Month: October 2022

Simple Ways to Automate Sales Recruiting Without Sacrificing Quality

Posted on by hiredna

On average, it takes sales recruiters 41 days to fill a position. Without some type of strategy in place for streamlining things, the process can be incredibly time-consuming and clog up internal resources. Fortunately, there are several ways to automate sales recruiting that can save you a massive amount of time without sacrificing quality.

Here are some specific techniques I suggest.

Use a Sales Recruiting Platform to Rapidly Fill Your Talent Pipeline

One of the most time-consuming parts of sales recruiting is simply filling your talent pipeline with quality candidates. Between creating job descriptions, finding job boards, posting on job boards, filtering through candidates, and so on, this can quickly eat through your workday and can be especially problematic for smaller businesses that lack a formal recruiting department.

A great way to get around that is to use a technology sales recruiting platform like HireDNA.

With HireDNA, you create an ideal candidate profile based on your specific hiring criteria. Then, using cutting-edge technology, it identifies both active and passive candidates who match that criteria to fill your pipeline. From there, HireDNA screens and assesses candidates to pinpoint the ones that are most likely to succeed and delivers the cream of the crop to your inbox. At that point, you simply choose who you want to interview.

Rather than meticulously moving through the recruiting process like had to be done in the past, HireDNA offers an ultra-streamlined approach that helps you find elite talent, essentially serving it up on a platter for you.

Companies that use it are able to cut their hiring time in half, with 96% of suggested candidates reaching the top of the sales force within their first year.

Send Pre-Screening Questions and Automate Candidate Ranking

Most of today’s applicant tracking systems (ATS) have robust features that can help a great deal with automation. One of which is pre-screening questions where you create a handful of key questions and send them to promising candidates. After a candidate provides answers, they’re automatically scored and ranked based on customized criteria. That way you can quickly take filtering one step further and trim your list of candidates back to the best of the best.

If you currently use an ATS, check to see if it offers this feature, as it can significantly reduce the time you spend looking through resumes.

Automate Candidate Reminders and Status Updates

Keeping candidates in the loop with interview reminders and status updates about where they’re at in the hiring process is important for providing a positive experience. But if you’re doing everything manually like sending email or text updates one by one, it’s can be a huge time drainer. Not to mention it can eat up a ton of “cognitive bandwidth” having to remember who you need to reach out to and when.

Another way to automate sales recruiting is to provide candidates with reminders and status updates with software like Pipefy.

One of the core features of Pipefy is workflow automation where you can set it to automatically send status updates and follow-ups. You can, for example, use email templates for outreach based on different scenarios. Information is pre-populated so that it’s customized for each candidate and the position they’re applying for. And when used at scale, companies have been able to reduce their time-to-hire by up to 80%.

Use One-Way Interviewing

Interviewing candidates is obviously a critical part of the sales recruiting process. But I think we can agree that it’s also one of the most time-consuming. With many interviews easily lasting 30 minutes, this can quickly eat through your day, especially if you’re interviewing several candidates at a time. Besides the actual interview itself, you also have to prep, assess the results, and more.

An absolute godsend for automating this part of sales recruiting is one-way interviewing where candidates record answers to a series of questions for you to look over later on. Not only does this allow you to get the critical answers you need from candidates, it lets you move through the process much quicker, and you can batch your reviews to accelerate things even more.

There are several platforms you can use for one-way interviewing, but one of my personal favorites is Tribepad, which features:

  • “Unlimited multi-media questions
  • A searchable template library
  • A drag-and-drop interview builder
  • Heaps of configuration and branding”

Record Your Training Program

For my final strategy, let me first say that even the best-recorded training program probably won’t be able to match a one-on-one or even a group training program led by a sales manager. And while you may not be able to cover all the intricacies and nuances, a recorded training program can still be highly effective for explaining key points and getting reps up to speed.

It’s just a matter of being realistic about what you can adequately cover in a series of training videos and properly executing. For example, giving new sales reps an overview of how to use your CRM software or project management solution can usually be efficiently done through recorded videos. So can going over scheduling, company culture, expectations, and other topics you would cover in a welcome packet. An added plus is that your reps have a dedicated resource they can reference at any time whenever questions arise.

As for platforms, I find Loom to be one of the best if you just need to record some basic videos.

Automate Sales Recruiting While Maintaining the Utmost Quality

Recruiting a talented team of sales professionals is a necessary precursor to success. But it can also be a big time drainer without the right plan in place. Luckily, technology has been a game changer for sales recruiting, and there are numerous ways to get more done in less time without it compromising the quality of your hires. In fact, it’s often the opposite where brands that intelligently use automation see better results than those that don’t.

To see HireDNA in action, reach out to us today for a free demo.

Onboarding Remote Salespeople vs. In-House Salespeople: Strategies to Win at Each

Posted on by hiredna

A growing number of today’s sales companies have a mix of both in-house and remote salespeople. In fact, recent data from HubSpot found that 46% of sales companies now implement a hybrid model. While there will certainly be some overlap between onboarding remote salespeople and in-house salespeople, each demands its own unique strategies.

With that said, here’s how to handle each.

Onboarding Remote Salespeople

Convert Traditional Onboarding Materials into a Digital Format

The first order of business for sales leaders making the shift to remote onboarding is to take the traditional onboarding materials you’ve been using over the years and make them easily accessible for remote reps. This may sound obvious, but it’s one of the biggest stumbling blocks among sales trainers just getting their feet wet. After all, if there’s a major gulf between the materials your remote salespeople access and what your regular in-house reps access, it’s guaranteed to create friction. That’s why you want to ensure there’s complete homogeneity between the two.

So how exactly do you go about this?

I suggest taking inventory of essential onboarding materials, such as your employee handbook, company policies, company culture outline, and so on, and creating a digital packet that’s accessible through an online portal. This is a great starting point and will provide a cornerstone of online resources for all your remote reps to help them get their bearings.

Create a Series of Onboarding Videos

One of the biggest barriers to successfully onboarding remote salespeople is the lack of personal touch they don’t get like they would with face-to-face, in-person training. While it’s impossible to completely replicate the in-house experience, you can get pretty close by creating a series of onboarding videos. And when done correctly with iterations over time, this can help you create a consistent, repeatable process that adds the personal touch with minimal time expenditure.

Fortunately, this is easy to do with a platform like Bitable.

With it, you can create high-quality, professional videos using pre-made templates. Bitable lets you record training videos, screen-capture videos, and animated training videos with ease. That way, you can build a series of onboarding videos in sequential order that fluidly moves remote salespeople through the process step-by-step. And if they ever need to reference a particular topic, they can always go back and review it.

Build a Tech Stack

Needless to say, tech plays an integral role in a remote salesperson’s day-to-day activities. So right out of the gate, you’ll want to supply each rep with a comprehensive tech stack that can be accessed from a single digital location, such as an online portal. This may include communication tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams, project management tools like Trello and Asana, and CRM tools like HubSpot and Pipedrive.

Here’s a detailed example of what a tech stack may look like for inbound sales teams.

The key is to provide a standardized tech stack to create a uniform digital onboarding experience and also provide the requisite training on each to reduce the learning curve (something that can be done through online training videos as I just mentioned).

Onboarding In-house Salespeople

Use a Milestone-Based Process

One of the biggest advantages to onboarding in-house salespeople the “old school” way is that you’re heavily involved with their development and can keep close tabs on their progress. To streamline in-house onboarding and help new reps realize their full potential in the quickest amount of time, I suggest using a milestone-based process.

Here’s what top corporate sales training company The Brooks Group has to say about it.

“A formal, milestone-based onboarding process provides the framework to give reps everything they need to succeed within your sales organization within an appropriate time frame. A successful onboarding process:

  • Sets time-based goals for content and skills mastery
  • Establishes expectations for new rep participation in the process
  • Guides both the representative and the manager through the process
  • Includes clear checkpoints to measure progress”

While you’ll want to use a milestone-based process to a certain degree when onboarding remote salespeople as well, you’ll really want to emphasize it when onboarding in-house reps for the simple fact that it’s so easy to track everything firsthand. Also, it helps standardize the process to ensure everyone is on the same page and prevent disparities from hurting your overall sales system.

Give New In-house Reps a Mentor

In a previous post, I mentioned that it typically takes around nine months for a new rep to become competent to perform and 15 months to become a top performer.

But I also mentioned that a strong sales onboarding process can reduce this time by as much as half. One of the best ways to do that is to assign a mentor to each salesperson — someone who personally oversees their development and primes them for success.

Just like you want to use tech to your advantage to aid in onboarding remote salespeople, you’ll want to use the face-to-face nature of in-house onboarding to your advantage here. By assigning each new rep their own mentor who they can shadow, ask questions, and turn to for support, it naturally creates a framework that accelerates progress. Not to mention it helps create a more close-knit culture that benefits everyone.

For a detailed overview of sales mentorship and guidance on how to set up a formal program, I suggest reading this article from HubSpot.

Winning at Both Types of Salesperson Onboarding

With close to half of today’s sales companies having a mix of remote and in-house salespeople, it’s incredibly important to offer effective onboarding for both. Again, this largely boils down to capitalizing on the opportunities of each, and implementing the specific strategies mentioned above should help you do just that.

And if you’re looking to fill your talent pipeline with elite salespeople in your industry, check out HireDNA. It can help you find both sales candidates and sales leaders, with 92% of recommended candidates becoming top performers within one year.