How to hire your next Sales Person

So you have made the decision to hire new salespeople!

First off, congratulations! Every successful business needs an amazing digital sales team!

For the purposes of this article, we will assume your sales process and customer journeys are mapped and working well

Let's face it, if they are not yet in place, adding new salespeople will make your job much tougher than it is already

So, let's ask a few other basic questions to get started...

• Do you want to provide updated digital sales training or do you want your hires ready to go??
• Are you hiring more analog people or do you want digital professionals who can grow customers in today's digital world?
• Is it your plan to provide customers and leads or do you want your sales team to develop at least some of their own??

These are critical questions that must be answered as it radically changes the skills you need

Let's face it, the old days of traditional selling are over, but most salespeople are still using traditional methods

So, if like most companies you want your salespeople to be contributing to new customer acquisition while growing existing customers then you are looking for very specific digital skills you may not yet be aware of...

So what do you look for in order to ensure your applicants are ready for the digital world?

Let's review a shortened list of digital skills, activities, and attributes to look for:

1) Do they have compelling profiles on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or on any other social media channels where your customers frequent??(based on your mapped out customer journeys)

• By compelling I mean, complete and interesting with a personal touch or flare and definitely not in the form of a resume!

2) Do they have a reasonable network of connections and followers that they can be adding new business through on behalf of your organization??

• Each digital channel is different but there are minimums you should be aware of so that you are not spending much more time and expense training than you expect
• As one example for a more experienced salesperson, you would want to know they had a network of at least 1K + connections on LinkedIn, this should be a question on your application and can be easily confirmed

3) Are they active on any or all of the key digital channels?

• By active I mean, liking, sharing, and engaging on relevant content to your industry, again another very easy element to confirm

4) Have they posted, written, and or created their own content on any or all of the relevant digital channels??

• This is likely the key differentiator between a successful digital salesperson and a work in progress
• This is very easily seen and checked on any of their profiles and is the difference between them having industry credibility or not?
• No content is No credibility with them relying 100% on the digital content and marketing of your organization
• Again, this is fine if that is your expectation, but if not...the learning curve is steep and most of today’s analog salespeople will not make the climb!?

5) How do they communicate with their customers and networks today??

• If all their communication today is by phone and or email, you have an analog salesperson
• If some or most of their communication is via LinkedIn, Twitter, Messenger, WhatsApp, etc… you may have a digital-ready salesperson
• Again this is something that can be easily seen in any of their profiles?

6) Last and most important…how have they been developing leads and new business to date?

• The key to this question is to ask them to walk you through their current sales process, without jumping in to save them!
• This will very quickly eliminate all the analog sales applicants from your process if you have not determined this already
• For example, if they rely on email marketing and company-generated leads to follow up … you have your answer!

So, are you going to hire more analog salespeople or are you going to hire salespeople who are ready to go in today’s digital world??

Lastly, for those of your salespeople whom you would like to become digital, we can help

Either way, let’s talk so that your next investment in salespeople returns real digital results!

Contact Thomas

• LinkedIn?
• Website
• Twitter
• Facebook

Contact Social Selling HQ

• twitter
• LinkedIn
• Facebook