leadership
Beyond Metrics
WHAT HR TEAMS NEED TO KNOW TO BUILD AND SCALE THEIR
SALES ORGANIZATION
By Jamie Hoobanoff
Building and scaling an organization’s sales
team can be a daunting task for sales lead-ers
and HR professionals. Whether you are
working to keep up with new hiring trends,
focusing on maintaining balance within your existing
teams or looking at innovative approaches to bring
on the best talent, managing and planning for growth
and the addition of new sales hires can be a challenge.
As we look ahead to 2019, there’s no better time
than the present to revamp hiring strategies. Included
below are some key recommendations to consider as
you plan to build out and scale the best sales teams:
i.e., those who will create strategies, implement
solutions and deliver lasting results for your com-pany.
These thought starters will hopefully inspire
different strategies that give your recruiting effort
the little push it needs to ensure a great start to a
successful year.
SALES RECRUITMENT IS SALES ITSELF
The way in which an HR (and recruiting) team
approaches the market is crucial to attracting the
right talent. The approach sets the tone for the search,
a recruiter’s ability to sell and will ultimately make or
break the success of talent acquisition efforts.
To win the kind of talent that is going to help a
company disrupt, grow and provide customers a
best-in-class experience, recruiters need to be really
good sales people. They must know a company’s cul-ture,
mission and what makes it a great place to work.
They need to believe in a company’s vision and be
able to communicate it to the types of talent being
targeted. They must also be able to clearly articulate
the full range of a company’s benefits as an employer
of choice. They have to sell a company as the best
place for a sales person to build their career.
For every three candidates interviewed, on average
one is hired
DON’T JUST HIRE FOR EXPERIENCE
Finding applicants is the easy part. In fact, most jobs that are advertised receive
too many applications. The trouble is, based on experience, roughly 95 per cent
of them are irrelevant or unqualified candidates.
Although sales people are generally evaluated and analyzed on sales met-rics,
it’s important to recognize that this should not define your hiring decision.
While metrics are a crucial indicator of how a candidate will perform on a sales
team, finding a passionate salesperson who has excellent communications skills
and also fits the company culture is a great way to foresee how a candidate will
shine on a team.
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HRPROFESSIONALNOW.CA ❚ DECEMBER 2018 ❚ 39
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