Sales Laundry

Companies looking to hire key sales personnel in this recession should be excited about being able to pick up exceptional sales talent that would otherwise be unavailable in a better market.  However, what I am hearing from my friends and contacts is just the opposite.  They are telling me great sales professionals are just as difficult to find if not more difficult to find than ever.

Is your company facing a similar hiring dilemma?  Is your growth being hindered by your ability to find great sales people?

Then I will tell you the same little secret I told them.

Strategically I have always enjoyed selling into down markets as long as I was confident my number of sales professionals or department headcount would at least hold steady through the difficult times.

In down economic times I set a policy of continuous forward progress in the face of competitors buckling, retreating, cutting their sales force or taking other defensive steps.  Ideally when my competitors are pulling back I like to raise my sales headcount, increase our visibility and target key clients in a bid to gain marketshare from otherwise formidable competitors that have been temporarily knocked off their game.

If I am not in a position to bump my sales head count moving into a difficult economic period then I work through/replace my habitually poor performing sales team members (if I have any) with sales superstars that have found themselves unemployed for one reason or another and netting a stronger sales team as a result.  The key is knowing where to find them, and that, thankfully, takes me back to the point of this article.

The secret is that I do not place too much emphasis on requiring deep industry knowledge.  I find the exceptional senior sales guys in the market that already have the sales skills I am looking for, sans the bad habits, and teach them what they need to know to function.

From my experience it is much easier to convey product and industry knowledge to a smart, skilled salesperson than it is to convey the subtleties of sales to a “newbee sales toad” as one of my engineers used to refer to them.

There is no reason to shy away from older/experienced or out of industry sales reps.  As long as they still have that hunger to sell and have not been ruined by too many years of poor sales management, these guys are gold mines.

Ease your “must have” requirements for new candidates.  Requiring new candidates come to you with an established contact list, precise industry experience, a specific number of years of experience and exceptional selling skills is a tall order under any market condition and severly limits the candidate pool to the point of being too restrictive to allow you the flexibility to build your headcount and mentor them to take advantage of favorable market conditions when they present themselves.

Hire for the right character, sales training and ability to listen/learn and ignore the grey hair and non-industry experience.  I think you will find, like I have, that your industry/business is not that hard to learn and that a good hungry sales professional that can find the right contacts and get in the door can sell just about anything.

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