Recruiting and deploying the wrong sales people cost companies hundreds of millions of Euros a year. Is this fake or reality?
I recently met an old friend of mine who has been in sales for as long as I have. He is the CEO of a high tech company and has managed to steer clear of the crisis due to the reputation and the services of his organization. The last couple of years has not been easy, due to the lack of sales power.
The markets he operates in are demanding more professional attention and a different tactic from sales people. Traditional sales approaches don’t achieve the results like they used to. This is something we see in the different European countries where we operate. It requires much more selling value instead of price. And this is often a major obstacle to sales people.
So he set out to add a different type of sales professional to his team. People who are able to sell value and not cave in to price. He spent more than 200 hours over the last year trying to recruit the right sales people. He met and spoke to different recruiters who presented tens of sales people who did not fit the job requirements and wasted his precious time. In the end he hired one so called sales champ who turned out to be a sales chimp. This person was terminated after 4 months after doing more damage than you can imagine.
Conclusion: the traditional way of recruiting sales people has taken its toll. There are more innovative and cost effective methodologies to search, find and recruit the right sales people from whom you expect above average results in more difficult markets.
What do you need? Professional and effective methods and tools. If you are using a recruiter, then you need a professional one who is specialised in sales, uses effective tools and approaches to present to you the right people. Not a CV pusher.
Call me and let’s look at sales recruiting from a different perspective.