No business will get very far without a dedicated sales team. When it comes to building one, however, many companies find themselves in something of a double-bind: most of the candidates interviewed for sales jobs lack the experience, track record, or commitment that sales excellence requires, and the candidates with the drive you’re looking for don’t stay on the market for long.
Whether you are building a sales department from scratch or expanding an existing division, finding the right personnel is both the most difficult and most essential part of that process, so here are three tips that can help you build a winning team.
1. Identify Strong Leaders
In sales, leaders set the tone for the department as a whole, and if you want to transform you sales team, you need to start with the people at the top. Nothing reinvigorates a department with new ideas, new vision, and new energy like new management.
Finding sales executives who have what it takes to build a dream sales team aren’t always easy to find, though, and working with a recruitment agency like SalesForce Search headhunters that operates specifically within the world of sales can be the fastest way to find leaders with the experience to rebuild an entire department and whose values match your own.
2.Give Employees a Sense of Ownership
In some cases, the best way to fill key roles in your sales team is by enticing representatives away from your competitors. While monetary incentives such as increased salaries or higher commissions are an important part of this, many sales professionals are looking for more than just a better financial return.
In today’s gig economy, offering employees a reason to stick around is increasingly essential for long-term success, which is why the largest firms put so much effort into inculcating their teams with a sense of brand identity.
While there are many ways to create a sense of loyalty, one of the simplest is to build a culture in which performance is valued and where representatives are given opportunities to develop new skills and paths to career advancement without leaving your organization.
3. Work with Professional Sales Recruiters
In the first point we noted that headhunters can help you identify and entice top leadership talent to join your team. But professional sales recruiters do a lot more than simply help you fill C-suite positions. In many cases, sales recruiters can help handle all your sales hiring needs.
Working with recruiters takes a lot of the guesswork out of hiring, and decreases the frequency with which you need to replace sales reps. Given how big a problem turnover is in most sales departments, recruiters don’t just help you build a great team, they can also help you reduce costs.
If you want your company to grow, your sales team is one of the most essential places you need to invest. But simply throwing money at a problem won’t necessarily solve it, and if your sales department has consistently failed to meet its targets, you might need to rebuild it completely from the ground up.
Building a winning sales team is about people, and finding the right people to fill the right positions is key. Identifying good leaders and providing them with a dedicated team that is in it for the long haul may seem like a big task, but it will be worth it in the long run.
