Month: October 2019

Improve Your Sales Hiring Strategy In 5 Easy Steps

Posted on by hiredna

Many organizations are heavily dependent on their sales team to reach their customers and grow. However, the sales industry is symbolized by a high turnover rate of 25%. Essentially, this means that organizations are often faced with a shortage of good salespeople that consistently produce. To help you attract and retain higher quality sales hires, here are some tips to improve your sales hiring strategy.

HireDNA can help you identify, hire, and train the perfect candidates for your sales team. Speak with a sales recruiting expert today.

5 Easy Steps To Enhance Your Hiring Strategy

In addition to solving the high turnover problem, improving your sales hiring strategy can also allow you to hire candidates who are a better fit for your organizational culture, product, and sales environment. Here are three ways to enhance your strategy:

Draft A Detailed Candidate Profile & Job Description

The first step to a high-quality hire is to provide a clearly defined candidate profile and job description that outlines the tasks and level of performance you expect. Specifically, your candidate profile and description should include the job-centric skills and characteristics that are required to excel in this role. You can also include the responsibilities that will be levied upon the new hire. For instance, will they be spending more time prospecting or managing key accounts?

The higher the level of detail in your job criteria, the better your chances of attracting a best-fit candidate. And here’s a tip: to create a tailored fit candidate profile and job description, conduct an evaluation of your top performers to identify the perfect skills and qualities that are most important to succeed in their position.

Use a Predictive Hiring Assessment

So, you’ve received a number of resumes and applicants. How can you screen them faster to find the perfect candidate for the job? Consider using a predictive hiring assessment like the Objective Management Group (OMG) Sales Candidate Assessment through HireDNA.

With a science-backed assessment, you can find the right candidate with far greater accuracy than relying on impressions or instinct. In fact, 92% of candidates who are recommended by the OMG Sales Candidate Assessment exceed expectations in the first year! At HireDNA, we can help you to create a custom assessment based on your hiring criteria and unique sales environment. Go beyond personality traits to assess candidates’ true sales DNA and potential in the role.

Learn more about our Predictive Hiring Assessments.   

Strengthen Your Interviews

In combination with a predictive sales hiring assessment, situational interview questions can be a powerful tool to help you assess how a candidate might perform on the job. These questions pose hypothetical situations that candidates must answer, requiring them to think on their feet and eliminating any reliance on cookie-cutter, prepared answers.

Cast A Wider Net

While conventional methods like posting on different job boards might have worked in the past, high-quality candidates no longer depend on such platforms.

In other words, posting on common forums might result in a high number of applicants, but there is no guarantee on the quality of the resumes that will flood your inbox. Here are a few of the leading job posting channels used by top sales recruiters today:

  • Industry-Specific Job Boards. Every industry has specific job boards. For instance, the job posting site ‘MedReps.com’ caters to candidates who are interested in working in the pharmaceutical industry. By posting in such targeted job boards, you are likely to come across a greater pool of best-fit candidates.
  • LinkedIn. LinkedIn is one of the most popular business-related sites in the world, amassing an impressive 610 million followers. With 92% of Fortune 500 companies also active on the forum, you can expect to find high-quality sales professionals here. Despite this, posting on LinkedIn is usually time-consuming and not always feasible for businesses that experience a high turnover rate.
  • Referrals. Ask your team to refer people who fit your job description—and consider setting up an incentive program for successful referrals. As this puts their reputation on the line, people are likely to only refer candidates who are qualified and hardworking. This is the reason why referrals continue to result in highly desirable hires. In fact, 50% of referrals are likely to stay at a job for three years—vs 14% of employees hired from a job board.
  • Proactive sourcing. There’s a difference between sitting back and waiting for resumes to come in versus proactively sourcing candidates. At HireDNA, more than 90% of our hires are proactively sourced. We find this to be the best method, because most top sales performers are not active candidates—they’re not actively searching job boards for opportunities. But, if approached with a great opportunity with good incentives, many great candidates will likely consider making a move.

Promote Yourself As A Preferable Employer

Similar to how consumers profile a brand before converting, candidates evaluate employers before choosing to join the organization. High-end salespeople are likely to have multiple offers, which means that they can take their time to research and select the best option and it’s not always about money.

This is why it’s incredibly important to invest in your ‘employer brand’ to ensure your company is positioned as a market leader. Showcase major clients on your website, highlight your sales reps, and make sure to emphasize your resourcefulness and culture to gain the attention of the top sales talent in your niche.

To further up the ante, engage with prospective candidates from the first point of contact (which is usually your website). Feel free to highlight positive testimonials, share success stories, and even include employee success stories to add weight to your claims. By showcasing your achievements, you are appealing to ambitious candidates who want to work with reputable organizations that can help take their careers to the next level.

Create A Highly Successful Sales Team

By optimizing your recruiting strategy, you can create a successful team of high performing sales reps. At HireDNA, our industry-leading, science-backed recruiting process can help you create a robust sales team primed for performance.

Why Choose Us?

  • We have an 80% successful placement rate
  • 92% of our hired candidates reach the top half of the sales force within 12 months
  • With innovative training tools, we help new hires onboard and ramp-up in 50% less time
  • Candidates hired via HireDNA have a 79% retention rate

Do you want to build a successful sales team? Contact Us

Top Inside Sales Training Ideas For Results

Posted on by hiredna

The modern business world is an ever-changing environment with continuous shifts in buyer behavior propelled by technological advances. This presents a challenge for even the most successful salespeople. To keep up, it’s essential to stay up to date on the latest selling practices and be open to learning new strategies. Here are some top inside sales training ideas to help you keep your team performing at a high-level.

HireDNA provides sales evaluations and training to Identify reps’ learning needs and empower them to sell effectively. Talk to an expert today.

Sales Rep Training Strategies

The modern sales environment is entirely different from what the industry looked like a decade ago. The dynamic nature of modern-day sales requires salespeople to be at the forefront of any development that can help them assess their prospects better and deliver a more customized experience.

This can only be achieved by implementing a thorough training program designed to address their specific strengths and weaknesses. Here are a few training tips that can help improve your sales team:

Start With A Sales Force Evaluation

To get the most value from your sales training program, you need to identify the areas that will be the most beneficial to target. A comprehensive sales force evaluation is essential to pinpoint performance gaps and limitations in your people, processes, systems, and management. With this knowledge, you can then build a custom training program to address those unique needs and your specific growth objectives.

HireDNA uses the Objective Management Group (OMG) Sales Effectiveness And Improvement Analysis (SEIA) for sales assessment, which has been used to evaluate over 1 million sales people. Results have included:

  • 33% boost in sales productivity
  • 33% more sales opportunities
  • 25% top-line revenue growth

Learn more about our sales force evaluations.

Modernize Your Training Methods

Your sales reps are busy people. When they are not glued to their phones talking to clients, they are prospecting leads, running demos and closing deals. Expecting them to take time out for mundane classroom training sessions will adversely affect their schedule and more importantly, their productivity. Coupled with how ineffective conventional training methods are, there is a need to modernize your approach to training and upgrade to an eLearning system.

There are various advantages to this. For one, eLearning has been proven to increase retention rates by as much as 60%. It also allows your team to consume training content according to their own schedule. Add in the ability to check-in on their progress, and eLearning emerges as the best way to train your salespeople.

At HireDNA, we offer clients access to the Rapid Learning Institute Micro-Learning Platform, which includes a digital library with over 100 modules focused on 10 key consultative selling strategies combined with real-world application,  role play, quizzes, and more. Learn more.

Focus On Your Target Audience

Most organizations design their training programs to enhance a salesperson’s selling skills instead of helping them develop a deeper understanding of your target audience and buyer journey. While improving individual skills is important, understanding prospects’ pain points, triggers, and how your product can help them is absolutely essential to closing more deals.

This is a crucial component of your sales strategy, as buyers are more likely to convert when their pain points are addressed. In fact, a Deloitte study discovered that 38% of consumers showed an instant desire to buy products that were personalized to address their issues, instead of generic sales pitches.

When designing your training programs, outline the key business challenges and highlight successful strategies for engaging with buyers. This will allow your sales reps to think like your buyer and help them to optimize their strategies.

Add Training Incentives

Adding an incentive is a great way to make sure your sales reps complete their training modules and make an effort to learn and apply new concepts. According to Harvard Business Review, incentives positively affect an employee’s decision to work harder in order to obtain an individual reward.

Increased concentration during training will not only help them become better, but by rewarding them with incentives, you will set a precedent for every sales rep to take their training seriously.

Emphasize On Demo Training

One key area that many sales reps need training on is the product demonstration stage. It’s important to tailor your entire presentation to fit the prospect’s business model and organizational needs, effectively highlighting your product as the solution to the obstacles they face.

Prepare your training sessions with success stories from outsiders, provide template slide decks to help them get started, and show them sample demos from successful sales reps.

After a few training sessions, you can even organize a test where you provide reps with a buyer profile and let them create a custom demo. This will give you a clear idea of how much they have picked up, while also allowing you to tweak your training strategy as needed.

Train Your Sales Reps For Increased Efficiency

Conventional training methods are ineffective and time-consuming. That’s where HireDNA comes in. We provide training content that is customized according to individual skill gaps for maximum increase in your reps’ strengths and productivity. Training is delivered through a proven micro-learning structure platform to help ensure your sales reps retain what they learn.

With implementation guides, personalized action plans, quizzes, analytics, and more, HireDNA provides comprehensive training programs that can help increase the quality of your sales team.

Why Choose Us?

  • Our training methods result in 50% faster new hire ramp-up
  • By identifying and rectifying skills gap, we can help you increase top-line revenue by as much as 25%
  • Once equipped with the right skills, HireDNA trained reps find more sales opportunities by as much as 33%

Are you ready to train your sales team for enhanced productivity?

CONTACT US

6 Steps to Managing Underperforming Sales Reps

Posted on by hiredna

It’s not uncommon for sales managers to hit a wall with some reps on their team. Underperforming salespeople present a dilemma for sales managers: terminating a sales rep can be costly, but an underperforming rep can lead to lost opportunities and low profitability. Before making the final call, however, try these tips for managing underperforming sales reps. We’ll walk you through strategies that can help you improve performance to get them back on track.

Identify new training strategies and motivators that drive your sales reps to perform at the highest levels. Speak with a HireDNA sales recruiting and training expert.

First, Identify the Problem

Even underperforming sales reps know when they are not meeting the set goals or expectations. They can read through the Key performance indicators (KPIs) and see where they are lacking. Your job as the sales manager, however, is to identify the root cause of the problem and take action to help them boost their performance.

Get to the root cause by asking them to explain their performance:

  • Why are they lacking in their set KPIs?
  • What are the reasons behind the gradual downfall in their performance?
  • Are the problems that they face relating to their personal life, the team, or the organization?
  • What tools, resources, and support do they feel they need to improve?

Get Organized

Once you have the issues outlined, segment them on the basis of whether they are something you can help them with (organizational issues) or something they need to work on themselves (personal issues).

As their manager, try to make the workplace as accommodating as it can be. Even if they are facing personal issues, try to give them some time off to tackle it better. By showing that you care, you can help motivate them to take control of their life and career. Sometimes, an open, candid conversation can be just the inspiration they need to turn their performance around.

Identify key areas of improvement and train your underperforming sales reps for success with HireDNA. Learn more.

Provide Coaching & Guidance

Often, poor performance stems from the simple reason of not knowing what to do and how to do it. Chances are, your underperforming sales rep lacks guidance on what you expect of them and how to effectively execute. You can try to improve their performance by showing them how to do what you expect of them, instead of reprimanding them.

Sales managers play a key role in developing salespeople. Coaching involves empowering your reps to identify issues on their own and determine appropriate solutions. The impact of this is clear: according to a study by CSO Insights, 95% of reps met their quota when a sales manager’s coaching skills exceeded expectations. Work closely with your preps, and provide personalized coaching and guidance, especially to anyone who may be underperforming.

Offer Training

Regular training can benefit your entire sales team, not just underperforming reps. At HireDNA, we can help you identify performance gaps and offer targeted training modules to help you ramp your team up for success.

We use Rapid Learning Institutes’ (RLI) Micro-Learning Platform, which offers a number of benefits:

  • 5-7 minute training videos
  • 100 modules in 10 key areas
  • Customizable content based on individual skill gaps
  • Role play, quizzes, and real-world guides
  • Usage reports and real-time analytics

Contact us for more information on our sales training programs.

Set & Keep Clear Expectations

An important step in managing underperforming sales reps is to communicate your expectations loud and clear. They should know exactly what you require of them and how much effort they need to put in to meet their benchmarks.

This should not be your usual meeting, where you assign them annual quotas, etc. Instead, a task by task, or metric by metric breakdown of what you expect from an underperforming salesperson is necessary.

If their poor performance stems from their lack of effort in a certain activity (number of calls, presentations, proposals, etc.), consider setting target goals for those specific actions. This will provide them with something to start off with, and you can formulate an action plan to gradually increase their productivity over time.

Provide Regular Feedback

The first step to addressing a problem is acknowledging that there is a problem. Your salespeople need to know whether or not you are happy with their performance.

All too often, sales managers only identify performance gaps when they are forced into conducting a performance review. A lack of formal and informal feedback, however, fosters a culture of non-accountability that leads to performance gaps in your sales team. Without regular feedback, underperforming salespeople will likely adopt a habit of doing things in a non-productive way. Consider establishing a weekly or monthly check-in where you can acknowledge your team and individual successes and failures.

Build a Productive Sales Team with HireDNA

A highly efficient and productive sales team is a cornerstone of organizational success. Organizations need to motivate and manage all sales reps carefully to continue to strive for optimum performance.

At HireDNA, we bring over 10 years of experience to help you recruit, train, and retain your salespeople. Let us help you cultivate a high-performance sales culture that helps your team grow.

Why Choose Us?

  • Our evaluations have increased sales productivity by as much as 33%
  • Our training has helped clients to identify 33% more sales opportunities
  • Our clients have grown top line revenue by 25%

Ready to take your sales performance to the next level?

Contact Us