Top Five Hiring Challenges

Technology Sales Managers Face

It’s no secret that top notch technology salespeople out sell, out hustle and flat out surpass the productivity of the good ones. In fact, most good sales professionals will never be great. The truth is eight good technology sales reps aren’t going to close the account that one great sales pro will, ever. This is because sales isn’t linear. The great ones are proactive: they reach out consistently, they work the phones daily, they masterfully convey the value of the company’s solutions to their prospects and they close deals. I would stand to wager great technology sales pros aren’t just better; they play a totally different game.

According to recent research, 55% of all salespeople who earn their living from sales should have a different occupation. In fact, 20%-25% of those in sales have what it takes, but should be selling something else. Believe it or not, based on these statistics, hiring experienced sales candidates will produce lackluster results approximately 80% of the time.

Now let’s get up close and personal with the top five sales hiring challenges technology sales managers routinely face year after year….

Hiring Challenge #1: Getting access to the right sales candidate pool--- Finding the right technology salesperson is simple, but not easy. Even if you think you are certain about pulling the trigger on your next sales hire, you may be dead wrong. However, your odds of selecting the right tech salesperson increase when you benchmark your choices against a talent pool that has depth, relevant experience and is hand selected against your “must have” requirements.

Relying on sales candidates sourced primarily from job boards, personal networks and referrals is potentially suitable for a hire or two, but the pool is simply too thin to draw on consistently for most high-technology sales searches. Great sales talent is rarely online looking for a job, most of the time they are relatively happy and need a specific approach when being wooed into making a change.

Hiring Challenge #2: Cracking the code: discovering the right skills and background needed for your sales job---Today more than ever, putting the right technology salesperson in the right sales job is both an art and a science. Matching hard and soft skills to the objectives of the sales role takes practice, strategy and lessons learned from both hiring successes and hiring mistakes.  Another factor specific to the peril of hiring sales pros: it becomes almost natural to equate enthusiasm and strong interview skills with outstanding sales performance! Sales professionals tend to be highly likable people who are full of energy, passion and charisma. Although these characteristics are beneficial, they can be weighted inappropriately and easily cloud the decision making process.

Hiring Challenge #3: Overcoming counteroffers and sales candidate turn-downs---Extraordinary sales professionals get counter offers from their current employer under most circumstances. Consider yourself lucky if the boss who originally hired them has already left the company, the fight will be easier for you to win. You should be prepared to deal with this situation and be preemptive. Hint: You must have methods to hire top revenue generating sales professionals that include cementing a relationship with them that is so strong they are compelled to leave the comfort of their current commission stream, client base and employer to make a fresh start and take a chance with the unknown. (Yes, that unknown is you: your company, your products and your leadership capabilities.)

Hiring Challenge #4: Flirting with the high costs of sales turnover and loss of revenue---Today’s technology company can no longer afford to rely on one or two rainmakers to hunt and feed the rest of the group. We see a large number of technology firms banking on the knowledge and revenue production generated from a handful (usually one to three) of high producing sales reps. Most firms struggle to achieve their real growth potential because it becomes easier to depend on the few who are producing today than to develop a repeatable and successful sales hiring strategy.

Here are the cold hard facts, sales turnover is the single biggest hidden cost in America today. Over 20 million Americans list sales as their primary occupation. While average voluntary employee turnover across all over industries is usually around 23%, (16.8% for 2009) annual sales turnover tops 40%.*

Hiring Challenge #5: Ignoring sales hiring mistakes--- It’s a fact— coming to the conclusion that you made a mistake early in a new hire’s employment tenure will save the company a lot of time and a pile of cold hard cash. Unfortunately, there is a downside to this strategy; it can be costly from a reputation management perspective. Your hiring prowess, company image and reputation with each false-start will begin to come into question. Poor retention of new hires impacts leadership ability, client relationships and your paycheck! The easiest way to solve hiring dilemmas is to learn from your mistakes, don’t keep repeating former hiring blunders and recover quickly from poor hires.

What’s the Solution?

If you’re like most technology firms, you are, have, or will do battle with all five of these sales hiring challenges. The organizations that build a repeatable sales hiring strategy and consistently focus on measuring their progress in these areas will ultimately slay the sales dragon over time. Solving the five pieces to the sales puzzle can make you rich beyond your dreams of avarice or break you down, eat up your profits and pave the way for your competitors to dominate the market.

Although a tremendous amount of ambiguity is par for the sales hiring journey, there really is only one solution: improve. The journey is often full of uncertainty, but it’s up to you to come clean and endlessly work on those issues which remain a challenge, and know that there are many successful solutions at your fingertips; especially if you are resourceful, believe in the unlimited potential of human capital and are determined to do what it takes to build that stunningly viscous sales team. 

*Source: Annual Turnover Rate, SBI Sales Benchmark Index; Data Driven Decision Making January 2007; US Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Department of Labor Statistics, 2007, 2009.

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