Tag: SaaS sales recruiting

Don’t Make Passive Sales Candidates Jump Through Hoops: Tips for Creating a Streamlined Recruiting Process

Posted on by Nick Mann

When most people think of sales recruiting, they likely envision scouting for active candidates who come to them and apply for a job. But according to a recent survey, 73% of candidates are passive, meaning they’re not actively looking for a sales position, but would be open to it if the right opportunity came along. Given passive candidates are often the most talented, it’s vital to develop a streamlined recruiting process where they don’t have to jump through a bunch of hoops.

And that’s what I’m going to tackle in this post. Here’s a formula for swiftly moving A+ passive candidates through your hiring process without unnecessary friction.

Put Yourself in a Passive Candidate’s Shoes

First, I think it’s helpful to look at the situation from the perspective of a passive sales candidate. Most are already employed, and because they’re in demand, have plenty of leverage. Therefore, they’re not going to jump at just any offer that comes their way.

To seriously consider switching companies, it has to be a truly enticing offer that goes beyond what they have at their current job. So if you realistically expect to land elite talent like this, you need two main things — an amazing offer that surpasses what they have in their current position and a straightforward system that seamlessly moves them through the hiring process.

This brings me to my next point.

Clearly Define Why Passive Sales Candidates Should Choose You

Before you ever reach out to a passive candidate, you need to be able to quickly articulate what makes your company a better choice than their current employer — an elevator pitch if you will. While every brand’s selling points will differ, here are some specific things most passive sales candidates want across the board.

Based on this and the unique selling points your offer, I suggest creating a recruitment pitch that you can reference at any time. And if you have multiple sales recruiters interacting with passive candidates, this should ensure a consistent experience.

Use Technology to Ensure a Passive Candidate is a Good Fit

If someone has stood out enough for you to have your sights on them, odds are they can sell. But there are other factors to take into account, such as working style, cultural fit, personality traits, and so on that will ultimately determine their likelihood of success.

Before you officially reach out to a passive candidate, it’s smart to use technology like an AI tool or a SaaS sales recruiting platform to analyze passive candidates based on the specific criteria you’re looking for. This will allow you to narrow the talent pool down and find the best of the best.

That way you don’t waste the candidate’s time or yours.

Make the Application Process Dead Simple

Research has found that “60% of job seekers quit in the middle of filling out online job applications because of their length or complexity.” And for passive candidates that aren’t actively seeking employment, they’re even less likely to complete a long-winded application.

For that reason, it’s critical to boil it down to the absolute essentials when gathering information. Better yet, allow passive candidates to apply through platforms like LinkedIn or Google so they can use their existing profiles rather than filling out a new one from scratch.

Offer Seamless Interview Scheduling

Another common source of frustration for candidates during sales recruiting is interviewing. The last thing you want is for a dream candidate to sour on a position because of complications during interview scheduling.

A simple way to prevent this is to use a tool like Calendly that allows candidates to conveniently schedule an interview at a time that’s best for them.

Simply send an invite with several time slots that are available, and a candidate can have their pick.

An added plus is that this also saves your recruiting team time from having to back-and-forth with candidates.

Keep Interview Rounds to a Minimum

Many sales recruiters require candidates to have two, three, or even four rounds of interviews before officially giving them a job offer. And while you want to be sure you’ve found the right person, going overboard on interviewing can be a major turnoff, especially for passive candidates that are already employed.

That’s why I suggest keeping your interviewing to a maximum of two rounds to prevent any conflicts. However, if you can just have one comprehensive interview, that’s even better.

As long as you’ve done your research and used technology like a sales recruiting platform or AI tool as I mentioned earlier, this shouldn’t be a problem.

Offer Job Status Updates

After you’ve conducted an interview(s), it’s extremely important to keep candidates in the loop as you’re making your final decision. Ideally, you’ll provide real-time updates via email, text, or messenger so candidates instantly know what’s happening.

And needless to say, don’t drag on your decision-making any longer than necessary.

Optimizing the Passive Candidate Experience with a Streamlined Recruiting Process

Because of their skills, talent, and proven success, passive candidates are often the best candidates. And while effective recruiting is important for filling all positions, it’s especially critical when recruiting passive candidates.

By following the formula outlined above, you should be able to create a more streamlined recruiting process that results in a better candidate experience and more A+ passive candidates accepting your job offers.

If you’re looking for technology to accurately and efficiently assess sales candidates, check out The Original Sales Assessment. 92% of individuals recommended by it go on to reach the top half of their sales force within one year.

5 Must-Know SaaS Sales Roles and Definitions

Posted on by Nick Mann

The SaaS industry is huge and still growing. As of mid-2023, there were 17,000 SaaS companies in the US alone and over 30,000 worldwide.

And by 2024, some experts predict this number could more than double to as many as 72,000 SaaS companies. As the industry has evolved, so have the positions, and there are a variety of SaaS sales roles, ranging from basic entry-level jobs to high-ranking executive positions.

In this post, I’ll provide an overview of five essential SaaS sales roles so you can better understand the underlying structure and how the various positions come together to create a cohesive sales team.

1. Sales Development Representative

The main purpose of this role is to bridge the gap between marketing and sales. A sales development rep’s responsibility is to continually communicate with the marketing team to identify sales qualified leads (SQLs) that have a strong likelihood of buying.

Once SQLs have been identified, a sales development rep will then pass them on to a SaaS sales representative who will attempt to make a conversion (more on this in a moment). B2B sales consulting and training services company Winning By Design elaborates saying, “They have to start a conversation and provoke a decision maker into action, handle objections, and close on a call-to-action such as meeting with an account executive (AE) or attending an event.”

One of the most important traits to thrive in this position is strong communication.

2. SaaS Sales Representative

One of the most fundamental yet integral roles at any company is a SaaS sales representative. At its core, a person in this position is responsible for selling products to customers, which can include a wide variety of activities, including:

  • Reaching out to and following up with leads through email, social media, over the phone, video calls, and other mediums
  • Creating and performing sales presentations
  • Identifying the specific needs and pain points of leads
  • Providing relevant product recommendations
  • Answering lead questions
  • Negotiating product pricing
  • Acquiring new customers
  • Communicating with the software development team to relay customer feedback

SaaS sales reps are typically the ones “in the trenches” and play a vital role in getting conversions and setting the stage for a positive customer experience, which is important for increasing retention and lowering churn.

3. SaaS Account Manager

After a lead has purchased a SaaS product and a sale has officially been made, the customer falls into the hands of an account manager who’s involved with ensuring customer satisfaction and building a long-term relationship.

A SaaS account manager performs several tasks but has two primary goals.

  • Cater to each customer’s needs to sustain positive momentum, increase loyalty, and boost retention
  • Seek out new sales opportunities with existing customers

As for specific day-to-day activities, these can include:

  • Managing the account portfolio, while giving each customer personalized attention
  • Building and maintaining customer relationships
  • Serving as a dedicated point of contact for customer inquiries and questions
  • Resolving any issues that arise
  • Checking in with customers to ensure their key objectives are met
  • Identifying potential add-ons or upgrades that could provide additional customer value
  • Offering suggestions on how to improve product performance

This graphic illustrates nicely how a SaaS account manager fits into an organization.

4. SaaS Sales Engineer

First, note that this isn’t a role that’s required by all SaaS companies. It’s typically reserved for those that sell a complex, advanced product that your average customer won’t fully understand.

A SaaS sales engineer serves two main functions.

First, as HubSpot puts it, “They must be able to use their applied technical knowledge to help sales reps persuade prospects to choose their products.” That’s their job on the pre-sale side of things.

And for post-sale, a SaaS sales engineer assists with the integration of the product into a customer’s existing tech stack. This is important given the average company used 80 different SaaS apps in 2022.

To ensure the process goes smoothly, a SaaS sales engineer will oversee the integration and resolve any issues that may arise. In turn, they play a big role in ensuring customer satisfaction and maximizing retention.

5. Sales Manager

You can think of the previous SaaS sales roles as relay racers passing a baton.

The sales development rep identifies SQLs and passes them on to a SaaS sales representative. A SaaS sales representative then engages with a lead and seeks to convert them. Once converted, they then hand the customer off to a SaaS account manager who looks to further build the relationship and make additional sales to existing customers to maximize value. And throughout this process, a sales engineer is there to ensure that the technical side of things goes as smoothly as possible.

Overseeing everything is a SaaS sales manager who ties it all together. This role wears a lot of hats, but their core mission is to build the best sales team possible, establish goals and KPIs, provide motivation, continually monitor team member performance, and ultimately ensure that customers are happy.

Because of the hands-on nature of this role, a sales manager will need to possess excellent communication and leadership skills. They also need to be a bit of a psychologist where they manage different personalities to get everyone to operate at their best.

SaaS Sales Roles Coming Together to Create a Cohesive Team

Having a tight underlying structure is essential to the success of a SaaS company. Teams need to have clearly defined roles and understand how everyone works individually as well as a unified whole.

While the specific SaaS sales roles of an organization can vary slightly, the five mentioned here are the fundamentals that you’ll want to know about if you’re assembling a team.

If you want to recruit the best talent in your industry using a data-driven process, use HireDNA to post a job for free. It eliminates 96% of wrong hires and reduces turnover by 50%.

SaaS Sales Recruiting: 5 Essential Tips for Hiring the Right Talent

Posted on by hiredna

In 2022, the United States contained more than 17,000 SaaS companies within its borders. Those 17,000 companies serve over 59 billion global customers. In 2023, Statista projects the global SaaS market to exceed $195 billion in market value.

What’s the common thread pinning these statistics together?

They wouldn’t be possible without SaaS sales jobs.

Salespeople deliver results that directly contribute to company (and industry) growth. But, selling SaaS products and solutions is not easy. Tech companies are observing major issues with their SaaS sales recruiting and staff retention metrics—why?

SaaS Sales Recruitment: Obstacles & Challenges

Companies are finding it extremely difficult to source, hire, and more importantly retain competent, high-performing sales staff. Below, I’ll examine some of the key reasons why businesses are experiencing these issues, and then how to revamp your sales hiring strategy.

It’s a Skill Issue—Soft Skill Issue

One of my past blogs was on sales recruiting challenges. In it, I detailed one of the biggest challenges for sales recruiters and SaaS hiring managers: lack of soft skills in new hires. Why is that one of the biggest challenges? It’s notoriously hard to quantify a candidate’s actual soft skill competence with hard data. Companies often hire salespeople who have underdeveloped soft skills.

Empathy, collaboration, the ability to build rapport, and communication skills have always been difficult to quantify with hard data. However, there have been many innovations in this arena in recent years. For example, certain forward-thinking recruiting platforms are providing companies with the ability to accurately quantify a candidate’s soft skill competence level.

For example, HireDNA is able to measure specific sales competencies, such as emotional regulation, foundational beliefs, and resilience in the face of rejection. This enables precise determinations of one’s sales potential. This capability can have a significant impact on SaaS recruiting and hiring success.

Inefficient Hiring Processes

The top salespeople don’t often stay between jobs for very long. In one of my past blogs, I mentioned that it’s common to have a window of only 10 days to find and hire the cream of the crop sales candidates. This is why inefficiency can destroy an organization’s ability to hire the best talent possible. In the fast-paced world of SaaS sales and IT sales recruitment, this rings especially true. 

Below are a few of my recommendations to improve your recruiting and hiring processes:

  • Have a clear understanding of the role you are hiring for and the goals you wish to achieve through this hire.
  • Leverage both passive and active candidates: A lot of the industry’s top talent will not be actively looking for a job.
  • Use a thorough pre-screening process that includes state-of-the-art tools and science-based evaluations. Interviews that focus on behavior, and an in-depth examination of candidates’ past performance, are also beneficial.
  • Employ a sales-specific assessment tool to ensure a candidate’s “sales DNA” competencies are accurately assessed and measured against your organizational needs.
  • Simplify the application process: It’s possible you are losing great candidates very early in the process simply because your application process is too complex or drawn out. I wrote more on this topic here.

Recommended Tools to Source, Screen, Interview, Hire, and Onboard Top SaaS Sales Talent

The end-to-end process of recruiting and hiring top sales professionals can be overwhelming and time-consuming, especially for SaaS companies. But it doesn’t have to be. I want to share with you two powerful tools that can help streamline your hiring process and ensure you find the optimal fit for your team.

eSkill

 eSkill provides a detailed evaluation of a candidate’s communication and collaboration skills. These traits are critical in a sales role. Here are a few of the main advantages that eSkill can provide your company:

  • Gain a deeper understanding of how well a candidate will work within your sales team, increasing the chances of a successful hire.
  • Easy to use and can be integrated into your existing hiring process, making it seamless and efficient.
  • Wide range of assessments, including pre-employment assessments, behavioral assessments, and skills assessments, allowing you to assess a candidate’s fit for the role and your company culture.
  • Detailed reports on each candidate, allowing you to make more informed hiring decisions.
  • Identify potential red flags early on in the hiring process, saving you time and resources.
  • Cost-effective and can help you save money by reducing the need for expensive and time-consuming interviews.
  • Determine the strengths and weaknesses of your candidates’ emotional intelligence, so you can provide specific, targeted training and development after they are hired to help them (and your company) flourish.

HireDNA

Using HireDNA as a part of their recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and training processes, SaaS companies can gain access to a powerful platform that leverages AI and science-based assessments to find the perfect fit for their sales team. Custom-developed for the needs of technology sales teams, HireDNA enables a faster and more streamlined pipeline of qualified candidates, accurate and predictive sales assessments, and effective onboarding and training.

Here is a short overview of our platform’s features and service offerings:

  • Powerful AI matching technology coupled with a proprietary sales recruiting platform, ensuring companies can source and attract top sales producers who fit their ideal candidate profile and selling environment.
  • Crowdsourcing and candidate referral models provide access to an extensive network of sales professionals. This creates a faster pipeline of qualified candidates.
  • Partnership with Objective Management Group (OMG) provides access to sales-specific candidate assessments and salesforce evaluations. These evaluations have been independently verified at 95% accuracy.
  • Onboarding and training processes designed to help new hires ramp up faster and improve retention. HireDNA’s training includes micro-learning, videos, quizzes, and action plans. All are tailored to the new hire’s sales DNA.
  • HireDNA’s results speak for themselves. 50% faster new hire ramp-up, 80% of searches ending in a successful placement, and 92% of candidates recommended and hired reaching the top half of the salesforce.

Using a science-based approach to SaaS sales hiring will continue to become more prevalent over the coming years. As tools like HireDNA and eSkill continue to evolve, companies will be able to attract, hire, and retain more of the best candidates possible—candidates who fit perfectly into their sales ecosystem, company culture, and performance requirements. 

Top 5 Best Practices for SaaS Sales Recruiting and Hiring

1. Have a deep understanding of your “why”

What is your company’s “why?” What about your sales department’s “why?” Culture, vision, goals, objectives, etc.—these all play an important role in the formation of your company’s “why.” When you lack a clear understanding of your company’s vision, ideals, and mission, it can be extremely difficult to find the right talent that fits into your brand’s unique culture and sales ecosystem.

2. Streamline and use a data-driven approach

Having a long, over-extended recruitment process is a talent killer. Luckily, recruiting in SaaS has come a long way (even compared to just a few years ago). Platforms like ours empower companies to fully transform the way they source, recruit, hire, and retain top sales talent. The importance of streamlining your approach to recruiting cannot be overstated. Likewise, leveraging the power of data and AI-driven recruiting tools can be a real game-changer for SaaS companies. 

3. Use your company’s value proposition

One of the more overlooked sales recruiting tips is leveraging your company’s value proposition. Your unique value proposition is a strong selling point to potential sales candidates. Using your value proposition during the recruitment process is crucial. It makes sure that potential hires align with the mission, culture, and “why” of your company. By clearly communicating your unique value proposition, you can ensure you are only bringing on individuals who are genuinely excited about what your company has to offer. 

4. Leverage the power of incentives

Incentives, for both on-hire and performance-based, can make a large difference in attracting top talent that is able to perform versus mid-range salespeople that deliver lukewarm results. Another major reason why incentives are vital to elevating your hiring strategy—passive candidates, which are often top performers, will typically need to be coaxed out of their current roles. Incentivizing passive candidates is highly recommended. Examples of compelling incentives include:

  • Bonus upon hiring
  • Compensation increase
  • Stock ownershp
  • Flexible and/or hybrid work environments
  • Growth opportunities within your organization
  • Ongoing SaaS sales training using industry-leading frameworks, workshops, and resources

5. Consider using SaaS sales recruiters

Delegating the traditionally resource-intensive process of recruitment to SaaS sales recruitment agencies can be helpful for certain companies. Top-notch agencies and their rosters of recruiters are experts at matching top talent with the right companies. However, many recruitment agencies in the tech industry use outdated methods and source poor-quality talent, so I recommend doing your due diligence if you’re considering hiring an agency.

Wrap-Up

Salespeople play a vital role in the growth of SaaS companies and the industry as a whole. Finding and retaining the industry’s top talent can be difficult, but the advice laid out above can help transform your recruiting process. A quick recap of what we covered:

  • Leverage next-gen recruiting platforms (e.g., eSkill, HireDNA, etc.) to help weed out poor-fit candidates.
  • Restructure your offer – focus on your value proposition, incentives, and attracting talent.
  • Recruit both active and passive candidates.
  • Streamline your processes.

Although companies face many challenges in SaaS hiring and recruitment, the strategies outlined in this blog can help maximize your recruiting efforts and source tier-one talent for your organization.