Skills based sales recruitment - change the game and generate larger revenues.

How to recruit better sales executives who will generate larger revenues.

I was talking to a Sales Director today about the challenges of business development and recruiting great sales people, and explaining how our new skills based recruitment tool can help her. I decided to write an article off the back of this conversation, to highlight a key challenge and our solution.

The challenge.

We’ve all been there: Interviewing a natural extrovert, who is great at building relationships, takes control of the conversation, and persuades you that they are the right person for the job. The problem is, it’s frequently not true. Many salespeople talk a great game yet are unable to back it up. The churn in sales teams is always high.

We’ve become fed up reading CVs for salespeople who present a great image but can’t back it up in the role – and move (or are let go) every year or two. Head hunting great salespeople who are typically well rewarded is tricky, and often they aren’t open to new opportunities unless one of the following is true:

1. They are unhappy with the relationship with their line manager.
2. They are unhappy with the strategic direction of the business.
3. They are unhappy with changes to their package.

Everyone wants to recruit a great salesperson. You’ve got to pay to get someone who can hit the ground running, and that’s not always possible. Budgets are tight and paying someone more than existing team members can create issues.

From a recruitment perspective, it’s a tricky situation and we have the solution.

The solution.

WasteRecruit have designed a skills-based assessment that can be used to assess a candidate’s potential, whether they have previous experience in the sector or not. The assessment enables us to test any candidate who applies for the role, which means we can effectively ditch the CV and focus purely on candidates who achieved the desired level of performance.

This significantly widens your candidate pool and focuses on candidate behaviour and skills, rather than previous experience and knowledge of the sector. We know from our own experience (plus the research evidence) that previous experience in a role isn’t a great predictor of future performance.

Why does it work?

There’s a good chunk of science which sits behind our test, so forgive me if this is a bit nerdy. Don’t worry, all you need to know is that our skills-based assessment really works.

The assessment presents candidates with a variety of situations (including photos), some relating to pipeline management and some relating to non-pipeline management situations. They are given different options and asked which one best reflects how they would proceed.

There are no clear right or wrong answers and as a result this leads to choices that best align with their skills. This gives us an insight into how they will respond to those critical aspects of the role that determine successful outcomes and revenue generation.

Alignment with your culture.

The assessment can be benchmarked against an existing team, to ensure key values and behaviours are more heavily weighted than others. We know that some companies want their salespeople to approach the role in a slightly different way to others and we can adapt the assessment accordingly.

Call us today!

Whether it’s a single role, or multiple roles across the UK, WasteRecruit has a solution that will increase the performance of your sales team and generate larger revenues. Want to learn more? Call 01252 353 080 or email nick@wasterecruit.com for more information.