It’s going to be frustrating, time consuming, difficult, and emotionally draining with a minimal chance of success.
Years ago, I created one of my first seminars: How to Find, Interview, Select and Hire a Good Salesperson. I was responding to the experience of my clients who were universally terrible at hiring a salesperson. Over the years, I’ve taught that seminar to hundreds of entrepreneurs and sales managers. At the beginning of the seminar, I ask this question: How many of you had a good experience with the first salesperson you hired? No hands go up. Occasionally, someone will raise a tentative hand, but then explain. “Well sort of, but…..” and provide caveats to their tentative response.
Add that experience to my over 35 years of working with B2B salesforces, and I can unequivocally state that there is a 99% chance that you will have a miserable, time consuming, disappointing experience when you attempt to employ your first salesperson.
Your disillusionment may come during the hiring process as you find yourself being frustrated with your inability to find the right person. But, more likely, it will come a few months after you have made the hire, as you realize that the person you hired is not producing like you thought he/she would. And then your stomach begins to churn as you realize that you hired the wrong person.
There are lots of reasons for that miserable success rate. First, most first time hirer’s are blissfully naive. They have been a salesperson, or they have been around salespeople. “How difficult could it be?” they think. So, they blithely go forward with misplaced confidence, expecting that hiring a salesperson is just like hiring an administrative assistant or customer service rep. They don’t do a thorough job of hiring a salesperson because they have never done it before and have overly simple ideas of the process.
While it would be nice if hiring a salesperson were just like any other hire, that is not the case. Salespeople are great at interviewing – after all, that’s pretty much what they do every day, and it is easy to form an overly positive impression of a candidate.
Additionally, the job itself warrants a different approach to hiring. In every other job description in your business the person pretty much knows what is expected of them, and what to do when they come into work. Salespeople, however, need to decide, every day and multiple times in the course of a day, where to go and what to do. That recurring decision puts them into a class of their own and requires a deeper dive into the hiring process.
One of the biggest reasons for the six-month down-the-road realizations is that expectations were never fully articulated. The employer expected this, and the salesperson expected that, and the expectations don’t match.
The other reason for the six-month wakeup call is that most employers have no effective sales management routines. They expected the salesperson to pretty much manage himself/herself, and discovered, too late, that what the salesperson thought was a good use of time turned out to be not at all what the employer expected.
So, if you are contemplating making your first sales hire, consider this:
1. At the moment, you are probably the company’s best salesperson. So, wait until you absolutely can’t go on without someone doing sales instead of you. Hire someone internally to take some of the administrative tasks off of you and thus allow you to continue to be the company’s best salesperson. Administrative people are far more plentiful and easier to hire than a salesperson, so cut off parts of your job and hire someone to do those so that you can focus on sales.
2. Take a ‘systems’ approach to your sales efforts and think of alternate ways of accomplishing the things you have in mind for a salesperson. Take the tasks that you were thinking the salesperson would accomplish and break the potential job up into multiple pieces. For example, you may expect him to make cold calls, set appointments, take care of service issues with current customers, maintain prices in the computer. Etc.
So, for example, if you expect hm/her to make cold calls, can you find a part-time telemarketer who could do that cheaper and better? If you expect him/her to take care of service issues with the customers, could you hire a customer service rep who could do that work cheaper and better? It may be that you don’t need a salesperson, that the job could be done, generally better and cheaper, by other people.
As you break the job up into pieces and find people to accomplish each of those pieces, you narrow the job description of your eventual salesperson. The narrower the job description, the more people there are who could do it, and the more likely it is that you will find a good salesperson.
3. When it comes time to hire a salesperson, do your homework first. Create a written set of expectations, a compensation plan, a detailed job description, a set of reporting routines, and the KPI’s and the system that you’ll use to measure his/her performance.
4. Create a process for hiring the person and stick to it. Your process should contain multiple interviews, an aptitude assessment, reference checks, and an interview by someone else whose opinion you trust.
Hiring your first salesperson is a watershed event in your company’s growth and your development as an executive. While it almost always results in disappointment, you can increase the likelihood of making a good hire by respecting the difficulty of the task and approaching it mindfully.
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