5 Ways to Transform Your Sales Talent Management Strategy
Categories: Talent Management
Creating a process behind your sales talent management strategy can lower turnover, decrease time-to-productivity and improve sales team bench strength. Unfortunately, talent management is likely on the bottom of the list for most sales managers, as they deal with revenue goals, forecasts and endless administrative burdens.
As a sales leader, if you’re struggling with hiring and retaining the top performers, you likely need to develop the necessary tools that help you hire consistently and coach for success.
Here are five ways to improve your sales talent management strategy:
1. Develop a Success Profile
A success profile is not a job description. Rather it defines the traits of a top-performing seller at your company. The more detailed you are at defining your ideal employee, the easier it will be to match the right person to the job. The success profile provides the base for the rest of your talent management, helping you onboard, manage and plan for promotions.
2. Improve Your Interview Skills
Once you’ve developed a success profile, an interview guide will help your front-line managers identify the characteristics that lead to successful hires. The resume is a good conversation starter, but it likely focuses on accomplishments instead of competencies and skills. An interview guide can help you ask questions designed to verify competencies, behaviors and look for patterns of success.
3. Understand Why New Hires Fail
An effective on-boarding process can make the difference between new hire success and failure. Think of on-boarding as an on-going process over 6-12 months. Work with new hires to create their own action-plans and reassess them often. Set the expectation that they own their own on-boarding. Provide weekly status updates on progress, and that you expect they will ask for what they need.
4. Manage for Success
Developing valid and measurable assessments like coaching guides and review templates will help your managers coach sales performance and identify those sellers best fit for growth. This approach promotes employee satisfaction because talented individuals are encouraged to advance and are recognized and rewarded for the value they provide to the organization. It also creates consistency around organizational standards and procedures, which improves accountability.
5. Retain High Performers
Setting clear expectations is a critical, fundamental thread running through that runs throughout the entire employee experience. If employees know what’s expected of them, they have a benchmark to measure their own performance. At the same time, developing a process for building a leadership pipeline ensures appropriate bench strength to support future business growth.
How much did your last bad hire cost you? How many top sellers you are you losing to the competition? How is that impacting your business?
Look at the numbers and we’re confident you’ll see how making a small investment in developing your talent management process will pay big dividends in the long run.
Get started now. Download our Talent Management eBook.
