Hiring Sales Reps in a Digital World: How to Find the Right Metrics for a Successful Sales Team

Hiring sales reps that will take your business to the next level can feel like a daunting task.  The recruitment cycle for sales never seems to get easier, no matter if you’re expanding an already robust sales team or if you’re just starting out with your first new hire. But it’s not you, it’s true: According to LinkedIn, Sales Professionals are in higher demand than ever: up 45% since 2019. With such a critical role, how can you be sure that your new employee will be the right fit for not only your company but for your bottom line?

Here are a few tips we’ve found to be effective for sourcing and onboarding successful sales reps.

Tips for Hiring Sales Reps for Your Business

• Understand What Your Goals Are – While this might sound rudimentary, you’d be surprised at how many companies get it wrong in the beginning. Does the sales cycle for your business operate around consultative or transactional approaches? There are different strengths and behaviors that are needed for both so it’s important to understand what role you’re looking to fill and know the behaviors that will allow an employee to flourish in that role.

• Make Sure the HR Team has a 360 Degree Understanding of the Sales Role – The number one concern we’ve seen from HR teams is how to deal with biases that get introduced in the hiring process despite intentional procedures that try to mitigate it. Sometimes it’s as innocent as questions that get introduced into the interview process that wrongly disqualify talented sales reps through no fault of their own. Establish a clear set of metrics that you want your hiring team to be cognizant of and give them the right tools to help quantify those metrics.

• Ask the Right Questions – A successful salesperson will ace your interview but might not live up to their potential once in the role. How do you make sure your hiring team isn’t won over by good salesmanship for a bad sales rep?
  
  You make sure your hiring team is asking the right questions during an interview and that they have a scale of what successful answers look like. Our proprietary Hire-to-Success methodology takes care of this by giving your HR team an unbiased composite of the strengths a successful person would have in this role (as well as performance gaps) based on objective metrics. That way your team has the tools they need to identify and drill into creating the framework for an interview and onboarding process that delivers the right candidates quickly.

•  Survey Your Current Sales Department – We’ve seen the highest performing companies start with their own understanding of what it takes to be successful on their specific sales team. This is what separates the best from the rest.  Quantifying successful metrics for your sales team ensures that any new hire brought in will contribute to moving the needle for your sales teams, rather than throwing a wrench into a previously finely-tuned sales machine. 

Whether you’re hiring your first sales rep or growing a sales team, you’re going to need a procedure that finds the right hire quickly and saves your business time and money. Having this established before the interview process will not only save your hiring team hours of talent sourcing but will also ensure that your new sales rep becomes an appreciating asset to the company. Aptology can help you create these procedures. Let us show you what 15 minutes can do.