The recruitment and selection of employees is a fundamental yet incredibly critical aspect of human resource management. To satisfy your talent needs and ensure high-quality staff, you need to hire the right candidates each and every time you undergo the hiring process. Though hiring is important for every position in your company, no position is as crucial as sales. Here’s why your organization needs to prioritize sales recruitment and take a proactive approach to hiring the right sales people.

Your Biggest Assets

Of course, every employee you employ is important to your company. But your sales people are arguably your biggest assets. In a world where products are becoming more complex, technology is changing the way we do business, and competition is fiercer than ever before, the key to staying afloat and staying profitable is still recruiting and hiring the most talented sales people.

Your company would be nothing if it wasn’t for your customers giving you the revenue you need to stay in business. And who deals with these customers? Who finds them, nurtures them, and closes them? Your sales people. Your sales team brings you the revenue you need to support your company’s operations and costs and allows you to fund the next step in the development of your organization. Your sales people are irreplaceable and indispensable, so you need to prioritize recruitment if you want top talent working for you, interacting with your customers, bringing in revenue, and helping you achieve your business goals.

The Importance of Sales Recruitment

The effective recruitment and selection of your sales reps is critical to the survival and development of your enterprise. Without the best team, you could be eliminated through tough competition in today’s market. Your profitability is based on the successful sale of your products or services, which is achieved by your sales people.

Prioritizing sales recruitment allows you to ensure that you have the highest quality sales team on the market. It can help you find, engage with, and recruit appropriate personnel for your myriad sales positions. Having a repeatable step-by-step recruitment process can weed out the mediocre candidates, help you identify top talent, and help you to avoid bad hiring decisions.

Thus, sales recruitment is essential and it cannot be ignored. If you skip vital steps in your recruitment process, if you don’t have a sound process to begin with, if your process is failing you, or if you wait until the last minute to recruit and hire sales people, you’ll face the consequences.

Sales recruitment shouldn’t be an afterthought. It shouldn’t just come up when a sales position comes up. It shouldn’t be rushed. It needs to be a priority in your organization because your success depends on it.

The Cost of Ignoring Sales Recruitment

If you consistently hire the wrong sales people because you ignore the importance of recruitment, you will face a lot of problems—and you are the one who will ultimately be at fault.

You’ll have an underwhelming and ineffective sales team that won’t be able to close deals—or even worse, a team that might damage your company image and ruin relationships with customers and prospects. You’ll also face a higher risk of mistakes, reduced productivity, and low morale. If you make the decision to remove your bad hires before they continue to damage your company any more, which you should, then you’ll also face high turnover costs, including advertising fees, administrative costs, and training and onboarding expenses.

You simply can’t afford bad hires in sales. The best way to ensure that you only hire top-performing sales people is to always prioritize sales recruitment. Make sure you’re up to date on current trends and challenges. Only use recruitment best practices. Always be recruiting. And if in doubt, request the help of a recruitment firm.