How to Hire High-Performing Sales Athletes

Have you been frustrated trying to hire the right person for your job opening?

Do you want to hire a high-performing sales athlete?

Consider these items as you look for a qualified candidate:

• Know what you’re looking for, what the position is and the KPIs it must impact once a successful hire is made
• Predetermine the characteristics that a suitable candidate must possess
• Create or revise an up-to-date job description 
• Determine your compensation plan
• Have a territory and/or ‘book of business’ plan

If you think about these items in the context of a sports athlete, it will help you come to a clear understanding of why they are crucial for a successful sales focused organization with top notch sales performers. Take ice hockey which has three basic positions – goal tender, forward and defense. 

Can you imagine hiring someone who is capable offensively for a goaltender position? It’s no different in sales – are you looking for business development, a hunter, or a farmer? What specifically must they accomplish to yield success for the company? The clearer you are about the role you expect someone to play, the responsibilities and the expectation that go with that role, the better set you will be for success.

With some of the complexities of developing Sales Athletes, maybe it’s time to consider a Sales Coach. Sales coaching isn’t one size fits all. Your sales coach may work exclusively with a few salespeople or with the team. They may work solely to support the sales manager to be more effective in their sales coaching role, or to complement their efforts as a sales manager. Engaging with a sales coach may begin with an assessment of your current sales team – one that identifies areas that will produce the greatest return on investment. If you are even a little open to the idea of sales coaching, what’s the harm in a conversation - one where you can determine if there is a good reason to explore whether sales coaching is or is not a fit for your organization… one where NO is OK.

Read more about sales leadership on our website!

Are you ready to build a sales-focused organization with a high performing sales team, sales leadership, and an effective sales management solution? 

Call us at 248-468-7400 or fill out our contact form to receive a sample sales effectiveness and improvement analysis (SEIA) report! 

Together, we can assess how your company is doing, what potential it has, how to realize this potential, how long it will take along with expected gains. We’re here to help you determine the best way to achieve your goals.

Creating High Performance Sales Athletes

We all want top performers in our sales environment, right? It starts with a successful hire, someone who has the right ingredients, talent and/or potential. 

In order to hire the right person, we have to know what we’re looking for and be able to define our needs before we hire talent. Let’s say we’re looking for someone to manage customer accounts and create opportunities to grow customer accounts. This is hugely different than a position where we’re looking to add new business, grow a territory, break into a new market, or something else. This all has to be in place before we advertise that a candidate is wanted for a specific position and that interested parties should apply. 

Below is a list that may help with acquiring top candidates and growing them into sales athletes:

1. Know what you’re looking for, what the position is and the KPIs it must impact once a successful hire is made
2. Predetermine the characteristics that a suitable candidate must possess
3. Create or revise an up-to-date job description 
4. Determine your compensation plan
5. Have a territory and/or ‘book of business’ plan
6. Know how you will work with the salesperson (meetings, ride along, joint calls, reporting, etc.)
7. Have an estimate for how long it may take a new salesperson to get up to speed and deliver results
8. Know how you will handle subpar performance
9. Define the role for the position clearly
10. Define the responsibilities for the position clearly
11. Have clear expectations for the position
12. Manage all of the above early and often

Examine this list and note the items you are well-prepared for and those that you are less than well-prepared for. It’s not a disaster to make changes – even with an existing team or salesperson. Make the adjustments, announce them early, and declare that we’ll climb into this change together.

Learn how a sales coach can help with your sales leadership strategy on our website!

Sales Leadership, Management, and Coaching for Your Sales Team

Are you ready to build a sales-focused organization with a high performing sales team, sales leadership, and an effective sales management solution? 

Call us at 248-468-7400 or fill out our contact form to receive a sample sales effectiveness and improvement analysis (SEIA) report! 

Together, we can assess how your company is doing, what potential it has, how to realize this potential, how long it will take along with expected gains. We’re here to help you determine the best way to achieve your goals.

Having Trouble Hiring? We Can Help

Before we talk about confidence with successfully hiring a sales team individual, whether they’re a VP of sales, a sales manager, or a salesperson, let’s be clear on the risk of a mishire and its associated costs. For most positions, hiring organizations find that for every two hires, they get one good one. Our experience suggests these mishire rates of 50% are higher with smaller business – likely due to the fact that larger organizations have well-established hiring processes. With sales positions, the risk of a mishire is even greater, and the cost of a mishire can approach 6 to 15 times the annual salary of that sales position.

So, for a salesperson who is paid $100K/year, a mishire can cost $600K. A mishire at the VP level can cost $3.75Mil, based on an annual salary of $250K. These are whopping numbers and reflect the all-in costs that may include down time, ramp-up and even remediation efforts that span a period of 6 months or more. Amazingly, 75% of all hires include some level of candidate disappointment.

We’ve all heard the expression ‘money makes the world go ‘round’. Companies are dependent on employees, and great team members grow revenue streams so cash can flow. The two main drivers of revenue in a company are marketing and sales. A lot is at stake when it comes to hiring sales talent.  

If you could resolve all or most of the concerns about your sales position hiring and how that has worked for you and your organization, what concerns would you want to address? Too often we’re blind to certain factors in a sales position candidate and don’t have any way to ‘try them on’ before we hire them. It’s something we only discover after we have made our hiring decision. 

Read more about hiring for your sales team on our website! 

Are you ready to begin your journey?

Are you ready to build a sales-focused organization with a high performing sales team and an effective sales management solution? Whether you are satisfied with the effort, focus, and results of your sales team, many people we speak with have been hesitant to act – simply because they don’t know where to begin. If you’re open to a brief call, let us know and we can take the first step together.

Call us at 248-468-7400 or fill out our contact form to receive a sample sales candidate assessment report! Together, we can assess how your company is doing, what potential it has, how to realize this potential, how long it will take along with expected gains. We are here to help you determine the best way to achieve your goals.

Are You Building a High Performance Sales Team?

Is your company focused on the right areas, and producing the performance and outcomes you seek? 

Thinking of your current organization, its focus on sales, the culture, employee & management attitudes (mindset), along with sales performance, read the statements below and ask yourself: are these in place and are they optimized? 

If your answer is NO to two or more statements, then you would likely benefit from a shift in sales related focus in your organization.

• All employees have a positive view of sales and selling in our organization
• The sales leader meets regularly with the business owner /leadership to ensure alignment of sales and organizational strategy
• Strategic prospecting targets are defined and included in each salesperson’s territory plan
• All employees in the organization understand the importance of sales and the role they play in supporting and increasing both sales and customer satisfaction
• The organizational culture supports sales efforts and our goal of being easy to do business with for our customers
• Each salesperson has a dashboard or individual sales plan that is reviewed regularly
• The sales team is viewed by the organization as a high-performance team, much like a sports team

Read more about creating a sales-focused organization on our website.

Every sales-focused organization has room for improvement! If you aren’t implementing all the statements above, or only a few, you may need to adjust your thinking or priorities around your sales efforts and function… it may be time to get help.

Over the past few months, we’ve provided an in-depth look at key areas of a successful Sales Focused Organization including sales fundamentals, effective sales management, and a high-performance sales team. Please click here to request your copy of our comprehensive checklist outlining specific focus areas toward building a sales focused organization that succeeds and thrives.

Want to get the best out of your sales efforts?

We work with sales leaders, managers, teams, individual salespeople, and their organizations.  With both our standard offerings and our customized coaching and consulting engagements, we focus on the gap areas to drive better sales results.  Our work varies in length from just one quarter to multi-year engagements depending upon the size of the organization and needs. In some cases, we operate as a Fractional Sales Leader and other times we coach with an existing Sales Manager and sales team. We often work at all levels of the organization to help build a Sales Focused Organization - leadership, strategic direction, systems, management, departments, and individual contributors. We also assist in the recruiting and evaluation of “Qualified, New Business” Sales representatives.

6 Components of Effective Sales Performance

Is your sales team effective, focused on the right areas, and producing the performance and outcomes you seek? 

Thinking of your current sales performance, including team members and their management, read the statements below and ask yourself: are these in place and are they optimized? 

If your answer is NO to two or more statements, then you would likely benefit from a shift in your sales management solution, mindset, or approach.

• The sales manager is effective in leading, coaching, and growing sales team members and the overall ‘sum of its parts’ performance
• We celebrate wins and goal achievement on a regular basis
• Annual sales plans and goals are in place for each salesperson
• Salespeople are not spending valuable “sales” time doing non-value added tasks that don’t contribute to results
• Sales training related to sharpening the saw on selling skills, process, and effectiveness occurs at least quarterly
• Each salesperson has a dashboard or individual sales plan that is reviewed regularly

Every sales-focused team has room for improvement! If you aren’t implementing all the statements above, or only a few, you may need to adjust your thinking or priorities around sales performance… it may be time to get help.

Over the next couple of months, we’ll provide an in-depth look at key areas of a successful Sales Focused Organization including sales fundamentals, effective sales management, and a high performance sales team. We will also provide a comprehensive checklist outlining specific focus areas toward building a sales focused organization that succeeds and thrives.

Want to get the best out of your sales team? Read the full article on our website!

Call us at 248-468-7400 or fill out our contact form to receive a download of our Sales-Focused Organizational Checklist! Together, we can assess how your company is doing from a sales, messaging, management, and performance standpoint, and determine the best way to help you achieve your goals.

High Performance Sales Team – T.E.A.M.

Together Everyone Achieves More (T.E.A.M.). What goes into building a great, high performing team? 

In our series, we have addressed elements that include sales process, messaging, the conversations salespeople have, and sales management. 

We now turn our attention to a high performance sales team. Critical elements that must come together include people, talent, execution, and effectiveness – all to achieve a desired result.

With a professional sports team, let’s say Ice Hockey, the goals are clear to almost anyone – players, coaches, management, officials and even the fans. The success of a professional Hockey team is influenced by many factors that may include talent, roles, synergy, practice, focus, coaching, leadership, drive, perseverance, mindset, and so on.

Is your sales team really different? Maybe the correct question is ‘should your sales team be any different’? With Hockey, the basics are skate, pass, shoot, score. If we reverse-engineer what winning looks like, a top performing team must win the most games, score the most goals, take the greatest number of shots, and so on. All of these must be well planned, practiced, and executed with micro adjustments made all the way through each minute of each period in a game. The coaching staff will help players see beyond their blind spots and overcome obstacles imposed by the competing team. This is all accomplished with practice sessions, meetings, video reviews, on and off the ice.   

We’ve found that many organizations want results, but when it comes to a high-performance team, gaps in this concept emerge. These gaps include unsuccessful recruiting of sales team members, not being clear about the role and results expected for the position, and not providing the right tools or direction that supports the optimal success of the sales team. While a sales manager can be key to building and sustaining a Performance Sales Team, each team member must have the potential to grow and excel. An effective sales manager will help grow that salesperson and work to release their potential.

Read the full article on our website!

Whether you are satisfied with the effort, focus, and results of your sales team, many people we speak with have been hesitant to act – simply because they don’t know where to begin. If you’re open to a brief call, let us know and we can take the first step together.

Call us at 248-468-7400 or fill out our contact form to receive a download of our Sales-Focused Organizational Checklist! Together, we can assess how your company is doing from a sales, messaging, management, and performance standpoint, and determine the best way to help you achieve your goals.