Cy Young & Hiring the Right Sales People

We are often asked to assist in the hiring process for sales and marketing professionals. After years of observations we can draw a couple of conclusions:

Sales people who can perform every task they are asked and perform them all well are like Cy Young award Winners - few and far between.

Sales people are often loaded up with so many additional responsibilities that time spent selling is less than 20% of productive time.

Hiring managers often use a "I'll know one when I see one" approach over a best-practice oriented process.

In medium sized businesses, the principal often hires and coaches the sales team. It's rare to find a founder that understands real sales productiity vs. driving the team to meet call quotas.

Sales people may be adverse to using technologies such as Sales Force Automation (SFA) and or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools because they don't see them as assisting in the pursuit.

Hiring managers often underestimate the amount of time and effort it will take to coach and manage less experienced people.

To hire the right sales people, a business needs to invest in creating a realistic picture of expectations and efforts. It also needs to ask if it can get more productivity out of the sales people by finding innovative ways to off load tasks that are not directly tied to closing business.

Call us today for a free sales and marketing consultation and to receive a free copy of our integrated sales & marketing toolkit. 410.782.0360.