No matter how great you become at sales, there’s going to be one issue that will stop your success.
It’s you.
Not your skillset, and not your personality. Rather, it’s the fact you only have so many hours in a day. If you’re part of a team, then your team will only have so many hours.
Combine that with the high turnover in sales, and you’ve got a recipe for stress, anxiety, and a revenue rollercoaster.
The solution for this problem is scale – and when it comes to sales, that means hiring great salespeople.
Finding great talent (or taking your great talent to a great team) is one of the last priorities for many, but when you can get the steps for recruiting and hiring out of your head, you suddenly free up time to do what you got into sales to do – serve!
To learn how we can create a recruiting machine that ensures we’re checking all the boxes (and not just the one marked ‘personality’!), we sat down with George Fisher, Vice President Channel Sales at Seceon Inc., and a US Navy veteran. He showed us how he’s stood up high-performing sales teams and ensured they had the tools to succeed.
Because we’re trimming hope from our sales strategy, we’ll use the acronym TRIM to guide us through creating a system with a trigger, ensuring it’s repeatable, building in ways to improve it and of course, ensuring it’s measurable and getting us results.
T – Trigger: George said this system is ongoing and mirrors the acronym ABR = Always Be Recruiting. To ensure we have a pipeline of good talent, George says he identifies the people in his network he’d like to have on his team and makes it a point to stay in touch with them. The cadence of 3 to 5 people a week works well for him. During these check-ins, he’s not trying to woo them onto his team. He’s taking an interest in their success and ensuring they know he’s in their corner.
R – Repeatable: With a pool of high-performing candidates that may or may not be looking to join a new team, George makes his recruiting process repeatable by thinking of a triangle, each side representing the critical elements of sales success:
- Will they do the job? (make calls, send emails, visit prospects, etc.)
- Can they do it? (Do they have the skills to do the job and can they demonstrate them?)
- Are they a team fit? (Do they fit the culture you’re building, not just possess a shining personality?)
Once a position becomes available, George says he reaches out to his candidate list and looks for folks who have told him they’re looking for a change or who have recently left a previous role. He’s asking them a few questions that he says reveal more about someone’s character than the typical inquiries.
- If someone wasn’t a fan of you, why wouldn’t they like you?
- Tell me about a time in high school when you accomplished something you’re proud of?
George says those questions reveal some qualities that may come out later that could affect the team, and they also reveal what kind of accomplishments the person is proud of. Are they accomplishments involving hard work, training and a team or are they solo accomplishments based on innate talent? Depending on the team fit you’re looking for, one of those answers will be preferable to another.
Finally, George says he asks candidates for two years on his team. In that time, he says, he can make them a star performer or make them so good that they’ll move on to their ideal role.
I – Improvable: To improve this hiring and recruitment system, George says to look at production slips and ask if your folks still have the skills to overcome it? If you’ve built a team of hunters and your industry suddenly requires farmers, do you need to change the profile of your candidates?
M – Measurable: To measure the success of this system, measure whether your salespeople are checking all the required boxes on their deals, and capturing what they learn outside their heads. While these are great sales skills in general, they’ll tell you if you’re hiring folks who are process-oriented or those who are hoping for success.