Hiring salespeople who will succeed and stick around is difficult enough, but add the complexity of technology-driven solution and/or services sales and you’ve got a whole other level of challenge on your hands. In fact, a recent Accenture/Burning Glass/Harvard Business School “Bridge the Gap” report found technical sales and sales management positions to be among the hardest in the work force to fill.
According to Harvard Business Review, many firms talk about talent management but few deal systematically with a basic fact: average annual turnover in sales is 25 to 30%. This means that the equivalent of the entire sales organization must be hired and trained every four years or so, and that’s expensive.
Consider these stats. Direct replacement costs for a telesales employee can range from $75,000 to $90,000, while other more complex sales positions can cost a company as much as $300,000. Moreover, these figures don’t reflect the lost sales while a replacement is found and trained. In sectors like medical devices, technical solutions, and many professional services, that total cost of turnover can rise to $1 million or more per event.
Bottom line is that companies typically spend more on hiring in sales than they do anywhere else in the organization. So how do you improve the returns on this investment? Here are some thoughts on hiring, training, and retaining the best technical salespeople for your organization:
1 – Know the Role: Hire for the Task
Selling effectiveness is not a generalized trait. It’s a function of the sales tasks, which vary according to the market, your product, your strategy, the stage of the business (i.e., startup or later stage), the customers targeted by your strategy, and buying processes at those customers.
Selling jobs vary greatly depending on the product or service sold, the customers a salesperson is responsible for, the relative importance of technical knowledge, and the people contacted during sales calls. As such, it’s critically important that hiring managers and talent acquisition facilitators fully understand the role before diving head first into a search.
2 – Reality Check: Simulations to Separate the Contenders from the Pretenders
Regardless of the size of your organization, it’s important that you introduce a reality check into the technical salesperson evaluation process in order to separate the contenders from the pretenders.
Even if the hiring manager has done or still does the job in question (thereby giving them a leg up on the evaluation), we’ve found that testing a candidate’s depth and breadth of relevant technical knowledge as well as their ability to establish rapport / credibility, accurately determine a prospective’s client’s needs (and overall situation – budget, readiness to buy, decision process, etc.) and connect the dots between said needs and solution attributes makes all the difference.
Oftentimes, we’ll schedule and record two or more reality-based simulated sales calls (or F2F meetings if more relevant) between candidates and “buyers” representing different aspects of the spectrum (highly knowledgeable vs. novices, open vs. closed-minded, decision maker vs. decision facilitator, etc.). Doing so can be quite revealing.
3 – Understand Indicators of Potential Success: Qualitative vs. Quantitative
Ignore past quantitative success, or lack thereof, at your own peril. Let’s be real, sales organizations are inherently performance-oriented and metrics-driven. Any sound evaluation process will include a deep dive into a prospective candidate’s track record as related to meeting sales goals, new account win rates, existing account retention and growth rates, personal OTE, and more. In doing so, be sure to understand the org structure of past or present employers to understand how their success has been facilitated by others. For example, your start-up software company might require a biz dev pro to generate their own leads, qualify prospects, produce their own presentations and proposals, and manage accounts from A-Z.
Just as we discussed above with task-based hiring, qualitative traits (adaptability, collaboration, empathy, motivation, reputation, resilience, sales intuition, target fixation) that lead to success in one organization may not drive similar outcomes at another. It’s important that hiring companies understand how to map their culture and selling style with those sales professionals they seek to hire. There are certainly plenty of behavioral, personality, and sales aptitude assessment tools out there from which to choose.
Per HBR, the best results, by far, occur when those making hiring decisions can observe the potential hires’ job behaviors and use a recruitment process based on a combination of factors including interviews, simulations, and assessment tools.
4 – Training: Play Nicely with Others and Get Your Hands Dirty
Sales professions tend to be extremely competitive, both internally and externally. There’s nothing wrong with fostering a competitive spirit, but not to the complete exclusion of collaboration.
A sales organization focused predominantly on competition often creates a culture of back stabbing, in-fighting and resource hoarding. People stop trusting each other and talented people walk out the door. If you want to create a culture that fosters innovation and produces breakthrough results, collaboration trumps competition by a long shot.
Your training program, particularly for those in technical sales, must embrace the same spirit of transparency and continuous improvement. This isn’t just about short-term onboarding, but rather about long-term professional growth and employee retention.
Technical sales team members should immerse themselves in the solutions they sell rather than just know the product data sheet. Involve them in the tasks they will encounter in working with customers. At HubSpot, Mark Roberge has sales hires spend a month in classroom-style training but also doing what their customers do: create a website from scratch and keep that site populated with relevant content. Roberge notes, “they experience the actual pains and successes of our primary customers: professional marketers who need to generate leads online. As a result, our salespeople are able to connect on a far deeper level with our prospects and leads.”
5 – Sales Compensation Model: Know No Limits
“Capping a salesperson’s quota is completely demotivational,” says sales trainer Steve W. Martin. In his research, he’s found “there is a correlation between not capping quotas and high performance.”
Understanding the business model, setting proper sales goals and OTE, and establishing a win-win scenario for exceeding said goals wherein both company and sales pro benefit are all critical to both attracting and retaining top technical sales talent.
