simple but quite comprehensive plan:O�Profiling exactly the kind of people that she would want to bring into the team in futureO�Creating a real career plan, starting with junior internal account managers, which she would start recruiting with a view to their potential as full salespeople, not just their ability to carry out the immediate roleO�Building up a database of possible future hires – largely people working for competitors or allied companies – and making sure that these individuals got some form of communication from her every few months. With possible future sales managers she would call them about every six months and be very open about the fact that she would love to interview them “when it is the right time for both of us”O�Making one of her marketing assistants responsible for keeping the company profile up to scratch on all social media sites, especially LinkedIn and GlassdoorO�Getting her managers to create a pipeline of possible openings and candidatesO�Working on a very clear proposition – “Why you would want to work in sales here” (which has also had many spin-off benefits for how she manages existing salespeople)O�Putting in place a simple hiring process once positions were formally availableO�Taking the old employee referral scheme, which offered a very small amount of money per recruited candidate, to something much more significant and tempting for people, but still much less expensive than using agenciesO�Continuing to work with a small and select group of recruitment agencies that specialised in her field, and with which she had built strong relationships, so that they were completely in tune with her thinkingO�Implementing a sales school approach of regular short training sessions for all salespeople, with a separate development stream for the internal account managers, involving them in numerous activities all designed to get them to a position where they could be promoted as quickly as possible.

The results had taken some time to come through, but now, after two years, Fiona is confident that she can fill most positions within six weeks of them becoming available. Internal account managers are being promoted to fill about half the sales positions, and she has a queue of external candidates wanting to join.

An unexpected side-benefit is that this approach has also had a significant impact on the existing sales team as they see some new, hungrier and more enthusiastic people coming through, together with the ‘pick of the crop’ of external salespeople with great experience and fresh ideas. Fiona is proud of these achievements, but has plans to keep refining her approach. She has ambitions for her company to be seen as a ‘destination employer’ within her niche market, wants to make the hiring process slicker and so is working with HR to implement a proper applicant tracking system – and she is keen to do more to promote the company through social media.

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