“We need better sales people!” Most sales managers have uttered these words at least once in their careers. Of course, every organization wants top talent selling their products or services, but hiring better sales people isn’t so easy. A sales person that would thrive in another company or industry might not be effective within your unique business environment. You must take a holistic approach to hiring if you want better sales people on your team. An integrated, measurable sales hiring process is necessary.

In order to achieve profitable results, use these five steps and start hiring better sales people today.

Know Who to Target

Your hiring efforts are bound to fail if you don’t fully understand what you’re looking for in your new employees. You won’t be able to focus your efforts on the right candidates and you’ll waste your time on applicants who you think will be a good fit but are in fact all wrong.

Identify the strongest members of your sales team and consider what makes them stand above the rest. What skills do they have? What personality traits do they have in common? Systematically analyze data using key performance indicators. Once you’ve identified some common strengths that allow sales people to succeed in your unique business environment, you can better understand exactly who you should be looking to hire.

Use Inbound Recruiting

Hiring better sales people can be done by marketing your organization as a desirable workplace. Great sales people aren’t going to want to work for a company that they know nothing about. Using inbound recruiting can help you increase brand awareness and highlight the reasons why great sales people should want to seek you out for employment. When you’re only using job boards to advertise your open positions, you’re really limiting yourself to mediocre candidates.

Start a blog to increase your search ranking and position yourself as a thought leader. Reserve a part of your website for candidates to check out what it would be like to work for you—use employee testimonials. Use social media to promote your company’s culture.  

Continuously Recruit

Waiting until you have an opening to start the hiring process isn’t going to produce the best results. You’ll be pressured to make immediate decisions so you won’t have enough time to find the right candidates to hire. You’ll end up settling—and that’s not how you hire the best. Part of your inbound recruiting process should be continuously building relationships with candidates, accepting resumes, interviewing candidates. Once the right person comes along, you can keep in touch until you have an open position.

Hire for Cultural Fit

Selling skills and relevant past experience are great, but don’t judge your candidates solely on these factors. As we mentioned before, some great sales people might succeed in different organizations but fail miserable in your work environment.

You should be hiring candidates who match your company culture. You need to focus on candidates who have the same goals and values as your company does. You need to find candidates who will work well within your current team and thrive under your leaders. Hiring for cultural fit will allow you to reduce your turnover rate and get long-term hires.

Use a Sales Recruitment Agency

A sales recruitment agency can help you find and hire top talent. Its recruiters will have deep connections with great candidates. They’ll have specific processes and metrics to find the best sales people who will be a great fit within your organization and who will have the skills and experience that you need to grow your profits. Its experts will recruit, screen, and interview part of the top ten percentile in your industry, so you’re left with a small pool of qualified candidates to choose from. This not only saves you time but also eliminates the risk of bad hiring decisions and reduces your turnover rate considerably.