https://youtu.be/Ad7dVKWCecE
Are you looking to hire your first, or next, sales rep? Hiring a sales rep is an exciting step in growing your business, but it is a process you want to get right the first time.
I know how important it is to your business to hire (or contract) the right sales rep for your growing business.
If you are just starting out, this might be the first time you have been through this process you are probably trying to replace yourself as the primary sales rep in your company. If you already have a sales team, then you know that it can be challenging to get through all the resumes and find a high-quality sales rep in a systematic, reliable way without wasting time and money.
Regardless if it’s your first sales rep or your tenth sales rep, you want the process to go smoothly and you want to hire the right sales rep, the first time.
20 years ago, I got my start in business working for a furniture chain in Minnesota. We had three stores with about $1M in annual sales. During my four years working there, we doubled our annual sales twice, growing our team in the process.
A number of factors contributed to our success, but if you want to be successful in retail, you have to have the right salespeople in place. To grow millions of dollars in sales, you need to attract, screen, interview and hire quite a few sales professionals in the process.
I was the general manager of this organization, so it was my job to build and manage the sales team. The company did not have a hiring process, so as the business began to grow, I had to figure out how we could effectively build a team of high performing sales people.
Now, this was in 1997. This was before Monster.com, Indeed or LinkedIn. When we needed a new employee, we had to post the job in the newspaper, on our own website or simply hang up “help wanted” signs in our retail store windows. There wasn’t a good way to do a targeted outbound search of potential candidates.
Despite the lack of online tools to attract candidates, we still got flooded with resumes. Every time we posted a job, I would have dozens of resumes to go through. It took an enormous amount of time and effort to read through the resumes, hold initial interviews and decide who to hire. Frankly, because I didn’t have a solid process in place, I hired a number of people who simply weren’t a good fit. It was a lot of trial and error.
Fast forward 5 years and I was working in corporate America for America’s third largest employee-owned corporation. The landscape had shifted dramatically. At this point, I was dealing with thousands of employees, hundreds of sales reps and hundreds of millions of dollars in sales in dozens of offices across the country.
When I was working for the furniture business, I was making up to a dozen hiring decisions a year. In my corporate role, I was making dozens of hiring decisions in a single month.
If you want to get good at something, it’s important you get a lot of practice. And that is exactly what I got. Fortunately, I had the support of a Human Resources team that was completely focused on attracting, screening, interviewing, hiring and compensating high quality sales reps.
I learned a ton from this experience and mastered a process that made hiring sales reps, more streamlined, less stressful and most importantly, delivered better results.
Today, I’d like to share with you a resource guide that will guide you through the process as you attract, screen, interview, compensate and hire your next sales rep.
You can download it for free, by clicking the image below!
