The Best Ways to Hire Sales People

As organisations confront new buying processes, the required sales processes are changing. This makes it increasingly important to hire sales people who are the right fit for your business.

- Frank Cespedes & Daniel Weinfurter

Many firms talk about talent management, but few deal systematically with a basic fact: average annual turnover in sales is 25% to 30%. This means that the equivalent of the entire sales organisation must be hired and trained every four years or so, and that’s expensive.

Consider these stats. Direct replacement costs for a telesales employee can range from R150 000 to R250 000, while other sales positions can cost a company as much as R1,5 million. Moreover, these figures don’t reflect the lost sales while a replacement is found and trained. In sectors like medical devices, big capital equipment, and many professional services, including these opportunity costs can push the cost of churn to R5 million or more per event.

The challenge is compounded by the fact that there is no easily identified resource pool for sales positions. According to Howard Stevens in Achieve Sales Excellence, more than 50% of college graduates in the USA, regardless of their majors, are likely to work in sales. But of the over 4 000 colleges in this country, less than 100 have sales programmes or even sales courses. The situation in South Africa is not much different. And, even if companies are lucky enough to find qualified grads, the increased data and analytical tasks facing many sales forces mean that productivity ramp-up times have increased. Each hire is now a bigger sunk cost for a longer time.

Bottom line: companies typically spend more on hiring in sales than they do anywhere else in the firm. So how do you improve the returns on this investment? Here are four places to start:

HIRE FOR THE TASK