Category: Sales Management

At HireDNA, our mission is to provide our clients with the tools and training needed to build a successful company. Our work is focused on core principles that drive our sales and hiring projects. We are proud to acknowledge that based on reviews from our clients, we have been considered by Clutch as one of the top global agencies focusing on Corporate Sales Training Programs in the IT and Business Services category.

What is Clutch?

Clutch is a DC-based reviews site that allows companies to use verified client reviews to pick solutions providers for business needs such as HR services. After evaluating all client reviews and descriptions of projects, Clutch organizes the providers in leader matrices in their respective fields.

Corporate Training Leader

Below, you can see the leader matrix that includes HireDNA as an emerging leader in corporate coaching. We could not have received this recognition without the kind words of our clients, for whom we are grateful to and hope to continue our work with.

“We are thrilled to have been chosen as one of the leading sales recruiting and training companies in Washington, DC by Clutch!” – Anwar Allen, CEO

Top Human Resources Company

HireDNA has also been listed on Clutch’s sister site, The Manifest, as one of the top human resource companies. These lists are supported by data and expertise to help improve the experience for businesses to choose partners. Clutch also supports an additional site, Visual Objects, which is a portfolio-based site that allows businesses to view portfolios of past client projects to make more informed partnership decisions.

Get In Touch

In the long run, investing in proper training and strategies in the human resources department can be extremely beneficial for company operations. We want to see our clients succeed and maximize their potential with a transformative hiring process. If you are interested in learning more about our corporate sales training programs, please contact us!

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?

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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 17^th 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

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 3^rd 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?

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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

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