How Building a Sales Team Works

When you begin the process of hiring your sales team, it pays off to first spend some time planning and setting up a budget. Advertising, recruiting, interviewing, and training are all expensive, and you don't want to waste your time and money on the wrong candidates.

Before you interview your first applicant, have in place the compensation structure you plan to use. Depending on how attractive it is, it may be a good enticement for top candidates. Check out Salary.com to get a feel for sales salaries in your area. Also, see How Employee Compensation and Benefits Work for ideas on setting up your sales compensation package.

Write out the complete job description. For example, put in writing the leg work that must be done prior to making a sales call, how you expect existing customers to be serviced, how you expect records to be maintained, how many calls should be made in a week, etc. Think through the entire sales process and detail how you want it to be done, what tools will be used, and your expectations for their results.

This exercise should include not only what you want sales reps or account managers to do, but how you want them to approach it. Think about the style of selling you want them to use. We talk more about the many ways to sell in How Sales Techniques Work.

When recruiting for your sales team, do you do it yourself or go through a recruiting firm? Do you put ads online or in your local newspaper? There are many sales recruiting events that offer the opportunity to meet and interview large numbers of qualified candidates. But which of these is the best for finding good people? Which is the most cost-effective? Well, that depends on how good you are at writing and placing your own ads, the pool of job seekers in your area, and the amount of time you have to spend doing it.

Recruiting Events

Recruiting events offer you the opportunity to see a lot of qualified candidates in a short amount of time. If you use a company like The Thomas Group, you can expect to pay about $3,000 to attend an event. But what do you get for your $3,000? You get two expense-paid nights in a luxury suites hotel setting. You get your company ad written and placed for you in key recruiting-based publications. You get pre-screened applicants, and you DON'T have to spend time calling applicants and setting up interviews. Because the recruiting firm places your ad in key publications, you draw in the best candidates.

The event will pull in several hundred job seekers, but the recruiting firm's sales recruiters will monitor and direct to you only the candidates meeting your preset qualifications. All resumes are available for you to review online one week prior to the event. You then interview your key candidates in a suite at the event.

Recruiting Firms

Recruiting firms screen and place sales representatives with companies, managing the entire process from start to finish. They even offer continuing services like sales management and training. You'll be charged either a fixed price or a percentage of the first year's salary.

Outsourcing

If you are in a new company or are moving into a new market, you may prefer to focus your resources on your core product or service rather than on developing a sales team. If this is the case, then outsourcing your sales efforts may be the answer. Save yourself some time and effort and get a seasoned sales team to boot. A sales management group will implement your sales strategies within the team, provide training, management, and handle the administrative side as well. There will be pluses and minuses, but it may be the answer that makes the most sense for your company.

Do It Yourself

If you're handling the recruiting and screening yourself, then here are some tips. The first step is to write a spectacular recruiting ad that really makes people want to sell your product or service, or work for your company. Describe your company in the absolute best light possible (without stretching the truth -- you don't want a new hire to be immediately disgruntled by the company not meeting his expectations). Make sure any benefits and perks are listed, such as company cars, flexible hours, on-site daycare, etc. These can sometimes make the difference between getting the best applicants and getting the not-so-hot ones. State your requirements for experience so that you get candidates who have the skills you need. Emphasize the possibilities of the job: If it is very likely that these sales reps can make X dollars per year and a nice cash bonus each quarter, then make that stand out in the ad. Remember, the people you want to attract should be motivated by money! Include the things that will get their attention.

You should have a good idea of the experience and skill level of your job candidates after reviewing the hundreds of resumes you've most likely accumulated. At this stage, you should be asking:

There are a lot of things to think about. With selling, experience isn't always the most important thing to look at, especially if you have existing sales reps who can assist in the training and mentoring of new recruits.

Analytical Skills

In order to be good sales representatives, your recruits have to have good research skills to find out about their prospects and know and understand their needs, their business, their business structures, etc. These skills can be taught, but experience in digging up the necessary information is helpful. These days, that experience includes Internet research skills, as well as good old-fashioned research techniques -- asking co-workers, making phone calls, and using business reference books at the library.

Communication Skills

They also need to be good communicators. The majority of what a sales rep does involves communication -- both written and verbal.

Whether it is explaining the specifications of your product or service or communicating how your prospect will benefit from the product or service, much rides on how this is articulated and negotiated. Pay close attention during the interview process to how your candidates articulate their qualities and "sell" themselves to you.

Technical Skills

What level of computer skills do they need? If you're planning on using any type of contact management software (see How Sales Techniques Work), then they have to be familiar with the basics of word processing, spreadsheets, and maybe the fundamentals of relational databases. You should also look for knowledge of presentation software like Microsoft PowerPoint. Many clients expect high-level presentations from sales representatives, so your reps have to be comfortable using the technology, and in some cases designing their own presentations.

With all of these things in mind, it's now time to get a big cup of coffee and begin wading through your stack of resumes. Set aside the "maybes" and the "definites" into two piles. Schedule your first interviews with the "definites," and hold the "maybes" for round two if you need them. Keep in mind that you will probably have at least one or two more interviews with several of the prime candidates, one of which could be a mock sales call where the candidate comes in and sells you your product. This can be an important evaluation tool, and can also help weed out candidates who aren't actually comfortable with sales even though they think they are!

Now that you've narrowed your choices down to your initial candidates, it's time for the warm and fuzzy side of things. Do they have the personality traits that will enable them to sell for and represent your company in the best way possible?

Personality Traits to Look For

When interviewing candidates, look for those who:

The interview will only be effective if you are properly prepared. Here are a few tips to help you along:

There are also a slew of questions you shouldn't ask. This list certainly doesn't include every question you should avoid, but does include some of the more common questions you might slip up and ask. Check with your HR department for more information on illegal interview questions, or go to the EEOC Web site.

Okay, so once you've hired your staff, you need to conduct some initial training. Read our next session to find out some of the best ways to make that training effective and interesting.

Confidence and selling ability go hand in hand. Building confidence can be tricky, but having a good understanding of your product, your competition, and the most effective sales techniques can help build that confidence and make an average sales rep into a star performer. A good training program for your sales reps can help them in numerous ways. You need to conduct training not only about your own products, services, company history, and existing clients, but also about selling techniques, technology, and software.

Ongoing and useful sales training is one of the most beneficial things you can do for your sales staff. It can have tremendous impact on sales and keep your staff "on their toes" as far as new and potential client needs and new techniques in the sales world go. By ongoing, we don't just mean annual training. For many companies, annual is the most they ever do, but the real benefits come with more regularly scheduled training sessions that build on each other. For instance, you may choose to talk about a specific sales technique as it applies to your product line in the first session, and then build a cross-selling technique onto it in the next session.

Keys to Successful Training

The keys to making your sales training effective lie partially in how you present the training to your staff. One of the most important things to get across is how this training is going to increase your reps' sales, as well as benefit the company. In other words, what's in it for them? Make specific statements about how using this new technique can improve the percentage of closed sales by X% (Of course, making sure you know your statistics is important, too!). Or, how it can improve customer satisfaction by X%, which will in turn pull more sales from those happy customers.

Another key element of your training is making it interesting and entertaining. You don't want your staff snoozing through your brilliant PowerPoint presentation any more than they want their prospects snoozing through theirs! Make sure you (or whomever you hire) are entertaining enough to keep everyone awake, and more importantly, interested!

Give specific examples about how to use the new techniques. Tell stories that realistically reflect your product and market. Be overly prepared for questions and have multiple scenarios in mind to illustrate your points. Make all of your training information specific to your product and your market.

Make sure everyone participates. What they "do," they "learn." Simply listening to an idea about how something should be done is never as effective as practicing it. Also, encourage participation in the discussion. Have everyone come in with a list of questions from prospects that have stumped them, as well as some answers they've given that have landed the sale. Then have discussions about these problems and keep track of the solutions that come up.

Handouts (or e-mails) that recap some of the best ideas that were generated from the meeting can be sent out for reference later. You can also use this information to build a database of questions and answers that can be accessed electronically when a sales rep is stumped.

Some final points in training include:

For more information on building a sales team and related topics, check out the links on the next page.