Hiring Sales for your Startups or Small Business – Part 2

Here is Part Two of my discussion on the Best Practices for Sales Person Recruitment.  In the First Part, we discussed the key requirement of Job Profiling or Benchmarking and setting up your Recruitment Process.  These are your first two critical steps in recruiting top performances.  In part two, we will examine the sales Interview Process and Approach and the use of Sales Person Assessments.  I look forward to hearing your feedback on the approach and whether you have implemented any part of the recommendations.

The Interview Process and Approach

After the job profile, this is the most critical step in the process.  First decide who all will be in the interview process.  Each person must know their role in the process and what they should be evaluating in the interview.  Your next step is to develop the questions that you will use in the interview.  These questions should be easy to build IF you have prepared a good job profile.  With a good profile, you can effectively explore each candidate’s background, their knowledge level, their skills, what they like to be involved with, their motivations, and how they handle themselves.  Make sure that you ask questions that discuss every aspect of your job profile.  Create a selling situation of some aspect of your business and see how they can sell your stuff on the spot.  This way you can determine if they have researched your company and how well they perform in a pressure situation.  Also provide for the opportunity for them to explore your business.  Listen to the questions they ask about your business.  This will tell you a lot about your candidate.

Use of Sales Person Assessments

There are a number of good assessments for sales available today.  HR Chally, Profiles International, and Growth Dynamics Inc. are just a few.  I would encourage you to use an assessment, but you first want to understand what the assessment evaluates.  Talk with the provider.  Learn what they are evaluating in their assessment.  Learn how to use the assessment as a part of the recruitment process.  Different assessments analyze different areas and provide different outputs.  Check them out.  Plan to use the results of the Assessment as a key tool in the selection process.  The Assessment will also be a guide to your onboarding process for the new hire and the ongoing development of the individual as they expand their tenure with your organization.  Next, determine at what point in the recruitment process you will use the assessment.  You should have a candidate quite a ways along in the recruitment process before you invest in an assessment.  Reserve the assessment for the short list or maybe just the final two candidates.  Once you have hired the candidate, the assessment will be beneficial in helping you track the performance of the rep in the job.

Summary

Sales recruitment is a big step in the development of your business.  Whether you are just starting out or have your business up and running, it is critical to lay out your sales recruitment process and get yourself and your organization prepared to evaluate and select the best candidate to grow your business.  The rewards of implementing a Best Practices approach to hiring your sales organization will come in growing your business more quickly and smoothly and without the additional expense of hiring the wrong talent.