You do not have enough resources committed to sales recruiting.
The painful truth is you do not have enough resources committed to sales recruitment.
The painful truth is your competitors could turn sales recruitment into a winning strategy if they really wanted to.
Until you maximize your sales recruitment strategy, you will not be growing as quickly as you could and should.
Sales recruitment must become your moat.
Your competitive advantage must be the identification, hiring and retention of top sales talent.
Win this battle and you will win the war.
So many interested in hiring the best salespeople yet...
So few committed.
As harsh as it may sound, most companies are not committed to hiring the quantity and quality of sales talent they require to grow their business model.
Take a moment and ask yourself the following two very revealing questions:
- Do I/we have the requisite number of quality sales hires to accomplish our sales objectives over the coming 12-24 months?
- Do I/we have a sales candidate pipeline where if we were required to grow our sales team by 10-20 percent over the next 90 days we could do so with without compromising quality of hire?The second question cannot have an affirmative answer without the first.
If you are honestly answering, "yes" to both, you really ought to be running a private equity firm. Nobody has their act together to this level.
You can't go broke selling at a profit.
The real problem with sales recruiting is a mindset issue. The mindset issue is one of limited thinking.
The mindset issue is, "We have a fixed budget for sales recruiting."
Most companies have a very fixed investment commitment in sales recruitment when it should really be completely variable.
Sales recruitment economics.
For simplicity sake, let's assume you are compensating a sales recruiter $125k and they have another $50k in support costs for a total of $200k (always round up).
- How does the marginal cost of $200k compare to lost sales of just one or two open sales positions per quarter on an annual basis?
- How does the marginal cost of $200k compare to having to hire second rate salespeople because you need feet on the street?
It is time to...
Get real.
Get real about the real costs of
- Missing salespeople.
- Being forced to hire low-performing salespeople.
Put the pencil to paper or better yet - pound out a spreadsheet. The data does not lie.
Create even more urgency by getting real about the contributing value of a sales wolf - a top 20 percentile salesperson.
Until you put the numbers together, the pain will never be great enough to overcome the way we have always done it around here.
And if you have not already done so - find out the ultimate secret to identifying and hiring sales wolves by clicking on the following graphic.
