Without sales you do not have a business, so you know how important hiring the right sales people is to your bottom line. If you implement the right strategies to hire sales people who are focused on generating sales to grow your business, the bottom line in your sales hiring can almost take care of itself. Building your sales hiring process around the following key points can further help ensure that you hire sales people who will not put your bottom line at risk.

Know Who You Need: Assess Your Current Sales Team Before You Hire Sales People

If you want to grow sales and add a comfortable margin to your bottom line, it makes sense that you would want to hire sales people and add to the sales team. However, if you are not sure who the right sales people are and how they will contribute, you might not see the results you were expecting. Take a careful look at your current sales team, especially your top and core performers who are always ready to give a little more in the name of advancement. Then evaluate the skills and characteristics that you have, noting any areas where you might be able to add new competencies to your team when you are ready to hire sales people. Look to:

• Experience or qualifications in pursuing the size and types of contracts you are relying on for growth
• Aptitudes for following up with different audiences, from cold prospecting to warm leads or existing customers, based on business needs
• Targets for productivity so that you have a baseline to measure performance after hire

Screen Before You Hire Sales People to Protect the Bottom Line

Candidate screening is an integral task to protect your organization’s bottom line. Improperly or inadequately screened candidates can pose risks to revenue on multiple fronts, including:

• Lack of work authorizations that could result in penalties to your business
• Previous disciplinary or even criminal problems that can potentially disqualify candidates
• Improperly based references that do not give the true picture of a candidate’s abilities

However, although thoroughly screening candidates is an integral part of the strategy to hire sales people, you should avoid asking for too much information at the outset. Screening candidates before interviews might be a nice idea but candidates may prefer to preserve privacy in the early stages. Candidates who are working with competitors are most likely the ones who will need an assurance of confidentiality before moving ahead with the interview process. Without granting this assurance, your organization may be losing out on the opportunity to hire sales people of the top caliber. To avoid this problem and save costs, only institute candidate screening for the most attractive applicants towards the close of the interview process.

Hire on Attitude, Train on Skills: Expanding Entry-Level Candidate Pools in the Name of the Bottom Line

The right sales people for your team can come from almost any background, even from outside of your industry or directly from university. Many organizations make the mistake of preemptively disqualifying candidates without several years of experience or skills that have been developed in the workforce. When you hire sales people who will be working at the entry level, keep in mind that attitude is hired, but skills can always be trained.

If your sales team is not quite where you want it to be, remember the characteristics and preferences you are looking for in candidates as you continue building. Though it is tempting to settle for average performers when top sales people are not flowing through your hiring process as readily as you would like to see, remember that the costs to hire sales people who give average performance are usually equal to the costs of hiring exceptional performers – on the front end. After hire, the exceptional performers will always do more to build your bottom line.