Expert Tips for Combining Sales and Recruiting Strategies

Higher sales rep turnover rates across industries appear to be the norm in the field. Why does sales hire seem like a revolving door?  

Reasons can include a lack of structure in the onboarding process or poor management, but more often than not, it’s due to ineffective hiring practices. Combining sales and recruiting strategies to hire top sales talent can be an effective tool in finding and maintaining a top-performing sales team for your company.  

Sales and Recruiting: A Powerful Combination  

Sales and recruiting have a lot in common—they’re both about building and maintaining strong relationships, understanding needs, and offering solutions. Combining them effectively can lead to a stronger sales force, increased revenue, and sustained business growth. We’ve put together some expert tips on how to blend sales and recruitment. It's all about making your search for top-tier sales reps easier and helping you slow down the revolving door of staff turnover. Let’s get started.  

Why Blend Sales and Recruiting Strategies? 

One of the key reasons sales and recruiting strategies are a necessary combination—the alarming salesperson turnover statistics. The average annual turnover in sales is 25 to 30%. High turnover rates can be costly and disrupt business. That’s why by adopting a holistic hiring approach with sales and recruiting strategies at the forefront, you can mitigate turnover and cultivate a stable, productive sales force. Here are a few tips to get started.  

Expert Secrets for Winning at Sales and Recruiting 

Exit interview research has shown that a primary cause of both poor sales performance and turnover is based on behavior, or more specifically, poor job fit. Instead of worrying about candidates that don’t quite fit the role, sales and recruiting teams can collaborate to create the ideal candidate profile for the salesperson position. Together, they can define the behaviors, characteristics, and skills necessary to fit the job description while aligning with your company’s culture and values.   

Encourage continuous communication and collaboration between your sales and recruiting teams. For example, they can start by sharing insights, challenges, and feedback to help refine the candidate sourcing and selection process and improve onboarding structure and mentorship to drive better sales results. 

Salespeople are at the forefront with knowledge about both the products and customers. So, they have firsthand experience about what it takes to succeed as part of your sales team. Tap into their expertise by involving them in the recruiting process. Empower them to provide feedback on candidates or participate in interviews to assess cultural fit and sales capabilities. 

Make sure your job ads are clear and compelling. Talk about the skills the job needs, but also mention how much the job focuses on sales. You want to grab the attention of the best candidates. It's also a good idea to talk about how the sales team helps the company succeed and the chance for people to grow in their jobs. This will get top salespeople excited to join. 

Consider using sales assessments during the hiring process, such as sales aptitude tests, role-play simulations, sales personality assessments, or behavioral interviews. These tools can help you evaluate a candidate's sales abilities, competencies, and potential fit within your sales team. 

Salespeople are in it to make money for the company and for themselves, as the higher the sales, the higher the commissions. Incentivize referrals to encourage your sales team to refer potential candidates from their network. How can you promote referrals? Offer bonuses, a point-based referral system, and celebrate your most successful referrers. Find a way that resonates best with your sales team, your culture, and your values. 

Tracking and analyzing data will help you gain insights into your sales recruitment strategies and find areas for improvement. Some metrics to track and analyze include time-to-fill, performance, sales turnover rates, and the success rate of hires to measure the effectiveness of your hiring process  

A company’s reputation is everything, so developing and maintaining a strong brand will help you attract top sales candidates. Showcase your company's workplace culture, values, and success stories on your social media channels, website, and employee testimonials. 

Learn More From Our Hiring Experts 

If your business faces high turnover rates, use these expert tips for combining sales and recruiting strategies to help you hire and retain talented salespeople. Our sales recruiting team at Hire Velocity can also help, as we have proven methods for talent acquisition to ensure companies find the right candidates for open sales positions.  

Contact us today to learn more from our experts.