Tag Archives: Individuals

How Do You Find Good Salespeople? Five Suggestions

Situation: A CEO wants to expand his company’s salesforce by adding “diamonds in the rough” – hungry individuals motivated by a high commission/low salary opportunity with high total compensation potential. How do you find these individuals? How do you find good salespeople?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Hire “out of school”. Create a career path from a lower paid inside sales position to eventual higher paid outside sales position. Give the individual(s) time to get up to speed understanding your technology as they develop sales skills. This helps to generate revenue to cover costs while developing new salespeople.
  • Accept the fact that you will likely experience turnover hiring candidates out of school. High commission sales forces in other industries deal with 85% turnover over 3 years to find “keepers.” This may be a significantly higher level of turn-over than you are accustomed to in other positions.
  • Look to sales job fairs and Craigslist for candidates.
  • Give your current sales people a bonus for referring friends or acquaintances who will stay with you for 6 or 12 months. Pay theses bonuses out over preset time periods.
  • Hire a good sales recruiter to find experienced high-producers in companies or industries with a similar product sale. The appeal to these candidates will be a high earnings opportunity combined with the chance to sell an interesting product. Because these people will already be high earners, consider creating a draw system so that they do not have to make a significant short-term earnings sacrifice by switching to your company.

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How Do You Use Metrics to Focus Your Team? Three Points

Situation: A CEO wants to improve company performance and is interested in how others use metrics to focus their teams. How do you use metrics to focus your team?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Engage your employees in the development of metrics.
    • The team members are close to the customer and the company’s key vendors. What makes sense to measure? What metrics are tied both to performance and a healthy or supportive but competitive environment? What would create adverse conflicts within the business or with either customers or vendors?
  • Metrics need to be meaningful and applicable.
    • They have to directly pertain to day-to-day, week-to-week and month-to-month objectives and performance.
  • Factor in personal issues.
    • Everyone doesn’t need to have the same metrics – instead formulate metrics that are pertinent to the different roles and individuals within the company.

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