Who Are You Taking #1 In Your Fantasy Sales Draft?!

When you are building your sales team, you might look at it through a similar lens of building your Fantasy Football team. The National Football League season starts this tonight but all of the Fantasy Football leagues have already chosen their teams. After much research and a live draft, all the teams are chosen and the head to head match-ups are about to be underway. If you are like my league, you have a prize (cash and bragging rights) for the winner and repercussions for the losing team. So how do you recruit sales talent that will crush your competitors sales team – aka – build a fantasy roster that is reality. 

Step 1: Know Who You Want

Just like picking a fantasy team you need to determine what kind of person you need on your team. Do you want them to come from a sales background, inside sales, outside sales, etc? Do they need to have certain characteristic traits? I would look internally for these answers, take a look at your top performers and the skills, personality and background they come from. Don’t reinvent the wheel, use what works and replicate it. 

Step 2: Have a Clear Process to Get Them Into Your Pipeline

Once you know what you want, you need to determine your process. You do not want to start interviewing qualified candidates if you do not have a seamless process. The interview process needs to be determined and have buy in from all internal colleagues that will affect your hiring decisions. You will not find and hire those top sales professionals without a clearly defined process.

Step 3: Move Them Through Your Pipeline With Urgency

Now you know who you want and you have the right process to get top sales candidates into your interview process. Again, just like your Fantasy Football draft, you need to move with urgency on the players you want on your team. If you do not move with urgency in this job market, another company will swoop in and take your top sales candidates. 

Step 4: Sell Them!

The next step will be to close out the process. You have to put your ego aside and sell your company and your role. Why should a top sales candidate choose your opportunity? You cannot be afraid to make the sale to create your dream team roster! 

Step 5: Make The Offer

The offer stage seems straight forward but on many occasions we have seen it fall apart here. Companies don’t have all their ducks in order which goes back to step 2.  When you have a clear process you ensure success. If you have a top candidate, they likely have multiple offers on the table. If you have done a great job in steps 1-4, don’t let a slow or broken offer stage ruin all the work you just did. Extend the verbal offer to gain verbal acceptance. Then in a timely fashion, send the written offer with an expiration date to create urgency on both parties.  

Step 6: Don’t Stop Networking

Keep going! You have made your sales hire(s) but you always want to be networking and filling your pipeline. If you have a network of top candidates, you will make this process easier as you scale your sales team. 

Conclusion

If you find yourself struggling with one or more of these steps and cannot seem to grow your sales team the way you need to, call Treeline. We are the Nation’s experts in sales recruiting and we can help you find qualified, interested and available candidates within 3 days of launching a search with us.