Month: October 2024

89% of Sales Candidates Accept Job Offers of the First Recruiter Who Contacts Them: How to Leverage This for Winning Top Talent

Posted on by Nick Mann

Here’s the scenario. After extensive (and costly) sales recruiting, you’ve finally pinpointed your dream candidate — someone who checks all the right boxes and who you feel would be the ideal salesperson for your role. But when you give them a call or shoot them an email, you find that they’ve moved on and have accepted a role with another company.

What happened? What went wrong?

More often than not in this situation, the problem is that you weren’t proactive and didn’t offer them the job quickly enough. For this post, I’ll discuss why this can prevent you from winning top talent and how to make sure you don’t fall into this trap in the future.

One Statistic You Absolutely Need to Know

First, try to put yourself in the shoes of an elite salesperson for a second. This person likely has plenty of options and leverage.

If they applied for multiple positions — as many jobseekers do — odds are more than one company is interested in their talent. And it probably won’t be long before someone recognizes what they bring to the table and tries to bring them on board.

Even if your company was the one they were most interested in, they’ll likely accept a comparable position if someone gave them an offer before you did. It’s nothing personal. It’s just a matter of who’s quickest to the punch.

And if the candidate needs to get hired in a hurry, it stands to reason that they would accept the first solid job offer that comes their way. This brings us to the one statistic you absolutely need to know.

“89% of applicants accept job offers faster when a recruiter contacts them.”

Rather than waiting around and leaving someone hanging after you’ve made a hiring decision, it’s crucial that you reach out right away with a formal job offer. Otherwise, you run a significant risk of losing top talent to a competitor.

You don’t need to rapid-fire right into onboarding, but you should let them know that you’ve chosen them for the job and what to expect next.

Two Other Compelling Stats

This makes sense considering that having to wait to see if they get an offer can be incredibly vexing for salespeople. In fact, 57% of people say the most frustrating part of the job search is waiting to see if they got the position after going through the interview process.”

Besides that, “Nearly one-quarter lose interest if they don’t hear back within one week after the initial interview; another 46 percent lose interest if there’s no status update from one-to-two weeks post-interview.”

And how can you blame them? The last thing you want to deal with when your livelihood is on the line is sluggish recruiters who leave you in the dark.

The bottom line is that candidates — especially those with a ton of talent and leverage — don’t want to wait around after an interview to be offered a job. They want it quickly.

Understanding this and adjusting your sales recruiting strategy accordingly is key to winning top talent. With that said, here are some specific ways to ensure you don’t squander golden opportunities.

Make Faster Decisions

A precursor to everything else is hastening your hiring decision-making. By this, I’m referring to avoiding requiring multiple levels of approvals from different team members before pulling the trigger. When this happens, you may have A+ sales candidates slip through your fingers by the time you’re able to get the green light for an offer.

Now I’m not suggesting foolishly rushing and not getting anyone else’s feedback. But it’s important to evaluate how many approvals you need before giving a sales candidate an offer and seeing if you could trim it back to streamline the process.

Maintain Consistent Candidate Communication

Communication throughout the hiring process is important anyway. But it’s especially critical after an interview and a candidate is waiting to find out if they landed the job or not. So you want to be sure that either you or a dedicated team member keeps your final round of candidates posted on the job status.

This starts with developing a sales candidate communication plan (you can learn how to create one here). And if someone reaches out to you to check the status, you should respond within 24 hours max.

Strike Fast With a Job Offer

Once you’re certain that you want to hire a particular candidate, don’t waste any time giving them a formal job offer. As soon as all key stakeholders agree, go ahead and let the candidate know right away so they don’t get lured into another position.

Keep in mind that you don’t need to provide them with ALL of the information right off the bat. This will come in phases during onboarding. But you’ll want to give them the good news that you want to bring them on board and provide them with the basics of what to expect next.

Also, be sure to include the basics like contact info, job details, salary, and benefits for quick reference.

That way they can officially shut down their job search and start preparing to join your sales team.

Winning Top Talent By Proactive Recruiting

Let’s recap. Sales recruiting can be incredibly competitive, and highly talented reps often have multiple companies vying for them. One of the main keys to landing superstar reps is having an efficient recruiting process and ensuring a team member immediately contacts them once they’ve been chosen.

The longer you wait, the greater the chances of them being snatched up by another company. But if you act quickly and maintain close communication along the way, the odds are in your favor that you’ll come out on top.

Want to take your sales recruiting to the next level by eliminating weaknesses and attracting ideal candidates? Take the HireDNA Hiring Readiness Assessment. Using it can improve screening accuracy, help you source candidates faster, reduce time to fill, and more.

Identifying Sales Rep Struggles: How to Recognize and Address Performance Issues

Posted on by Nick Mann

According to Salesforce, “67% of sales reps don’t expect to meet their quota this year, and 84% missed it last year.” Also, 53% of sales pros say it’s harder to sell than a year ago.” While I doubt that the numbers are this high across the board, this data shows how common sales rep struggles are.

And let’s be honest. This is not an easy profession. With quotas to meet, tons of stress, and skeptical customers, most reps have their work cut out.

For this post, I’ll identify what I believe are the biggest sales rep struggles, pointing out how to recognize and swiftly fix them to get your sales team operating at its peak potential.

Poor Product Knowledge

Let’s start from the top. Sometimes the main reason for a rep struggling isn’t due to anything complex or convoluted. Sometimes they simply don’t have proper command of the products they’re selling.

When this is the case, it creates a negative domino effect where they struggle to convey value to leads, demonstrate how your products will make the lives of your leads easier, build trust, and so on.

And it’s easy to see why poor product knowledge can be such an issue, especially when it comes to SaaS. Many SaaS products, for example, have a wide range of solutions and features, and cater to different demographics like solopreneurs, small businesses, and enterprises. Just look at how many popular features HubSpot has.

If you throw a salesperson in head-first without adequate time to learn the ins and outs of your products, understand the greater context, and how the dots connect, their conversion rate is likely to suffer. That’s why offering robust training to ensure new reps not only learn how your products work and their benefits but how they fit into a customer’s business processes.

Also if you offer a wide range of products, it’s usually best to allow new reps to only focus on a few initially and gradually have them branch out over time as their knowledge grows. To learn how salesperson training can have up to 350% ROI, check out this article.

Inefficient Time Management

Here are a few stats I couldn’t believe regarding salesperson time management.

If your sales team is anywhere near these numbers, it’s guaranteed to hurt their performance. Just imagine only spending two hours a day actively selling.

So what’s the solution?

First, I suggest creating a tech stack that features the perfect mix of tools for activities like:

  • Setting appointments – Calendly is great for this
  • Customer relationship management – HubSpot is an excellent choice
  • Task management – I love Trello
  • Time tracking – Toggl Track is great

That alone can make a big difference.

Next, your salespeople must prioritize tasks and focus their attention on 1) actually selling rather than administrative tasks and 2) going after hot leads rather than squandering their time on those that still need nurturing.

There are a ton of lead-scoring platforms out there, but ActiveCampaign is one of my favorites because of its simplicity and user-friendliness.

Also, if you find your team constantly swamped with repetitive administrative tasks, it’s smart to hire someone to handle this part of sales so you can free up your sales reps’ time for more important matters.

Lack of Motivation

Even if you have the most skilled, talented, superstar salespeople, their productivity will likely be minimalized if they lack motivation. And considering 79% of today’s workers are disengaged to some extent, this is an issue you’re almost guaranteed to encounter at some point.

So what leads to a lack of motivation?

Poor compensation and lackluster incentives like rewards and benefits are a big reason. Overlooked achievements where major accomplishments go unnoticed are another. Also, having little to no career development opportunities can cause salespeople to stagnate, as there’s not much of a reason to keep pushing.

While you can’t necessarily expect every rep to give 110% effort every single day, your workforce should be sufficiently motivated. Otherwise, you’ll want to identify the root problem (likely one of the issues I just mentioned) and figure out what you can do to remedy the situation.

For a deep dive into this topic, I suggest reading this article from The Harvard Business Review.

Difficulty Closing Deals

Imagine this. Your marketing team has done an amazing job cultivating high-quality leads — individuals who have expressed a clear need and interest in your product — and served them up on a silver platter for your sales team. But despite being ultra-qualified, the conversion rate is far lower than what it should be.

This can be incredibly frustrating, and if left unchecked, it can suck the life out of your ROI and put a damper on company morale. But what can you do about it?

It starts by understanding some common reasons why reps fail to close deals, such as:

  • They don’t fully understand your product (this goes back to our first point)
  • They’re unable to explain the full value of your product
  • They’re not truly listening to the needs of your leads
  • They’re not skilled at persuading leads to pull the trigger
  • They give up too easily

Of course, there are a ton of other potential reasons for a low conversion rate, but these are good places to start. Once you identify a possible culprit, zero in on what you can do to help your reps improve in that department.

For instance, if they’re unable to convey your UVP, you may want to create a bullet list of the core benefits for each customer persona. Or if they’re not fully listening to your leads, you may want to provide coaching on how to improve active listening.

Identifying and Overcoming Sales Rep Struggles

Even the best of the best salespeople will struggle from time to time. Your job as a team leader is to quickly pinpoint performance issues and help steer your reps back on track.

To streamline the process of identifying and eliminating weaknesses in your sales recruiting, check out the HireDNA Hiring Readiness Assessment.