Sales Talent Management: The High Cost of a Bad Hiring Decision

If you’re like most sales managers, you’re constantly taking shortcuts with the time you spend on sales talent management. In many sales organizations, activities associated with managing people often get put on the back burner either because we are uncomfortable handling them or because we’re too busy reacting to seemingly more pressing problems.

Unfortunately, taking shortcuts in these key processes can bring negative consequences to your sales organization, including negative impacts to your bottom line. 

Sales leaders need a process that helps them drive success in these key areas of sales talent management:

• Identifying and Recruiting New Hires
• Equipping New Hires with the Skills to Achieve a Reasonable Ramp-Up Time
• Managing Performance
• Developing and Retaining Top Sales Talent 
• Planning for Future Bench-Strength/Succession

The due diligence spent building a high-performance sales team saves both time and money. Nothing provides better proof of effective people management than a simple scenario that calculates ineffective people management.

We all can think of an example – someone you hired who didn’t work out or someone on your current team who’s not working out now. To identify the bottom line costs to your company, it’s pretty simple to do the math. We’ve plugged in a hypothetical example using a B2B sales organization with approximately 500 sales reps worldwide.

You Do the Math:

• How long does it take to find a sales rep? (Probably 2-3 months)
• How long does it take to recruit and on-board them? (3 months)
• How long does it take to find out they aren’t the right person? (3 additional months)
• How long does it take to off-board them and re-recruit? (2 – 3 months)
• What do I expect out of an average territory annually? ($1.5M)
• Now, what about your time? How much of your time has been required in the process thus far? 
• What about your team dynamics? This kind of situation is sure to have an impact on the rest of your sales team. 

Any way you slice it, it’s a costly, frustrating scenario that no sales manager wants to deal with, but most of us have to. 

If your sales organization hasn’t defined the DNA of your top performers, then your hiring profiles are likely off-target. Start by asking the top performers on your sales team these three questions:

1. How would you define success in your current sales role?
2. What specialized knowledge do you have?
3. What particular skills and behaviors make you successful?

Once you determine the traits your top performers have in common, you can create a specific success profile for any person in the same role. Now when you consider new candidates, you will be able to assess them against the top performers in your sales organization.

Developing a Success Profile can help you discover not only what type of person will be successful in a sales role in your organization, it can also provide a tool to guide your talent management processes throughout on-boarding, performance management, development and retention -- producing consistent sales performance, reduced turnover and faster time to productivity.