How to find Sales Reps: A Guide for Beginners
Achieving incredible sales opportunities and building a strong revenue stream for your business starts with having an effective sales team. You need to hire professionals capable of engaging, understanding, and converting your audience through a range of channels and methodologies. More importantly, you need to find someone who can grow and thrive with your business, particularly when the average turnover rate for salespeople is around 27%.
The key to hiring good sales reps for your team is knowing where to find your ideal candidates, and how to define the professionals you need.
First: Decide on Your Ideal Candidate
Before you start looking for the best places to find sales reps, you need to know exactly what you’re looking for. As a sales organization, you probably have a profile for your ideal customer you use whenever you’re searching for leads. Why not create a similar profile when searching for candidates?
Before you start exploring job forums and reading through applications, create a profile for the kind of sales rep you want to bring into your team. Make sure you think about:
- Technical skills: What kind of specific technical skills does your ideal sales rep have? Are they efficient in things like cold calling? Do they know how to use sales technology and CRM software to make them more effective in their roles?
- Soft skills: Do you need a sales rep with excellent teamwork skills? Communication abilities are a clear must-have, but what about leadership skills, and the ability to solve problems under pressure? Soft skills are crucial too.
- Traits: Most of the best sales reps have a series of crucial traits. They need to be goal oriented to help push them towards achieving their quotas, and excellent active listening so they can understand the problems of your target audience.
The Best Places to Find Sales Reps
Once you’ve got an idea of what your ideal sales rep looks like, you’ll be able to build job descriptions you can share with recruitment teams, and post on your website. Recruiters and staffing agencies will help to get your information out there for potential candidates to find.
You can also take an active approach to finding the ideal reps too. Some of the best places to find potential sales reps include:
Your network:
Reach out to your professional and social network to see whether you can find anyone who might be suitable for your professional team. Do you know any solid professionals who has the right soft skills and can be coached on technical skills? Can anyone from your current network direct you towards professionals they can vouch for who might be looking for a job?
You can also examine organizations you have connections with, such as community groups, your university’s alumni association, and even your industry communities.
Events and conferences:
Conferences and events aren’t just an excellent place to get information about your industry and hear from market leaders, they’re also a fantastic opportunity to recruit some talents. Try searching for events connected to your niche in your area, and you’re sure to find a few sales people amongst the attendees who you might be able to bring into your team.
Even if you don’t find a person to hire directly at an event, you may be able to expand your network, which will lead to more potential sources of talent in the future.
Social Media:
Social media has made it much easier for business leaders from all backgrounds to find sales talent these days. You can use sites like LinkedIn to help you identify talented salespeople in your industry, and you can even sort through available candidates by skills or background.
LinkedIn allows you to differentiate between candidates looking for jobs and people who might be willing to switch their current role for the right offer. You can also share job listings on LinkedIn or reach out to LinkedIn groups for help finding the right candidates.
Don’t forget to consider other social media sites too, such as Facebook and Twitter. These environments can be just as valuable for reaching potential talent.
Traditional job boards:
There are tons of popular job boards on the web today which can expand the reach of your job offerings, and help you connect with a wider range of candidates. Well-known resources like monster and Glassdoor can help you to deliver your listings to a huge pool of applicants all over the world.
These job boards are also useful when you’re researching for your job listings, as they can give you an insight into what kind of skills other competitors are advertising for, and what sort of price you should be paying your sales reps.
Don’t forget, you can always look into niche forums and job boards specifically associated with your industry to help improve your chances of more experienced candidates.
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