Three out of four sales reps don’t know what they’re doing. Great sales people who will actually deliver ROI are hard to come by. Most people just don’t have what it takes to close sales, even if they have stellar resumes and shined during the interview. As a result, you’ve probably made your fair share of bad hires and face a never-ending high turnover cycle.

The future of your organization depends on finding and hiring the best sales people. As they’re the ones bringing in the revenue, you need to have top talent on staff to be able to not only profit, but thrive, in the market.

So how can you ensure that your new hires can deliver ROI? Use these tips.

Look to Passive Candidates

If your hiring process entails posting job advertisements on online job boards, all you’re going to attract is active candidates who aren’t necessarily the people you want to hire. Though you could find a diamond in the rough this way, it’s far more effective to seek out passive candidates instead.

Passive candidates are the sales people who are already employed with other companies, but could be swayed away if the right offer came along. Although it’s more difficult and time consuming to not only find these highly sought-after candidates but get them to accept your offer, the effort you’ll put in will be worth it. These passive candidates typically make better hires because their current employment proves that they are skilled and experienced as well as reliable and dependable—or else they would have been let go by now.

If all you’re doing is seeking out active candidates, you’re missing out on a potential gold mine of talent in the passive market.                                                                                             

Engage a Sales Staffing Agency

Hiring might seem cut and dry and pretty easy, but making the right hiring decisions is actually quite difficult, and you won’t realize your hiring mistake until it’s too late and you’ve wasted money, resources, and training time on your bad hires.

If you engage a sales staffing agency to hire your sales people from the get-go, you’ll be able to ensure that your new hires are not only right for your company but can actually deliver ROI.

Sales recruiters not only understand sales, but many of them have been sales people themselves, so they know what it takes to be successful in the field. They have the experience and expertise to identify the traits and skills that are required for success and find the best talent that would be ideal for the positions you have open. Engaging a sales staffing agency can increase your bottom line while also reducing your turnover rate. Its recruiters can help you build a strong sales team that you can be proud of.

Test Your New Hires

Instead of committing full force to your new hires and then having to back track when you realize you made a hiring mistake, you should test your new sales people before committing to them. This can come in many forms. You can have them sell something to you in the interview to test out their skills. You can have them perform skills testing and personality testing to see if they have what it takes to close deals. You could offer a non-committal probationary period where you can see them in action before offering permanent employment. Or, you could consider temp-to-hire employment opportunities. Either way, you should be sure that your new sales people can deliver ROI before taking them on full time and permanently. It’s a sound strategy to ensuring that you don’t create a mediocre or poor sales team.