Demystifying Sales Hiring - collaborative study between Mettl and SHRM India
In today’s complex world, organizations are changing at a rapid pace. Business leaders across industry verticals want nothing but fast and sustainable growth. This results in huge targets for the back-bone of any organization, which is the Sales Team.
These pressures are complemented with highly demanding, technology-empowered and information-rich customers who are redefining traditional selling. For many sales organizations, selling has evolved from traditional product pitches to a more customized, highly tailored, and/or customer-focused solution pitches. An important block in ensuring organizations grow at the desired rates and sell to these new-age customers is by building winning sales team.
The sales representatives, who are the face of any organization, need to be a step ahead of their customers to close the deal and meet business objectives at the same time. This challenge of building winning sales team isn’t a simple task. HRs who are assigned this humongous task are struggling to meet the expectations from their sales leaders. Since sales is a complex job, it might come across as difficult to fully understand every sales role in its entirety. Even the job description varies drastically across organizations and at times even within organizations.
From the person selling a shoe in a store to a person selling complex aircraft solutions – all are at the end of the day “Salespeople”. HRs and sales leaders need to understand which competencies make their top performers successful. These competencies then must be replicated to resolve multiple issues faced by HRs across employee life cycle ranging from shortlisting the right people out of the shrinking talent pool to hiring the best-fit candidate for organization’s unique requirements to on-boarding these right people quickly to keeping them motivated and ensuring regular trainings for better productivity as well as returns on investments.
There have been attempts by others to understand and break down sales job roles in the past. Some have looked at the approach that a salesperson takes (his or her personal style) when dealing with clients and closing transactions. These studies have classified salespersons as Hunters and Farmers. Others have classified them
Below are some of the key findings which were uncovered from our survey of 1600+ sales professionals across industries in the 2016-17:
1. Hiring the right talent emerged as one of the top 3 growth drivers to improve the performance of sales across industry, company size, buyer type (B2B/B2C).
2. Teams invest inadequate time to know why their top performers are successful in their organization.
3. High performing teams focus more on competency based hiring & analytics and performance forecasting when compared to low performing managers.
4. Many organizations don’t use simple tools like online assessments and structured interviews for hiring the right sales executive effectively.
These insights provided enough evidence to the fact that HRs must not only spend adequate time in identifying critical competencies for their unique requirements but also use well researched tools to ensure they do this at scale using state of the art technology.
