This month’s blog is the byproduct of a conversation with the CEO of a potential client. He was looking for advice with his vision to take his company’s sales force to the next level. They have built a small but effective sales team; they’re close to securing a sizeable round of funding, and their product is cutting edge. There’s one big obstacle though. The CEO...
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5 Questions to Ask Before You Hire a Sales Recruiting Firm. 1. How does your firm find talent? Most recruiters are network based meaning they have a network of sales professionals that they have developed a relationship with. Usually, their network will be geographically or industry based. Should they have the right candidate in their network, they can deliver them to you quickly. Often, this...
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With white collar unemployment at its lowest level since 2001 (2.2%), the competition for b2b sales talent is at historic levels. There are simply more available positions than qualified talent (see graph below). Because of this, traditional talent resources such as job boards aren’t working. What does work is target recruiting (headhunting) currently employed sales professionals. With 86.2% of Sales Talent’s hires in 2017 found...
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With 2017 behind us it’s time to look ahead and project sales hiring for 2018. As there aren’t any specific sales hiring forecasts, each year we build our own by looking at the overall hiring projections from the industry standards – CareerBuilder, Manpower, and Linkedin. We also bring in relevant data from Glassdoor and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Since each company gets their information...
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Dramatically increasing the size of your company’s sales force in a short period of time can prove to be a painful process. Fortunately, many of the issues you’ll face are knowable and avoidable. Based on our observations, we see 5 common sales force expansions mistakes that most companies make. 5 Sales Force Expansion Mistakes. Underestimating the Project. The biggest mistake we see companies commit is...
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One thing that eighteen years of sales recruiting has shown us is that most companies are horrible at selling their opportunity. The first step in understanding how to do this correctly is recognizing that there are two distinct phases where you’ll be selling your opportunity. The first phase is the attraction phase and the second is the interview phase. A solid attraction story will compel...
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We’ve written extensively about Glassdoor in the past – Part 1, Part 2. For this blog, we wanted to share a simpler, 5 step guide on how to fix negative Glassdoor reviews. To give a benchmark, the average employer on Glassdoor has a score of 3.3 stars (out of 5). This is up from 3.2 stars when we wrote our original pieces on the topic...
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Most hiring managers do a poor job of evaluating weaknesses or concerns that they find in a candidate. In our experience, they either reject the person when they find a concern or they focus on what they like and fail to properly vet the concern. Both approaches leave much to be desired. Given how excruciatingly difficult it has become to hire A players and how...
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If you have been living on planet Earth, you’ve undoubtedly encountered Glassdoor. Love it or hate it, the employer review website has brought transparency to hiring. We love it. Today’s blog isn’t about Glassdoor (you can read more about our thoughts on Glassdoor in Glassdoor Part 1 and Glassdoor Part 2) but instead, what we learned from taking transparency to the next level with our...
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Recently, a client of ours was struggling to decide between two finalists for a critical sales role. To break this tie, they asked each candidate to put together a 90-day business plan as their last step in the interview process. Only time will tell if this process produced a favorable result. Personally, I’ve never been a fan of using business plans as criteria in sales...
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