“The job requires interaction with these customer types: [IT director, etc.].”We’ve looked at how to improve your sales skills in the early stages of your startup.
But once you’ve gotten your business off the ground, you might consider hiring your first sales reps. Many founders make this decision because they want to increase sales and enter new markets—and, truth be told, they’re tired of working seventy-hour weeks.
Some businesses will start by hiring independent sales reps (please see “How to Find Independent Sales Reps,” page 138). Others will want to hire and train an internal sales force. The latter option will take more time and resources, but may pay off down the road, as your employees will be focused exclusively on your products or services.
We’ll take a look below at how to hire internal sales reps. To ensure these new team members will be a worthwhile investment for your company, Inc. columnist Geoffrey James recommends doing the following:
1.Examine your sales process. If you’re ready to hire somebody to sell, you’ve likely already acquired some customers. While some of that business may have come from previous business contacts, you’ve probably got some idea of what it takes, in terms of expertise and skill set, to sell your offering. Make a list of what’s required, such as “knowledge of manufacturing processes” or “experience selling to large corporations.”
2.Interview your existing customers. Many entrepreneurs forget this part, hiring sales reps without asking their customers how they want vendors to sell to them. The more you find out about the environment in which your sales rep will be selling, the better you’ll be able to decide whether a particular candidate is right for the job. And by the way: Your customers will be pleased that you bothered to ask.
3.Write a concise job description. Make it specific, not general. Some examples:
“The job requires interaction with these customer types: [IT director, etc.].”
“The job requires telephone cold calling, generating at least ten sales leads a day.”
“The job requires the ability to build a network of customer advocates.”
Your goal here is to define the job clearly, without jargon.
4.Devise a reasonable compensation plan. Probably the biggest mistake that small business owners make when hiring salespeople is underestimating the amount of effort it’s going to take to sell their offerings. “If you truly believe (as many entrepreneurs do) that your product or service will ‘sell itself,’ then you probably shouldn’t be thinking about hiring a salesperson—not because you don’t need one, but because you’re fooling yourself,” James says.
5.Use your own network. Now that you’ve got your concise job description, contact everyone you know who might know somebody who has those characteristics. In fact, the process of writing the job description may have brought somebody to mind. A personal referral from a colleague is much more likely to yield a great candidate than somebody who answers an advertisement.
6.Contact your local business school. While not all business schools have sales courses or programs, they’re becoming more popular. “The graduates from such programs have an incredibly high success rate compared to other kinds of sales new hires and are often exposed to a broader range of business concepts,” says Howard Stevens, CEO of Chally Worldwide, a sales consulting firm.
7.Run ads. If steps 5 and 6 have come up blank, then run ads on job boards and industry publications. Since you wrote a very specific job description, “you’re less likely to get deluged with plain-wrap resumes from every Tom, Dick, and Mary who’s ‘highly motivated’ and ‘success driven,’” James says.
8.Interview to determine character. When you call somebody in for an interview, you already know (from your description and the response) that they’ve got the basic attributes you need. Now your primary job is to assess character. “Try to find employees whose personal experience illustrates the kind of resilience that will help them shrug off the inevitable disappointments that are part of any career in sales,” advises Gerhard Gschwandtner, publisher of SellingPower magazine.
9.Do your due diligence. Unless you’re hiring somebody with no prior sales experience, the interview should cover how much the candidate sold in his or her previous position. Ask the candidate about compensation for those sales. Try to find somebody who worked with the candidate in the past, other than the references that he or she provided. (LinkedIn can be a good resource for this.) If you find any inconsistencies, disqualify the candidate.
10.Hire conditionally, on a trial period. “The truth is that you don’t really know if a sales professional is going to work out until after they’ve attempted to sell for you,” James says. Large companies typically have formal trial periods for sales reps, but smaller firms may not be accustomed to thinking about hiring in this way. Make sure that you have precise (i.e., numerical) measurements for what constitutes success.