It is true that the majority of small businesses fail in their initial five years, not because of the service of product or poor accounting practices, but due to lack of sales. So, when your new business startup is growing, it’s time for you to have someone else wear a few of those many hats that you’ve put on since you began. Decide to hire some people to handle the sales department effectively. But the question is how and where will you find such a good salesperson? As a small-business owner or startup, you simply can’t risk putting a dent in your profile by having some worthless sales people.
Experts strongly suggest you to start shopping for sales people at the place where you shop as a consumer. Start paying close attention to the worthy salespeople whom you encounter as a customer. What is it that they’re doing and that makes you feel good to work with them? The most important first step is to recognize the productive and the lucrative sales people. When you find someone who’s too good, compliment them as most sales people love to be recognized.
Perfect tips for hiring the best sales people for your organization
- Review and analyze the job opening: Before you post it to the online job portals and in the newspapers, check over the job opening and make sure it’s still relevant. If it has been a while since you’ve hired a salesperson, then you need to make certain changes to the requirements now. Make sure you check carefully for typos and grammatical errors as these are huge turn-offs to the superstar candidates that you want to attract.
- Know what you’re looking for: Once your job opening is live in the paper and online media, you’ll probably end up with a blizzard of job applications. Among them, up to 90% won’t be qualifying or will rather be a poor fit and will be worthy of going straight into the recycle bin. But the remaining candidates might be more than what you want to bring in for interviews. Make a list of your desired qualifications before going through the qualified applicants and use the list to prioritize the applications.
- Be prepared with your interview questions: Write down your interview questions way ahead of time and make sure you use the same set of questions for each interview. This way you can look at each candidate with the same kind of information. You might wish to add a few customized questions for some particular candidates but the core set of questions need to be the same for all.
- Sell yourself: Irrespective of the state of the job market, the sales superstars usually have their very own choice of positions. You will require doing a bit of selling in order to convince such a candidate to work for your company. Prepare some valuable information about the company in general and also the sales team and for the position that you’re hiring for.
- Look for right competence and intelligence: Too often sales managers wish to hire candidates who know the industry they’re selling into today and yes this is indeed a great requirement if the candidate has the ability to be successful enough. However, there is a large pool of competent candidates who are not currently involved in your business and who could be your next superstar. So, if you limit your search to the ones who are industry-experienced, you might be losing some good employees.
You should read more about hiring sales people for startups in this article, you need to take into account the above mentioned headhunting tips. Choose the best to get the best results for your company.
