Uncomplicate- How to hire and upskill your new sales person
Uncomplicate by Freshworks brings you crisp and insightful videos which will focus on answering one tactical question around sales & marketing, support & collaboration, employee engagement, and growth.
Having a killer sales team is a high priority for all companies. But, the real challenge is to keep the momentum going by hiring and upskilling the right young talent.
How exactly do you hire your sales superstars-in-the-making? Asad Zaman, Managing Director at Sales Talent Agency, delves into the art of hiring right.
“Before upskilling them, you need to make sure that you are hiring the right people. At the junior level, you are hiring for potential and talent,” says Asad.
Asad looks for three qualities when it comes to assessing talent:
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- Drive– does the person have the drive? Drive, for Asad, is work ethics and resilience. “If this person has a goal at the other side of the wall, will they run through, punch through, jump over, and dig under to get to the goal,” says Asad.
- Right Nature- Sales requires empathy. A sales person’s job demands dealing with different kinds of people. Does the potential hire have the emotional intelligence to deal with this?
- Acumen- One needs to gauge if the person is naturally curious and intelligent enough to become an expert and develop the right business acumen.
While having the right guardrails for hiring young talent is a great start, the more fundamental problem is to be an attractive place to work. What does that mean? It is not just about having a fancy office, it requires one to really understand what young hires are looking for.
“They are looking for three things— are they inspired by the problem you solve, will you provide the infrastructure, onboarding, training, and leadership for them to become the best version of themselves. If that’s there, can they make lots of money and grow as well,”says Asad.
Assuming you are a great place to work and have hired the right talent, the real work starts now. You’ve made the investment by getting the young guns on board, but how do you make sure you retain them and help them grow? For this, you need to understand the core requirements of a newly minted salesperson. He/she is looking for a good value prop to sell (your product), proof that the value prop is really useful to customers so that they can be genuine while selling, realistic targets to achieve, engaged support, and opportunities to grow.
Companies usually falter by setting unrealistic targets or miss giving the right support when required. While setting the right target is a straightforward task, giving the right support requires a lot of strategizing.
Put yourself in the shoes of your new hire. The hire goes through four stages within a year of joining the company.
Stage 1- When they are just starting, their confidence is high but their skill set is low. They are eager to make a mark.
Stage 2- Their confidence is dipping/low because they realize they still haven’t made a dent and their skill set is still low.
Stage 3- They have been there for a while. They have received enough training and have developed their skills. Their confidence is increasing, but “they are not sure if it was luck or them,”says Asad.
Stage 4- They are high on confidence and skill set.
Companies need to be careful when the hire is in stage 2 and stage 4. At stage 2, the person might want to leave as they are feeling low, while at stage 4, they might want a change as they are bored. Companies need to come up with strategies to reduce churn at each of these stages and come up with the right talent development program.
Hiring, upskilling, and retaining sales folk is no easy task and requires a well thought out process to make it work.
Share your ideas on how you think one must go about it in the comments below.
(This post was co-produced by Praveen Ramesh.)
