Many businesses struggle to hire the best salespeople for their
company, which can quickly become an expensive mistake. It can take about three
months to hire a salesperson, three months to train them and six months to identify
and remove them if they are underperforming. This means there will probably be
over a year in which your company is not making the sales it should be, making
it extremely important to get it right first time.
The reason for this is often that the company is not looking in
the right places or for the right kind of person. Hiring salespeople is different
from making hires for other positions. There are many factors that are
difficult to quantify, with personality and cultural fit often being more
important than knowledge or experience. While the latter qualities are of
course desirable in candidates, they are generally things that people can be
trained in, whereas the former are not.
For this reason, it is important to consider a number of soft
skills, such as determination, listening skills, passion, motivation, rapport,
confidence and commitment. Many of these factors are difficult to assess in a
short face-to-face interview, which is why at Hays Sales, our consultants take
the time to get to know our candidates as well as our clients, so that they can
always make the best recommendations for both parties.
Hays Sales are experts at identifying talent and work closely with
both clients and candidates to understand your individual hiring requirements. To find out more about how our expert consultants can
help you, please visit http://www.hays.co.uk/sales.