Is your company planning to expand its sales force this year? Include an active process in your plan if you want to avoid committing consequential mistakes. It’s a complicated process, yes, but it’s attainable even with a given time.
With enough experience on the matter, we’ve narrowed down the top 3 mistakes that sales recruitment firms need to avoid during talent expansion.
3 Sales Recruitment Mistakes To Avoid
From Swamping To Juggling
Sales managers and everyone in the recruitment department gets swamped with the workload during sales force expansion. It’s a huge undertaking, after all. Juggling multiple tasks tend to lead to unproductive hours of trying to achieve everything that entails the recruitment process, but actually not getting anything done.
You have to pool sales candidates, but you also can’t forget the fact that hitting the quota does not stop when you’re hiring an entire sales force. So while you’re drafting applicants who you have to examine of having potential, you also have your hands full with a sales number you need to reach. The thing is, both of them have deadlines.
The Solution:
Before stepping into this next chapter in your company, anticipate the circumstances that might disrupt the roles of everyone in the sales team. You can set up a protocol and assign a task force that can focus on this specific project.
Miscalculating The Time Element
As much as it takes up a lot of hands, don’t underestimate the time element as well. Then again, unplanned or abrupt changes in the sales team protocols lead from one bottleneck to another. Remember your deadlines? They don’t cease to end when you fail to foresee that you need enough time for the people who will hire qualified salespersons for your team.
And then, when sales candidates get hired, you need to move on to the next phase, the next challenge— managing your new hires. They won’t be sent to battle without training and orientation. Unfortunately, this stage takes just as much time as the hiring phase, sometimes even more.
The Solution:
Set up a rough estimate of the whole sales recruitment process, one that fits multiple candidates for hiring and training. Make your task force available for the allotted time to avoid disrupting your sales team operations.
Lowering Hiring Standards
An overwhelming sales recruitment workload, paired with insufficient time, is like a formula for major slip-ups. The worst-case scenario is having to hire sales candidates with compromised standards. Expediting the process is ineffective and downright disappointing. It’s a waste.
It gets dreadful when you overlook essential aspects of the overall qualifications of sales candidates, such as realistic expectations from newly-hires and requiring documentation of their actual sales accomplishments.
The Solution:
Stick to your hiring process, no matter the cost. Skipping the important parts will only lead to more drastic consequences.
The Recruitment Process Avoids Mistakes
A series of steps in sales recruitment is effective when it’s repeatable in a way that produces scalable results. This becomes a process that you should not stow away from if you want to ensure hiring the best sales candidates in your sales team. The process will help you in your sales talent expansion. And the process avoids mistakes.
Sales Recruiters Chicago’s headhunters can help your business scale and acquire the top sales candidates. Check out their website today.