Author: hiredna

How To Improve B2B Cold Calling Success Rates

Posted on by hiredna

Cold calling has been one of the major selling tactics over the years, requiring reps to approach complete strangers and win them over through excellent interpersonal skills that persuade the prospect to covert. Cold calling can be very challenging, but there are some tactics that could help improve your success. Here are some thoughts on how to improve B2B cold calling success rates.

At HireDNA, our sales evaluation and training systems are the results of 20 years of experience. Get in touch to learn more about how we can help to improve your sales team. Talk to an HireDNA expert.

How to Improve Cold Calling Success Rates

If done effectively, cold calling can yield great success. Take the technological giant Uber for example. Did you know what laid down the foundation of Uber and ultimately the entire trend of the sharing economy? A cold call.

According to founder, Travis Kalanick, he dialed a number of people he found on Google when searching for ‘San Francisco chauffeur’ out of which three replied. The rest, as they say, is history.

With so many organizations deriving great returns from their cold calling strategy, if it’s not working for you, chances are that you may need to tweak your strategy. Don’t worry! This article will offer tips that can help enhance your cold calling success:

Improve The Quality Of Your Data

62% of organizations rely on prospect data that can be inaccurate or incomplete by as much as 40%. Not only does this result in wasted effort, it also costs your business valuable resources. According to a report by Harvard Business Review, ‘bad’ data costs businesses more than $3 trillion each year in the United States alone.

As consumers become increasingly aware of sales tactics, they tend to only respond to products and services that are tailored according to their needs. If your sales reps are reaching out to prospects based on incorrect, inaccurate, or incomplete data, you are bound to get underwhelming results.

Consider investing in solutions like SalesIntel that allow you to analyze your database and identify any lacking information that adversely affects your quality. Additionally, optimize your prospect data collection strategy. Adding relevant questions to your forms and allowing prospects to express their answers in detail can significantly improve the quality of your data.

Talk Less, Ask More

The art of converting prospects through cold calls is heavily dependent on what you do after the prospect picks up. You can have the most suitable product that can solve your consumer’s problems, but if you don’t have the right tone, chances are you might not close the deal.

The number of questions and the relevancy of your posed questions also play a big part. An extensive survey that analyzed 519,000 cold calls found a directly proportional relationship between the number of questions posed by the sales rep and the percentage of closed deals. To put it simply, it was found that asking 11-14 questions over the course of your call significantly increases the chances of your success.

However, be careful to not overdo it. Sales reps who asked 15+ questions only fared marginally better than sales reps that asked 7-10 questions.

HireDNA offers advanced training tools and customized content-based training methods to enhance your sales performance. Learn More.

Take Rejection As A Learning Opportunity

Regardless of how much value your product can add to your prospect’s business, the fact remains that cold calls often result in rejection. And over time, rejections can become demoralizing. The hallmark of a successful sales representative, however, is their ability to take these things as part of the business and continue to tweak their sales strategy to counter such rejections.

If you are giving up too easily, then cold calling will never bear fruit. You need to be motivated to pick up the phone with a defined purpose every time. Whenever a prospect hangs up on you, ask yourself, would it be any different if you hadn’t tried calling them?

Focus on the key takeaway: why did they hang up? Did your opening statement fail to catch their attention? Did you not address their pain points adequately? By learning from such challenges, you can quickly turn such prospects into paying consumers.

Explore our blog on How to Motivate Your Sales Team When Sales are Down for strategies to inspire your team even in the face of defeat.

Hire Top Talent

Beyond training your existing reps, bringing in highly skilled sales reps can be a quick and easy way to improve your team’s overall B2B cold call success rate. When you hire top talent, they will often have a track record of success. If cold calling is a priority for your business, be sure to make that known in the hiring process, and consider including interview questions or posing scenarios centered around cold calling when vetting candidates.

HireDNA predictive sales candidate assessments allow you to predict success before hiring with proven data and science, not impressions and instincts. Learn more.

Train Your Sales Reps For Unprecedented Success

Cold calling is far from dead. But many organizations need to work on their strategies to enhance their effectiveness. That’s where HireDNA comes in.

We offer sales performance evaluations to uncover skills gaps in your team, and we deliver advanced training through a customizable cloud-based learning platform to improve performance. Not only do we customize our learning offerings according to the skill gaps found in each individual salesperson, but our interactive approach ensures your team absorbs every bit of it with quizzes, role play scenarios, guides, and action plans.

Get in touch to learn more about our sales recruiting, evaluation, and training offerings. Create your winning sales team today!

CONTACT US

Strategies To Improve Your Sales Onboarding Process

Posted on by hiredna

Modern sales organizations are always in the process of hiring, whether you need to replace team members or increase sales capacity. That’s why an effective sales onboarding process is crucial. The success of your team comes down to how quickly your new hires can pick up the necessary skills and become a productive part of your sales team.

With industry reports stating that the average new hire can take as long as nine months to ramp up, sales managers are always searching for strategies to improve their onboarding process and reduce training costs. Consider these tips!

HireDNA can help you identify training needs and ramp up your new hires more effectively. Talk to an expert.

4 Strategies To Improve Your Onboarding Process

As employee turnover rises, companies face the pressure to speed up their sales hiring and training process to maintain their revenue. According to a CSO Insight survey, 45% of sales leaders place reduction of the sales onboarding time as their topmost priority.

Here are four proven strategies to improve your sales onboarding process:

Invest In A Comprehensive Training Process

Onboarding isn’t something that can be completed within a week. Depending on your niche and business complexity, it may take several months before a new sales rep is ready to take on new clients alone.

By creating a comprehensive training program with daily, weekly and monthly checklists, organizations can remove the guesswork from the onboarding process, giving every sales manager a precise idea of how to ramp up a new hire.

As you improvise with each hire, you will gradually formulate an exhaustive training process that allows new salespeople to integrate with your organization seamlessly. This includes everything from incorporating them within your workplace culture to educating them about your products and finally helping them to understand your target audience.

This training process can be used for both new hires and existing salespeople. HireDNA can help you identify and resolve weaknesses and skill gaps limiting your sales results, then deliver comprehensive training to close those gaps. Learn more.

Modernize Your Communication Channels

Traditional onboarding tactics made frequent use of charts, books and other items that have been duly replaced by our smartphones and laptops. As managers continue to interact with an increasing number of millennials sales reps, the onboarding training channels should evolve to maintain a process that is effective and efficient.

Make use of explainer videos, online training modules and interactive case scenarios that allow sales reps to apply what they have learned in real-life settings. Additionally, organizations can provide relevant product guides and descriptions to new sales reps during their training period. This increases their interest, resulting in higher retention and an effective training process.

At HireDNA, we use Rapid Learning Institutes’ (RLI) Micro-Learning Platform , which features a library of training videos, modules, role play scenarios, quizzes and more—all of which can be customized to meet your unique training needs. Learn how we can help you reduce onboarding time by 50%! Learn more.

Enforce ‘Shadowing’ As A Focal Training Process

While newer communication channels are a must-have in any sales organization, they don’t negate the importance of some evergreen training methods, such as shadowing.

Consider encouraging new hires to shadow veteran salespeople as they go about their usual routine—prioritizing prospects, conducting customer outreach, giving demos, etc. This allows the new hire to pick up vital traits, and is a more hands-on way to introduce them to the company culture and related procedures.

The ideal mentor should be an experienced salesperson who has the capacity to teach the skills required to make it to the top level while also possessing the temperament to answer any questions the new hire may have. Organizations need to identify the right mentors as well as develop the right training regimen to optimize this technique even further.

Don’t Rush Your Training Process

Impending team quotas and organizational pressure can get to the best of sales managers, resulting in new hires being rushed to their workstations before going through the entire training process.

While you may be recruiting experienced sales professionals with a history of achieving their quotas, you must understand their prior experience is of a different workplace culture, dealing in different products or maybe a different industry altogether.

To become a valuable member of your organization, every new sales hire needs to receive adequate, personalized training that can allow them to integrate with your organization’s sales process. While rushing sales reps through the hiring process may look like a beneficial step in the short run, the long-term implications can be unsatisfied team members who might not want to continue. This is why it is important to allow sales reps to complete their training in due time.

Train Your Sales Reps More Effectively With HireDNA

As sales managers continue to ramp up new hires, they face challenges that hinder sales reps from learning effectively before being moved on to the next phase. At HireDNA, we utilize modern strategies and innovative tools to cut down on your training time by half.

Leverage a modern cloud-based micro-learning platform that provides custom mapped training content tailored to the skill gaps for each individual sales representative. With interactive learning, quizzes and real-world simulations and more, we make sure your new hires are ready to perform in no time.

Why Choose Us?

  • Employees ramped up by HireDNA provide 33% more sales opportunities
  • Our proven, data-backed methods increase top-line revenue by 25%
  • Our innovative techniques cut down the training period by up to 50%

CONTACT US

Top Reasons to Hire Millennials in Sales

Posted on by hiredna

You’re likely always on the lookout for exceptional salespeople to join your team. Inevitably, you will find yourself reading a lot of resumes from new graduates. There is a stereotype, however, that millennials are apathetic, entitled, and lacking drive. Not only is this stereotype ill-founded, but if believed, it can deprive you of the most ideal candidates that your organization needs. In this post, let’s take a look at some of the top reasons to hire millennials for sales.

At HireDNA, our sales recruiting experts can help you find, hire, and train the perfect sales candidates for your team. Contact Us.

Millennials Are The Most Dominant Demographic

According to PEW Research, millennials make up 35% of the workforce, which is more than Boomers (25%) and Gen Xers (33%).

In other words, when you begin headhunting for a valuable addition to your organization, there is a 35% chance that you will run into a millennial. Considering they meet your requirements, are you willing to let them go just because they were born in a certain era? With an Ernst & Young study predicting that millennials will constitute about 75% of the workforce by 2025, your team would be better prepared for that future if you start integrating millennials as core members of your team as soon as possible.

Technically Savvy

Millennials have grown up with computers and smartphones. They are quick to learn and adapt to new sales technologies, which can be very valuable in the workforce. Many millennials also have very high social selling skills, which could be a result of having to learn varying online communication methods.

Highly Purpose-Driven

Millennials successfully navigated through the post 9/11 economic slump, the 2008 stock market crash, and other major incidents due to their persistence and dedication. They are driven by their purpose, which in a salesperson’s case, would be providing clients with the best possible solution and closing a high number of deals every month.

As such, many millennials are focused on making an impact. This drive has seen them put off marriage and children longer than any of the previous generations.

Thanks to our data-backed recruiting process, candidates recommended by HireDNA have an 80% placement success rate. Learn more.

No Need for Micromanagement

Millennials don’t like being chased around by managers and being micromanaged every step of the way. As a sales manager, you probably don’t like to run around employees and bind them to hard and fast rules, either. And so, hiring employees from this generation might be the best option for you.

Remember, the millennial generation is keen on learning and tailoring their ways in the face of new challenges. Ready to adapt in the face of changing consumer patterns, millennials can prove to be a real asset.

They Appreciate Feedback

Ever had a sales representative who took feedback way too personally? As a sales manager, your job is to correct where they are wrong and provide constant advice on how to manage the challenges they face when dealing with customers.

Even though some salespeople do not take constructive criticism in the right way, it is a crucial part of becoming a high performing employee. When dealing with millennials, you are less likely to see such behavior.

According to a Deloitte study of the five most important factors when evaluating jobs, millennials view the potential of professional development and training programs as one of the top factors they value. Because of this drive, millennials may be more open to criticism if they believe that correcting their behavior can help them to progress within the organization.

How to Recruit Millennials

To attract millennials to your organization, you need to focus on what matters most to them:

  • Impact. How can you present the work that your organization is doing as meaningful and impactful?
  • Work-life balance and flexibility. Is there a possibility to work from home? Are salespeople tied to their desks all day?
  • Collaborative work environments. How does your team work together? How will new hires be able to contribute?
  • Continuous learning opportunities. What opportunities are available through your organization for continued improvement?
  • Clear career paths. Millennials want to be rewarded for their hard work. They want to see a clear progression, or they may lose motivation.

With a science-backed predictive hiring assessment, you can find the right candidate with far greater accuracy than relying on impressions or instinct. 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.   

Create A Successful Sales Team

At HireDNA, we can help you recruit the perfect candidates for your sales team. Let us help you grow your organization with the right candidates for the right roles, backed by proven data and science.

Why Choose Us?

  • 20 years’ worth of hiring experience
  • 8m candidates assessed
  • 50% faster new hire ramp-up
  • 70% candidate retention

Are you ready to hire top quality salespeople for your organization?

CONTACT US

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

Essential Sales Manager Skills

Posted on by hiredna

Sales managers are responsible for your team and its productivity. They’re required to motivate reps on an individual and team level, manage sales reporting, recruit, train, and more. A good sales manager needs to be more than just an excellent closer. Here are some essential sales manager skills to look for in the best candidates.

Do you need help finding the right sales talent? With HireDNA’s science-based system, we have achieved an 80% placement success rate. For further information contact our sales recruiting experts today.

Top Qualities Of An Effective Sales Manager

The three hallmarks of a good leader are their ability to inspire innovation, incentivize results, and build strong communication channels within the team. Simply put, a good sales manager is often judged through the performance of their team, rather than through their personal capacity to produce individual results.

Good sales managers achieve team objectives by streamlining sales cycles and setting motivating, yet realistic goals. They should be able to create a sense of purpose in their salespeople, encouraging them to see sales as alleviating a customer’s pain points rather than just reaching their targets.

Leadership requires keeping an eye out for improvement opportunities to help other sales reps meet requirements and quotas more efficiently. These can include providing administrative support, upgrading the CRM for more actionable data, re-assigning or mixing up tasks to promote competition, and more.

Training, Coaching & Mentoring

According to a study by Ohio University, 65% of sales reps under the best 25% sales managers were hitting their individual quotas. And, according to 74% of industry leaders, sales training and mentoring is the most important roles managers play.

This indicates the importance of having a skilled, knowledgeable manager in place who can pass on their know-how through training, coaching, and mentoring. With the acumen to identify struggling reps and recognize challenging situations, managers should be ready to step in and help wherever needed.

These questions are a good starting point when evaluating a sales team:

  • Are there any situations that team members find challenging?
  • Are there any new hires that might require assistance adjusting to the company’s sales cycle?
  • Are there any pre-existing employees that are having a bad quarter?
  • Can my personal experience in certain situations be used to train such individuals?

At HireDNA, we can help you evaluate your team and provide the training to help you be more productive than ever. Our innovative sales training strategies can help you shorten your training time by 50% for faster and more effective coaching!

Performance Evaluation & Management

According to Salesforce, the majority of a sales manager’s time—around 32%—is spent managing people. But what exactly is performance management?

While the implementation of the task may vary, performance management is the process of analyzing quarterly sales targets, identifying low-performing reps, and strategizing ways to deal with challenges. It is, at times, confused with performance evaluation—but while the latter involves productivity appraisals, managing involves a more holistic approach that includes evaluations plus:

  • Sales data analysis
  • Identifying key performance issues
  • Reporting to upper management

Great sales managers understand that unchecked issues can lead to a low morale and missed targets, thereby decreasing the efficiency of the entire team. They also have the skill and the drive to take action to resolve these issues.

Ability To Identify & Build A Talented Sales Team

While most sales managers usually work with an already existing team, they may be tasked with recruiting new sales reps from time to time. But even good managers can find the recruiting process daunting.

An inability to scout the right talent for your team could potentially damage your sales capabilities and make it difficult to meet targets. Therefore, it’s important for sales managers to systemically identify the correct candidates, recognize hiring mistakes and build a strong sales team—or they should know when it’s best to seek help from a professional recruiter.

Are you looking to hire a sales manager? Join us for a live webinar on October 17th at 11 AM to learn the science behind the OMG Sales Candidate assessment and how it accurately evaluates sales management skills and predicts success. Join us!

Build A Productive Sales Team

HireDNA helps managers build high-performing sales teams, cutting down on hiring mistakes that can be costly in the long run. For the last decade, our data-driven, results-oriented insights, combined with our science-based methods, have ensured that our clients find the right salespeople for the job. Let us help you grow your team for success.

Why Choose Us?

  • We help our clients ramp up new hires with 50% faster training
  • Our training and onboarding strategies increase candidate retention by 79%
  • We help you eliminate hiring mistakes by 96%
  • We have an 80% job placement success rate

Whether you’re a sales manager looking for strong reps to join your team or you need to hire a top sales manager, we can help you find and land the best candidates.

CONTACT US

How To Set Measurable Sales Goals & Objectives

Posted on by hiredna

The biggest mistake that sales managers make when setting goals is focusing entirely on numbers. Sure, the sales force is judged on its ability to increase revenue and foster financial growth—but you need a solid roadmap to get there. Here’s a quick guide on how to set measurable sales goals and objectives to give your team a roadmap for success.

Our industry-leading sales recruiting, evaluation, and training process can reveal all the obstacles to your sales team’s success. Speak with a HireDNA sales recruiting and training expert today.

Break Up Annual Goals Into Monthly Goals

When setting targets and objectives for your team, it’s important to specify the big picture for the annual term, but it’s even more important to break that bigger picture into more actionable monthly or quarterly goals that can seem more manageable. Breaking down an intimidating figure into convenient installments can help alleviate stress for your team while helping to better ensure you are on track throughout the year.

You can calculate your monthly departmental goals by working back from the annual target set forth by your company. You can narrow these goals down even further by calculating how much your team and each individual rep needs to sell to meet that goal.

When setting these monthly goals, one important aspect is to factor in seasonal and staffing fluctuations. For instance, if you are planning to hire four new salespeople for your company in the last quarter, meeting an aggressive goal in Q4 may be unrealistic, as you will not have trained employees. One way to counter this is to ensure that you set a higher-than-average goal for the 3rd quarter (or for the first three quarters).

Set Specific Activity-Based Goals

A study by Harvard University found that setting specific targets can increase your performance by as much as 30%. But how can you do this as a sales manager? Let’s look at an example:

Assume one sales rep needs to close at least $5,000 worth of deals to meet your monthly target. Start by analyzing how the salesperson performs throughout the entire sales funnel (emails, calls, demos, meetings, etc.)

Assume that their history suggests they have to close at least 6 deals a month to hit their quota. If you know that only half of their product demos tend to convert into deals, then you know they need to make at least 12 demos this month.

Now take this a step further. If only 30% of the rep’s calls result in a demo, you can set the very specific KPI that they need to call at least 40 prospects this month, or roughly 10 per week. This way, you can specify the rep’s goals down to each activity while helping to make their work appear a lot more manageable in the short-run.

Our science-backed sales assessment can identify motivators that keep your reps driven to perform, leading to a 33% boost in sales productivity.

Give Incentives For Smaller Goals

While meeting annual quotas is often rewarded with several incentives, salespeople often disregard smaller goals, because there is little motivation beyond the big picture incentive.

For this, sales managers need to know what motivates their reps. This can be a financial incentive, such as a cash bonus, or a simple reward like a round of golf at their favorite course. It doesn’t matter if you have budgetary constraints either—even the promise of additional vacation time or a recognition program can help to motivate your sales reps to meet all their short- and long-term goals.

Prioritize What You Want Accomplished First

Salespeople need to juggle many tasks, which is why sales managers need to ensure they clearly define which tasks are of higher priority. Determine the most important goals for your organization and make sure they are presented to your team in a way that clearly defines priority.

The sequencing of goals can differ from sales rep to sales rep as well. For example, a closing sales rep must be tasked with prioritizing the number of deals they convert, whereas sales development roles should work to improve their prospecting. A logical goal for the former would be to increase their outreach calls by 20% whereas senior employees must prioritize their revenue figures.

In an ideal world, every organizational goal and objective would be met—but this is not always the case. Prioritizing goals strategically can help to improve performance and reinforce the right behaviors while helping to improve your chances of meeting those goals that matter most.

Plan For Impending Failure

While no sales manager plans to fail, they must accept the reality that unforeseen circumstances are an unavoidable part of business. There is no such thing as a sound organizational strategy that does not take skill gaps, market barriers, and other obstacles into account.

Part of setting sales goals includes having a backup strategy to troubleshoot potential problems as they arise so you can get back to your normal efficiency as quickly as possible.

You can start off by identifying potential hurdles that can stop you from achieving your goals and take steps to position yourself to avoid these. Lastly, you should plan ahead to establish a strategy that can help you tackle these issues in the event that they do arise.

A great way to identify and resolve potential roadblocks before they impact your sales performance is to conduct a thorough evaluation of your sales people, process, tools, and systems. This process will provide valuable insights to align you goals and capabilities to drive performance. Learn more about evaluating your sales force here.

Build A Productive Sales Team

With a comprehensive sales force evaluation, HireDNA helps organizations identify core KPIs, uncover skill gaps, and reveal actionable strategies to help drive sustainable growth. We provide data-driven insights and science-based assessments to help you build a high-performance sales culture that has helped our clients deliver consistent results for the past decade.

Why Choose Us?

  • We help our clients discover 33% more sales opportunities
  • Our professional assessments can help increase top-line revenue by 25%
  • We deliver our services across 200 industries around the globe

Determined to improve your existing skill gaps and resolve weaknesses?

CONTACT US

Most Effective Sales Recruiting Strategies In 2019

Posted on by hiredna

No matter how great your product is, if you don’t have the right sales team to close deals, you won’t experience success. Yet research shows that 46% of sales hires fail within the first 18 months on the job. This indicates that many companies are using ineffective recruitment strategies to seek out the right talent. In this post, we’d like to share some of the most effective sales recruiting strategies to help you find and hire the best salespeople for your organization.

Contact the sales recruiting and training experts at HireDNA to help you hire, train, and retain top sales talent. Contact Us

Most Effective Sales Recruiting Strategies

Top salespeople are rare and incredibly prized. They are often already employed and make a good living for themselves, which means recruiting them can take more than just posting an online job and waiting for the perfect candidate to find you. A sustained, full-channel recruiting strategy is needed to attract high performing salespeople. Here are some strategies to keep in mind:

Build Your Brand

A high performing salesperson will only work in a company that is as ambitious as they are. An established, maintained brand image could help to tilt the decision in your favor, especially if the salesperson has offers from multiple organizations.

The best way to create a positive brand image as an employer is to work on your website—most importantly, your careers page. Try to showcase what it’s like to work for your organization and what makes you better than the competition.

Social media platforms like LinkedIn are also excellent areas to build your brand and attract top talent. In fact, 70 percent of the people who follow a company on LinkedIn say that they would like to work for them. Be sure to regularly post and share content, and don’t be afraid to message candidates directly.

Plan Your Interviews Meticulously

Interviewing only when employee turnover pushes you to do so can be a dangerous practice. The pressure to fill a position may lead you to hire a sub-par employee. Instead, work to proactively build a roster of strong candidates. You should be in constant recruiting mode, seeking out and screening top candidates so you can reach out whenever a position needs to be filled.

During the actual interview, keep in mind that a conversational style is more likely to elicit gut responses that can help you to pinpoint the true skills of the interviewee. Check out our blog post on Top Situational Interview Questions for key questions to help you effectively assess candidates.

Don’t Give In To First Impressions

Around 80% of a salesperson’s success is a result of their mindset rather than their learned skills. The fact of the matter is, only around 26% of people have what it takes to succeed in this highly demanding field.

When you are working to recruit top talent, it’s important to keep an open mind. It’s important not to reject applicants or candidates outright based on a first impression from experience listed on their resume, as they might have something even better—a sales mindset.

A science-based sales candidate assessment is the best way to identify candidates with the right mix of sales DNA for your organization. At HireDNA, we use the OMG Sales Assessment Tool, which goes beyond personality traits to assess 21 core selling competencies possessed by top sales performers in your industry. Learn more.

Invest In Referrals

Referrals have long been one of the best ways to find exceptional talent. Unsurprisingly, great salespeople happen to know other top salespeople who may be looking for a new opportunity. Internal marketing is a great way to encourage referrals, which can be a very cost-effective recruitment strategy. You can even introduce a referral program where you reward employees for referring great talent that results in a successful hire.

Keep It Brief

A long, drawn-out hiring and recruitment process could be a deterrent. The top salespeople likely already have multiple offers in hand. They might take a job with your competitor while you’re busy trying to reach a decision. It’s important to keep your overall process short and practical, acknowledging that this is a talent-driven market.

Hire The Best Sales Talent With HireDNA

Finding and recruiting top sales talent is essential for future success. But this can be challenging. In fact, 53% of sales hires eventually fail to live up to expectations.

At HireDNA, however, we offer 10 years of recruitment and training expertise to help you find the right candidate. Our science-based predictive hiring process has resulted in an 80% successful placements rate.

Why Choose Us?

  • 92% of our recommended candidates reach the top half of the sales force within a year
  • Hiring mistakes eliminated up to 96%
  • 79% candidate retention rate
  • Our new hires ramp up 50% faster than the industry average

Do you need help recruiting top salespeople?

CONTACT US

How To Terminate A Sales Rep The Right Way

Posted on by hiredna

Effective sales managers are responsible for hiring and retaining top-performers. They also have the duty of evaluating and terminating underperforming sales reps. While the process of firing someone may seem daunting, it can be made easier through proper planning, preparation and professionalism. If all efforts at improvement fail, here’s how to terminate a sales rep the right way.

With HireDNA, you can hire the best reps from the start, identify skills gaps and KPIs, and train your team to ensure your reps are aligned with your expectations. Contact Us

Is Termination Necessary?

The first step in determining if firing a rep is necessary is to understand your key performance metrics (KPIs) and assess the level of performance across your entire team including systems, processes, management. A sales force evaluation can help you identify KPIs, uncover skill gaps, and discover opportunities for future growth—while also identifying underperformers.

From there, you will need to identify the root cause of these limitations and how to improve them. Can your bottom 10% benefit from sales training? Are they coachable? Do they lack the proper motivation? Check out our blog post on How to Motivate Your Sales Team When Sales Are Down.

If your bottom performers do not possess the right skills for the role or do not improve with the proper training and coaching, it may be time to let them go. That’s the harsh reality of the sales environment.

The Costs of a Bad Hire

While terminating a sales rep can be a difficult job, it is sometimes an essential one. Poor performing reps can impact the efficiency and morale of the entire team and set your organization back financially. As per estimates, a bad sales hire can cost up to 50-75% of an employee’s annual salary.

What’s the cost of a bad sales hire for your organization? Find out with OMG’s sales hiring mistake calculator.

What Qualifies As A Bad Hire?

There are several red flags that can help you identify when a sales rep becomes a bad investment for your company. Look for these signs:

  • Constantly ranks in the bottom 20% of the sales team
  • Consistently fails to meet quota
  • Contributes zero or low potential leads to the organization
  • Consistently receives bad reviews
  • Does not participate in training programs

If your rep is showing any of these attributes, then it might be time to evaluate your sales employee and make a final decision.

Want to avoid the cost of a bad hire? Build a strong and promising sales team with HireDNA. Learn More

3 Steps To Fire A Sales Rep

A poorly executed termination can set the wrong precedent on how your firm deals with a firing situation, and it can also lower team morale. All of this can lead to a bad sales cycle and reduced ROI. That’s why it’s important to get the termination process right. To help, follow these three steps:

1. Analyze The Source Of The Problem

Sometimes, just highlighting the negative attributes of a sales rep isn’t enough. You have to dig in deeper. While an employee may seem unproductive on paper, there could be ways to understand and mitigate the lack of productivity and save the cost of hiring a new individual.

Before you let a team member go, make sure you’ve covered all your bases. Consider these questions:

Does This Individual Have A History Of Poor Performance?

If yes, then they probably slack on the job, and laying them off would be better than incurring losses every term. But if they’ve only recently started underperforming, then there might be a reason behind it which you, as a sales manager, should look into.

Assess if the employee has any personal issues and how long it might take them to recover from them. And lastly, run a risk analysis and consider if keeping this employee could potentially lead them to replicate past successes.

Could The Performance Be Improved With More Effort From My Side?

As a sales manager, the responsibility of your team’s performance falls on you. While it is important to hire the best talent, it is equally crucial to identify and mitigate weaknesses in your team before they become a threat.

Suppose you had an employee who started missing training sessions, but you let the behavior slide because their numbers were good. When such an employee stops showing growth, their lack of productivity also reflects on your ability to manage the team. Ask yourself if prompting and active effort from your side can rectify the situation.

Need help with training and onboarding your employees to increase team efficiency and employee retention? Set up a consultation with HireDNA.  Learn More

Is The Poor Performance A Consequence Of An Organizational Change?

Has your organization has gone through any sort of corporate restructuring, like the following:

  • Change in management
  • Mergers
  • Change in salary plans
  • Acquisitions, etc.

This could be a major contributor to the downhill performance of your employees. Always take pre-emptive measures to deal with such a situation and ensure that your team is ready to accept forthcoming changes.

2. Make Your Termination Process Transparent

We cannot stress enough: do not surprise the employee. Dismissals can be hard to deal with even if your rep does anticipate it. If an employee is blindsided, it could lead to a feeling of distrust in the organization and imply that anyone can be terminated without prior cause.

To avoid this, make sure your termination process is transparent and that a poor performing employee knows what’s coming their way and why. You can do this by conducting constant appraisals and making sure that the rep is notified of their bad performance and is duly warned. This can help you in two ways:

  • It can motivate the employee to work harder to stay on-board
  • It can set a good precedence for other team members

3. Do Not Demonstrate Emotions

Terminations can be emotional. Their show of emotion can potentially trigger yours as well. But, if there’s one thing you should do before sitting down with an employee to terminate them, it’s to leave emotions at the door.

There are instances where the dismissed individual can become visibly angry or even resort to verbally expressing anger toward the sales manager. Just make sure this does not lead you to take irrational steps. It also helps to have an HR or legal representative present during the meeting to effectively deal with unexpected events.

Hire the Right Sales Talent

Finding quality talent is the first step to hiring the right people for the job and minimizing the risk of bad hires. And if you’re terminating a sales rep, you’ll want to replace them as soon as possible with an individual who is ready to perform. By working with the sales recruitment experts at HireDNA, you can do just that.

With a range of science-backed tools, we can identify the right talent for your sales team and assess each candidate thoroughly to ensure that they’re the best fit for your organization.

Why Choose Us?

We offer:

  • 92% success rate
  • Hiring mistakes eliminated up to 96%
  • Data pool containing information of 1.8m pre-assessed candidates

Are you ready to hire the right candidate for the job?

Contact Us