Where is your next salesperson coming from? This is always an interesting question in a forum. Many do not know. Some think they will appear from hope or wish. Many don’t begin the search until a need arises. If you are a Sales Manager or higher in the Sales org chart, this should be a big concern at all times. Good salespeople are hard to find. Great salespeople are even harder to find and sometimes feel mythological.
Meeting When There Is No Position Open
Weeding out good and bad sales fits should not be a reactive thing you do when a vacancy appears on the team. A proactive candidate pool is hard work. But it will more than pay off when it comes time to fill a spot on the team. If you lose a salesperson and do not have a pool of candidates, it can take 60-90 days to build the pool before you even run interviews. This leaves you and your team short-handed for over a quarter of the year. This can lead to rushed or impatient hiring, and if that hire is bad, it can haunt you for years. Having this pool of candidates ready to go reduces hiring time by up to 60 days. And you will start from a place of strength by having only solid candidates to pick from.
I encourage Sales Management to meet salespeople from 3 specific groups.
Competitor Reps
Group 1, your competition. This allows you to assess the people closest to what you sell. This should be the easiest group to consider, and you get the side benefit of really knowing your competition. From each competitor, who are their strongest salespeople? Not just on paper. Is this rep capable of doing better at your company and under your direction? This group should also allow for the fastest onboarding and ramp production, as these reps do not have to learn the industry, just the company systems. One word of caution, make sure they think through their non-compete (really non-solicitation). Can they generate business without existing clients?
Adjacent Industry Reps
Group 2 is adjacent industries. These are salespeople who sell something similar but do not quite compete with your offering. This still allows for easy assessment, but you must evaluate the learning curve this salesperson would go through if they transitioned to your product or service. I encourage asking them to explain back to you how they relate what they sell today with what you sell. If they can make this connection, it will improve their onboarding.
Reps Far Removed from Your Industry
Group 3 consists of salespeople completely outside of your industry. They will be harder to evaluate, and they may need to score higher on aptitude to make sure they can learn your company’s products or services quickly enough, while learning the admin/systems side during onboarding. For any hires from this group, you must temper your expectations for production to be a bit slower as they have more to learn. When you find a good candidate from this group, you will find they bring fresh ideas and unique takes on prospects.
I am a strong proponent of meeting with potential salespeople 2-3 times per week, even when you are not hiring. If you are afraid of what salespeople you may be missing out on in the world, this will be the best way to allay your fears. Meeting this many reps allows you to see how many reps outside your organization you would evaluate as not being able to succeed in your organization, which should be a high percentage. I find the fear of missing out drives high anxiety among Sales Managers and their upper management. Every company’s profile of a great salesperson is different. This is good that you will not have as much competition for the salesperson that is the right fit for you and your company. This is bad, in that you will have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find a person to add to your talent pool.
How to Leave this Meeting
A word of advice. If you uncover a diamond of a rep in this meeting and you have no current open positions, communicate your interest and let them know they are in your candidate pool. Timing will be everything in this relationship. I would let rep prospects know, “I want you to interview in any of my upcoming interviews”. Then I would own the fact that timing is everything. I would always let them know, that every time a position comes open, I am going to reach out to you. I will ask if now is the time. If it isn’t, I will put you back in the pool and check with you again the next time. They won’t come out of the pool unless they ask. Even then, I would still call when a position was open. Check-in with your pool candidates every six months to see how they are doing. Remember, this is still a courting process. Just because you were interested once, doesn’t mean they don’t need to hear you are still interested.
While building a proactive candidate pool is hard work, the other option is anxiety about what to do when a rep leaves…and a rep will eventually leave.