7 years ago
February 21, 2017

What to Do If You Need to Hire Several Senior Sales People

When you have to hire several senior sales people at your organization, you have three options on the table. Keep reading to learn more.

Rhys Metler

What to Do If You Need to Hire Several Senior Sales People

Senior sales executives are critical to your sales team. Their job responsibilities include identifying and selling to top-priority prospects and maintaining relationships with customers to build business. They’ll often mentor less experienced sales people to strengthen your team. They may even identify new product or service opportunities to create new business opportunities. Your senior sales executives must have very specific skills, like creativity, sales planning, independence, negotiation, and motivation. They must excel at what they do and consistently hit sales targets. You must be able to depend on them to build your bottom line.

Naturally, when you’re looking for even one senior sales exec, you have a big job on your hands. It’s not easy to find top sales talent with the right skills, experience, and personality traits to do the job well. And hiring the right person is of utmost importance to your bottom line. You simply cannot settle for mediocre for this high-level position.

But when you have to hire several senior sales executives, your job could become nearly impossible. If it’s so difficult to find even one qualified candidate, how can you be expected to find several?

Here are three options you should consider when you need to hire several senior sales execs.

Build a Database of Talent

If you know that your sales organization is intending to expand in the future, it would be prudent to start your candidate search early. By allowing yourself extra time instead of waiting until the last moment to hire several senior sales executives, you can give yourself a better chance of recruiting great candidates. Even if you’re not yet ready to make the final hiring decision and bring them on board, you can build a database of talent.

Constantly be recruiting new talent, interview every week, and when you find candidates worthy of being hired, add them to your database of talent. Once you do end up expanding, you’ll have several names to call and you won’t be under such a time crunch, scrambling to identify and recruit top talent at the last minute.

Recruit Passive Candidates

Though passive candidates are usually more difficult to recruit, they’ll be worth the time and effort spent on the process when it comes to hiring senior sales execs. When filling a senior position, you seriously need candidates who have solid experience and have proven their skills in sales. People new to the field simply won’t do. When you put out an ad on an online job board, you’ll likely only get applicants with little to no experience, so it pays to look for passive candidates instead for these roles. Passive candidates are already employed at other companies, whether in your field or not. Their employment shows that they can hit sales targets, have experience, and are committed to sales, making them ideal candidates.

Partner with a Sales Recruitment Agency

Building a database of talent and recruiting passive candidates are both great options for hiring several senior sales executives if you have time. Unfortunately, sometimes you need to fill your roles immediately. Sudden new demands in business might require you to hire extra senior-level sales people right away in order to meet your clients’ needs efficiently. And in this case, you cannot go through the long hiring process. Every day that the roles stay empty means that you’re getting further and further away from hitting your revenue targets. When you need senior sales executives quickly, partnering with a sales recruitment agency is your best option.

Sales recruitment agencies have large networks of sales reps—some may have over 100,000 sales people in their candidate pools. And with their technology platform, they can quickly identify the best candidates in their networks that fit the roles’ criteria. Their screening process and assessments can shortlist the most qualified candidates in no time, so you can move forward and hire your new senior sales executives quickly.

 

Rhys Metler

Rhys is a tenacious, top performing Senior Sales Recruiter with 15+ years of focused experience in the Digital Media, Mobile, Software, Technology and B2B verticals. He has a successful track record of headhunting top performing sales candidates for some of the most exciting brands in North America. He is a Certified Recruitment Specialist (CRS) and has expert experience in prospecting new business, client retention/renewals and managing top performing sales and recruitment teams. Rhys enjoys spending quality time with his wife, son, and daughters, BBQing on a hot summer day and tropical vacations.

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