Five Mistakes Businesses Make When Hiring Sales Staff

The lifeblood of any product-driven company is a good sales staff that can peddle its products to whatever markets have been primed through good marketing. Hiring a quality sales staff is far from easy, though. It takes a particular skill set to be good at sales, and more, it takes knowledge of the company's mission and product. Many growing businesses struggle to put the right people in place in these roles, turning their sales team into a revolving door of entering and leaving salespeople. Here are five mistakes young businesses make when trying to hire salespeople. 

Valuing networks over skills

Many growing companies want to produce results right away. This is fair, but it also causes mistakes in hiring. For instance, some might hire a person with a good looking network rather than a person with the skills to develop sustainable sources of business. While having a network that one can exploit is a good thing, it's not sustainable. Smart businesses hire people because they have the skills to develop new networks. Just hiring a person based upon their existing network puts the company at risk. What happens when a salesperson exhausts his existing network? Sustainability should be your concern when making sales hires. 

Failure to communicate expectations

Simply hiring a person is only the first step. As a leader, you have to communicate your expectations for your sales professionals. They should know what financial incentives they need to hit in order to be profitable. If you're giving those professionals the tools to be successful, then they should be able to achieve their goals quickly. If you don't set your goals, you run the risk of having people become complacent, however. Many smart business owners are doing more than just setting direct financial incentives. They are setting activity expectations. Rather than saying that a person needs to sell $1,000 per day, you might say you expect the person to make 60 sales calls per day. Focusing your expectations on the process rather than the result is a recipe for success. 

Going with too much-guaranteed salary

As a growing business, you should be looking to incentivize high performance. Salespeople understand that their job is to sell, and many like the idea that they can make great money by performing well. If you pay big base salaries without giving performance incentivizes, you'll take on all the risk without realizing any of the upsides that come from incentivizing your staff. Focus instead on low base salaries with high-performance bonuses. This will push your sales staff to be better every single day. 

Forgetting about the company culture

It is common to see executives view their sales staff as being somehow disconnected from the larger mission of the company. This can lead to cultural mismatches, where a laid-back company hires a high-tension salesperson. With every single hire you make in a growing company, you need to think about how he or she contributes to the culture you're trying to build. Just because a salesperson works mostly out of the office or all day long on the phone does not mean you can forget about culture. If the person doesn't fit, they will become a problem for you down the road. 

Hiring salespeople who don't know the product or service

Being good at sales is about more than just having a good personality and outgoing nature. It's also about being able to communicate precisely how a product or service fills the need of a customer. This isn't possible unless a salesperson has intimate knowledge of the inner workings of a product. Many good companies find their salespeople from a pool of their best customers. The best-equipped sales professionals are usually those people who have previously been loyal customers of the company. 

Business owners should see the opportunity to hire as one of the most exciting things they do. Every employee has a chance to bring something special to help grow the company. With sales staff, you have to be more careful. Not every person has the ability to sell, and many managers have less ability to identify quality sales talent. Avoid these five mistakes and you'll be on your way to success in this realm.