Hiring new sales people isn’t easy, and it also isn’t cheap. When you hire new members for your sales team, you spend a lot of time and money on the recruitment process, training, integration, and more. All of this time and money quickly adds up to a significant sum. And if you’ve made sales hiring mistakes and hired the wrong candidates that just can’t sell, you have to spend even more on starting the process all over again. For entry-level employees, you’ll be spending from 30 to 50% of their annual pay to replace them; for mid-level employees, that number jumps to over 150%.

As you can see, sales hiring mistakes can be incredibly costly. Here’s why you can’t afford to make them.

1. The Cost of Recruiting

Recruiting a new hire just once is costly enough, but if you make hiring mistakes and that person needs to be let go, then you’re doubling your costs of recruiting for one position. You’ll have advertising costs, the price of an in-house recruiter to review resumes and interview candidates, and the cost of drug screens, skills assessments, and background checks, if you perform them. This entire sales hiring process can cost thousands of dollars—so you don’t want to have to pay twice to find one qualified worker. You need to hire right the first time to keep your costs down.

2. The Cost of Training

Once a new worker is hired, he needs to be trained to perform his new duties. You might have the costs of professional seminars or training sessions if you put a lot of your money towards training. But even if you just train in-house, you have to pay for the trainer’s time and materials. In fact training is one of the costliest investments you can make. Though it makes good sense to ensure that you provide adequate on-the-job training and education so your new employee can work as efficiently as possible, that money is wasted if you’ve made bad hiring mistakes and the employee doesn’t work out.

3. The Cost of Low Productivity

For you to get the best return on your investment when it comes to your workforce, you need everyone to be as productive as possible. Any low or lost productivity will hurt your bottom line, and making sales hiring mistakes can lead to this problem in a few ways.

Once a new hire doesn’t work out and you have to restart the recruitment process, you will inevitably see lost productivity when you’re short a team member. When you’re searching for a replacement, work is being left undone. Or possibly worse, you dump all of the extra work on your existing sales team, which hurts everyone’s productivity as these overworked employees all try to handle the extra tasks on top of their full plate. And while training the replacement once one has been found, productivity will be low not only just for the trainee, but also for the trainer, which can last for weeks or even months.

In addition, until the new hire is fully functional in his new role, he is more likely to make costly mistakes, which you’ll have to spend more time fixing, hurting your own productivity.

Outsource to Save on Costs

As you can see, you really can’t afford to make sales hiring mistakes. They hurt your company in more ways than one and lead to very high costs. Every bad hiring decision can cost you thousands of dollars. Instead of risking these high costs, you should consider engaging a sales staffing agency to handle your hiring needs for you. Its recruiters will ensure that you hire right the first time, so you can avoid making mistakes and avoid making bad hiring decisions.