Hiring an effective sales team isn’t easy at the best of times, but it’s even harder when in-person meetings can be impossible to arrange and the entire process needs to happen remotely due to the coronavirus pandemic.
In times of economic uncertainty, a good sales team is more essential than ever. Fortunately, if you need to hire more sales staff or expand sales operations in the coming months, there are still plenty of ways to connect with high-quality candidates. If you want to build a sales team that can take your company to new heights in the coming year, here are four tips you can use to find the right personnel.
1. Work with a Recruitment Agency
A successful sales team rarely comes about by chance, which is why companies looking to expand their marketing capacities — or set up completely new sales departments — often work with recruitment agencies.
Recruitment agencies keep extensive databases that can help put you hire from a potential pool of hundreds of thousands of sales representatives, so when you work with professional recruiters you don’t have to wait for the right resumes to be submitted in order to start building your team.
2.Look for Relevant Experience
Every industry operates according to its own logic, and the best sales teams have extensive experience working in a particular sector. While a talented salesperson can be trained to sell just about anything, onboarding is a lot easier when you hire personnel who already have deep knowledge of the type of product or service you are selling.
Experience isn’t just about familiarity with an industry, though — you should also make sure that the salespeople you hire have a proven track record of hitting or exceeding their sales targets.
3.Take Personality into Account
It may not necessarily be the case that real salespeople are born, not made, but it’s certainly true that having the right mixture of drive, acumen, emotional intelligence, integrity and other soft skills is essential for success in sales.
While these traits can be hard to discern from a resume, interview, or short personality test, sales recruitment agencies have specialized software they use to assess the qualities and aptitudes of the sales people they place.
Working with sales recruiters can help you cut through the noise and focus on those characteristics that can help you identify people who will be the right fit for your team.
4. Hire People Who Want to be Part of a Team
Competitiveness has always been part of the sales industry, but when healthy competitiveness tips over into aggression, the department will start to suffer. Hiring salespeople who are personally driven but also excited about contributing to something larger than themselves will help you create a team that exceeds expectations.
As the global economy starts to stabilize in the wake of the coronavirus crash, many businesses are starting to reinvest in sales as a way of recouping some of their losses. If you are considering expanding your sales department in the new year, working with sales recruitment agencies to identify good candidates with the experience and aptitudes you are looking for is a great way to build a team that can deliver long-term success.