Salespeople don’t meet the plan, sales are stuck, and there are fewer deals than needed. Advertising adjusters spend the budget, but the “return” is lower than expected. The reason for these situations may be the company’s approach to hiring performers. To hire the right marketers and salespeople, you need only three things. We will talk about them below.
Table of Contents
Four common mistakes that prevent you from assembling an effective sales team
Every situation is a consequence of previous actions. We have compiled a list of mistakes in team building that we encountered more often and that resulted in salespeople who did not sell, advertising adjusters who drained budgets, and similar characters who got into the company. This resulted in a revenue stream that didn’t grow or sometimes had to fund the existence of the project from other projects, company executives worried about cash gaps and losing money.
- Hiring by recommendation.
- Lack of real verification of the candidate’s motivation and competencies before hiring.
- The lack of opportunities to make good money just on sales.
- The desire to find a “cool salesman.
Sales team staffing system
Now let’s look at a system that eliminates these mistakes and allows you to assemble a team that will help you grow and maintain high marketing and sales performance. There are three parts to such a staffing system.
- Defining, understanding the position. The result is a clear understanding of who is needed now and the real requirements for the candidate.
- Search, selection and recruitment. The result – a task-capable employee in the workplace.
- Adaptation, control, and management. The result – an employee who gives the expected result.
Why these three elements?
- If we don’t understand and determine who we need, we will find and choose anyone, we will manage and control, but the result will be different from what we expect. Plus, too many resources will be spent on control and management.
- If we understand and clearly define who is needed, but we can not find and select, then the result will be resignation and hiring the wrong one, and again we will get a sad result. And again we will be tired of managing and controlling.
- If we understand, identify, find and select, but do not control and do not manage, then the probability of the desired result again is not so great.
But these three things in the right combination give you the result you need: an employee who is hired, completes his task and gives the result that is required, looking for effective solutions, and even signs it is not working with your payroll solution provider. After all, an employee’s entire job depends on the payroll.
What should be in each element?
What does it take to understand the position and clearly define who you need? The approach is this. Sales is a set of processes, each of which gives a result. The specificity of the company and the business as a whole unambiguously influences the content of the processes if we consider them at the necessary level of detailed elaboration. Descending on the required level and looking at the processes, you can understand what knowledge, skills, and qualities the executor should have to be able to produce the result you need without problems. Thus, you need the sales processes written down at a level of detail that reflects the specifics of the company and you need to analyze them.
What does it take to find and select the “right” candidate? First of all, let’s look at the processes of attracting the candidate and the processes of attracting customers. You can see that the processes are similar: place an ad on the site, the audience browses, clicks through, drops the application. As such, candidate sourcing should be treated the same way as customer acquisition: algorithm, metrics, tools.
To select the “right” marketer and salesperson you will need a competency map. The map is obtained in the previous step. The competency map should contain lists of knowledge, skills, and qualities. All that remains is to figure out how to check them. How do you check your personal qualities? You check them by simulating the situations in which they occur. Example: “In a situation where the task of preparing a report for Monday morning arrives on Friday evening, what in your opinion is the right and reasonable thing to do?”
Adaptation will usually require the timely provision of accounts and access, a knowledge base (if available and appropriate), introductions, etc. This is where a ready-made live checklist comes in handy. The sales team management will require standards, regulations, rules, and everything that affects the effectiveness of the processes in which the performer is involved. Also, the system of non-material and material motivation will not be superfluous. That is the creation of conditions, encouraging to do the work efficiently, by the role, processes, and responsibilities. As for control, in our opinion, nothing better than reports has been invented yet. Strict requirements are important here. The strictest.