Importance of hiring right candidates
It is essential to hire the right employees for your sales team since they are the driving force behind leading customer calls, revenue generation and designing suitable sales strategies. However, wrong hires can not only lead to degraded team morale but also wasted time and resources.
By concentrating on hiring the right employees in a right way, companies can avoid sales hiring mistakes and flourish in a highly competitive market.
A must read: How to Build a High-Performing Sales Team
Survey Insights: Revealing trends and patterns
According to the Xactly survey, sales turnover remains the elephant in the room demanding urgent attention from organizations.
The survey enlists a few statistics to be aware of in the current sales landscape:
- Sales organisation’s turnover is nearly 3x times higher than any other organisation. There are various reasons behind this such as the pressure to meet daily or monthly targets, unrealistic expectations from management, stagnant career growth and inadequate training. This has a chronic effect on revenue and employee motivation.
- Most representatives leave even before they have reached their highest potential. This can be because of lack of better coaching to develop sales skills, low team collaboration, low recognition within the organization. Hiring managers should ensure that they have better quality of onboarding programs and realistic milestones for employees to achieve.
- It is expensive to replace a top performing sales representative: There is a huge cost of hiring associated with replacing top performing sales professionals due to significant training expenses. This may also impact client relationships since top performing professionals tend to develop high level of trust with clients. In addition, it is difficult to hire someone who has the same level of experience and in-depth knowledge.
- There is a lengthy time lag to fill a vacancy. It takes on an average 60 days to find someone. This can really affect revenue and employee’s productivity. Long recruitment process, notice periods, high demand for skilled candidates are some of the reasons owing to lengthy hiring time.
- A bad sales hire can become a costly mistake for the organisation. This can ultimately lead to loss of revenue, large replacement costs and disrupted client relationships.
Readers’ Favorite: Case Study: Mamaearth – Leveraging Neuroscience To Increase Sales
Factors leading to high sales attrition
- Constraint to meet quotas: When sales employees are given unrealistic targets to meet, it causes un-necessary pressure and frustration within them leading to burnout.
- Compensation structure: Financial rewards act as one of the biggest motivations that drives employees to work hard. However, if the structure is not transparent and unfair to employees, they feel undervalued.
- Lack of career progression: Lack of career progress causes employees to feel demotivated and disengaged. This feeling of stagnation and little recognition forces them to look out for better opportunities in the job market.
- Bad management: Poor management is one of the biggest factors leading to causing sales attrition. Micromanagement, toxic work environment and bad conflict resolution create a ripple effect of dissatisfaction among employees thereby causing high attrition.
7 sales recruitment red flags
Every organization should focus on hiring the right fit.
From our experience of having sat through more than 1000 interviews we have picked 7 sales recruitment red flags:
- Lack of clearly defined job description: Lack of clarity on what the job exactly demands from candidate is one of the major red flags for both employee and recruiter. Job descriptions are outdated and not updated on a regular basis thus causing the quality of job applications to be poor and misaligned. In the long run, this may also lead to reduced productivity due to ill-defined scope of work contributing to sales recruitment mistakes.
- Rushing the hiring process: Every vacancy within the company costs millions as each day passes. In order to avoid this, hiring managers usually rush the overall process without properly assessing the candidate leading to bad sales hires. Though rushing the recruitment process may seem like a short route, but in the long term, this may result in mis fit candidate being hired.
- Huge number of candidates: Since recruiters usually have a large pool of candidates to evaluate, they tend to get exhausted and stressed during the hiring process.
- Lack of interviewing skills: Due to poor interviewing skills, HRs end up hiring unsuitable candidates who are unqualified for the role. Recruiters should try to assess the candidate based on cultural fit, mindset, and critical thinking ability. In addition, inadequate skills pose a problem for the interviewer to sell the role and present the organization effectively.
- More focus on DEI Targets: Majority of hiring managers focus only on Diversity, Equity & Inclusion targets. Though these factors hold a lot of importance, yet it’s also essential to hire the candidates on the basis of merit.
- Influence of unconscious bias: Unconscious bias have a deep impact during the hiring process thus leading to unfair decisions. Several kinds of unconscious bias such as affinity bias, halo effect, gender bias, beauty bias etc. might be applicable in interviews. All these biases can cause lack of diversity and innovation and even legal risks at times due to gender/skin discrimination.
- Over reliance on candidate’s answers: Recruiters often tend to rely more on candidate’s answers than assessing practical skills and critical thinking ability. This ‘Trusting my instinct’ decision making process does not work too well in sales hiring. Hiring such candidates can prove to be costly since it not only leads to wasted time but also candidates end up in a role where their potential is not completely utilised. This makes candidates feel demotivated and they end up leaving the company.
Expert Insights: What is Stopping Your Sales Team From Closing That Deal?
Conclusion
Every recruiter should focus on identifying sales hiring mistakes to hire best quality hires for their organization.
By fixing these red flags, companies can reduce employee turnover and maximize overall revenue generation.
