Your VP of sales has important responsibilities and is one of the most critical team members at your organization because this senior professional is in charge of your most important assets: your sales people, your customers, and your revenue. Making a sales hiring mistake for this position can cause significant damage to your company and can be far more costly than hiring the wrong sales rep.

Unfortunately, though, 70% of employers hire the wrong VP of sales. They hire at the wrong stage in their business or they hire the wrong type of person. Since most hiring managers and business owners do not have in-depth sales knowledge, it’s understandable that hiring mistakes are rampant in this department. But when it comes to your VP of sales, no hire at all is a much better option than hiring the wrong person.

You have to take the steps required to ensure that you hire the right person from the start, so you can avoid damage to your sales team, your revenue, and your reputation with customers.

So what’s the best way to hire your next VP of sales? Engaging a sales recruiting expert. Here’s why.

You’ll Receive Both Hiring Expertise and Sales Expertise

Hiring for any position in any department is difficult. Many employers simply don’t know how to hire effectively. They don’t have the in-depth knowledge, experience, and expertise required to understand today’s market trends and challenges, recruiting best practices, compensation packages, and competition. They don’t know how to find, recruit, or hire the best candidates. They don’t know how to weed out the bad and spot the rock stars. Engaging a recruiter will allow you to gain access to this hiring expertise that you need to make better hiring decisions.

But when you engage a sales recruiting expert, in particular, you’ll also benefit from sales expertise. The fact that you don’t have in-depth sales knowledge shouldn’t affect your hiring decisions. Engaging a sales recruiting expert can ensure that this does not negatively harm your business. Your sales recruiting expert will be able to help you choose which sales management style is best for your unique organization, which skills and experience are critical for your new VP of sales, and which candidate will fit in best within your company culture.

You’ll Gain Access to Higher Quality Candidates

Even if you have great hiring instincts, you might not make the best hiring decision simply because you are choosing from a group of mediocre candidates. When none of your candidates are ultimately suitable for this senior position, settling for the best of the worst is common, but a bad idea.

When you engage a sales recruiting expert, you’ll be able to leverage a highly qualified pool of candidates. A top sales recruitment agency will have deep networks and strong relationships with both active and passive candidates in the top ten percentile of the sales industry. When you have access to higher quality candidates, you can make a better hire.

You’ll Save on the Costs of Bad Hiring Decisions

Hiring the wrong VP of sales can hurt your pipeline, increase your cost per lead, reduce the productivity of your sales team, and cost you a lot of money, not only while that person is in your employ, but long after, as you try to rebuild what that employee has cost you. In addition, turnover costs at the senior level can be significant—the higher the salary you offer, the bigger the impact. You could be wasting between 200% and 400% of the position’s annual salary. Engaging a sales recruiting expert can help you to reduce this impact on your bottom line by helping you choose the right candidate from the very start—the best VP of sales for your company.