If you want to recruit top sales people so that you have the best sales team possible, you’re going to be competing with other top companies in your area and you’ll need to set your strategy accordingly. To get the best you’re going to need to fine-tune your recruitment process and offer top-tier incentives – top sales people have a lot of job opportunities available to them so you need to think about how you can make your company stand out from the crowd. To help you recruit top sales people we’ve compiled a list of pointers that may help your recruitment planning.

Are you talking to the right people?

In order to recruit top sales people you first need to be identifying them and then attracting them to apply for your positions. You might for example want to review which publications and locations you are advertising your roles – are these places where top sales people are likely to see them? If not, where should you consider putting them? This might mean considering an increase in your advertising budget. Another possibility is using an agency to help you recruit top sales people – they may be able to advertise to people you cannot reach with your current advertising budget. If you know of top sales people in other organizations that you’d like to recruit, you can also approach them personally to see if they’d be interested in taking up a role in your team.

Are you offering a great deal?

To recruit top sales people you need to be offering them some great incentives – these people are likely to get multiple job offers and you need to be competitive if you want them on your team. Typically star performers will be looking at several things but chiefly they’ll be interested in their earning potential now and their earning potential in the future. Your bid to recruit top sales people can also be helped by offering further non-financial benefits – for example by having a great training and professional development scheme in place you can help attract candidates that are serious about their career development.

Are you identifying the best applicants?

You can attract top sales people – but are you able to identify them and recruit top sales people? This step is just as vital as all the others that precede it. It doesn’t matter how much great talent you’re attracting to apply for a job at your organization, if you can’t separate the star performers from the average sales person you’ll never be able to recruit top sales people for your team. Hiring the wrong person can cause significant financial damage to your team in lost sales so this is a vitally important step. Look at your current star performers – what attributes do they have that help them succeed? You may also want to consider what the overall mentality of your team is like – even a top performer may perform badly if they are not suited to the environment in which they are being asked to work.