Where to find Salespeople

My thinking on this topic is at first glance not the general consensus. Any description and insight provided is drawn directly from my time as a tree/landscape business owner and my experiences therein. I can not tell you what will work for you, I can only describe what worked for me and other business owners in my network.

For the purposes of clarity, I break sales hires into two main groups using a sports analogy:

1. Trades - Those employees currently working the role we seek to hire for. Think salespeople with industry experience.
2. Draft Picks - Those candidates with little to no experience but have the raw talent and character that aligns with your values. 

I will describe some best practices I found to be helpful in each of these 2 groups.

Trades

Before I jump into how/ where to look for salesperson “trades” I want to describe my experience in doing so and why I do recommend it. 

When I went to hire my first project manager/sales estimator, I approached the process much like many others - looking for a Trade. I thought I needed to find a person with specific industry experience who is selling in their current role. I narrowed my criteria and arrived at the following “must-haves”:

• 10 years business experience 
• Multi-years selling in the landscape/tree care field
• Local to my area
• Is unhappy in their role/ with current company
• Oh and who is in my budgeted price range (which was mid-range compensation at the time)

I did the logical first step, drop a job ad on Craigslist, ZipRecruiter, Indeed and sit and wait for my dream candidate to show up on a silver platter in my inbox. After MANY interviews I selected the candidate that checked as many of the above criteria boxes as possible. I feel for a very common trap. The trap of “abdication” instead of “delegation. Abdication is the subtle habit of task-dumping as I call. This is where you defer responsibility to an employee without any parameters or expectations in place. This strategy essentially is a “hope for the best” scenario. 

I assumed that experience automatically meant hands off management. I took the quick fix of dumping the role on this new hire without better understanding the why, how and what I expected from it.

This hire, as I would learn later, turned out to have all the tell tale signs of not being the right fit for my company. What I perceived as “experience” was nothing more than a massively inflated ego with 10 years of bad habits. The factor I did not consider is that an employee might have years of experience in a role with a different company but that company may not share your values and expectations. 

I sent this employee out as the ambassador for my business without any real standards or explanation of my expectations. 

I found myself having to unteach several deeply ingrained habits that turned out to be very difficult to overcome. So much so that I ultimately decided that this individual was not the right fit for my business. The ironic fact is the time I thought I was saving by not documenting and outlining this role ended costing my twice that when I had to let go this employee and restart the process over again a few months in.

With all that said, I still believe ‘trades” can be a viable option for hiring salespeople so let’s look at some best practices for doing so.

Define detailed Job description

• In the “How to structure a sales hire article” mentioned above, I go into detail about this process. The important thing to understand is that expectations are everything and they start at the initial job post interaction. Spend adequate time crafting a job description that clearly communicates the position, the hours, your management style, what is in it for them and the type of personal skills required for the job. While you want to write your job post as a marketing piece, you also want to hit home and resonate perfectly with your ideal candidate. To do this, specific job details help paint the best picture.

What is your offer

• When hiring, you are competing with other companies in your market for the attention and commitment of prospective candidates. Things like compensation, perks and benefits are all factors that the candidate is going to consider in their decision. Be forthright about these items and try to make them as compelling as possible. Ideally you want to offer compensation that aligns with your company’s values and vision. For example, let’s say one of your core values is Customer Success. You could have part of your salesperson package that every 5-star review that your company gets from a job they sold, they get an extra $100 kicker for example. This shows you are serious about your integrity and measure performance against these values.

Tell a better story

• Like your offer, you are in the business of convincing candidates that your company is worth choosing over another. The story you tell about your business directly correlates to the quality of your hires and your retention of employees. A good place to start is to look at recruiting videos on Youtube. Organizations like the US Armed forces, Chic-fila, Enterprise Rent-a-car, and Southwest Airlines all do a great job of captivating interest in working for their company through enticing videos. Take notice of the language, the tonality, the focus on team-building and career advancement. These groups, spend millions of dollars crafting marketing messages that resonate with young-adults seeking fulfillment and a next step in their career trajectory.

Get Creative

• As mentioned, using videos and testimonials from current employees can be a great way to paint a vivid picture of what it would be like to work for your company. Because you are one of many companies seeking experienced candidates attention, traditional job ads and recruiting may not differentiate your company enough. Get creative. Can you hold a fun after-hours event in your community to gather groups of arborists or those working in your field? Host an axe-throwing event, a happy hour, a bowling night, BBQ. Anything that gets like-minded industry people together to get talking and sharing your business name with the community. Events like this can be an excellent way to draw interest and start conversations to gauge where experienced employees are and find those that would consider a change in companies. 

Draft Picks

My preferred method of finding salespeople, particularly in the current economic climate, is to create them. The idea of finding “trades” may be very useful in speeding up the learning curve and training period, but in my experience it is not the easiest strategy to sustain. Most green industry companies focus on a relatively small geographic market therefore the pure odds of continuously finding qualified and experienced salespeople are slim.

If you look at the most successful companies, they all focus on a home-grown, promote within, corporate university strategy. This is because they recognize that it is much more scale-able and controllable to focus on the creation of a sales hiring system rather than constantly searching for the needle in the haystack employees. 

You have probably heard the old adage: 

“Hire for character, train for skill.” 

This statement to me, reigns as an excellent guiding principle for any business. In the green industry, we tend to inflate the level of complexity involved in what it takes to sell work in our businesses. We know that it has taken us years to craft our knowledge and instincts in our field and we can often have a difficult time rationalizing how we would translate those years of experience to the untrained eye. 

I would urge you to take a step back and try to look at your business objectively. The analogy I like to use is to think about the medical field… surgeons in particular. In the matter of a short set of years, medical schools can take a relatively untrained young person and teach them mind-bogglingly complex surgical procedures that save lives. There is arguably no more life-or-death occupation than this. I bring this up to say, taking a step back to realize that we are not teaching someone rocket science here. This is not intended to belittle our industry but actually designed to inspire and take the pressure off a bit.

The point is, your new hires are going to mess up, under price work, unknowingly piss off customers and just plain drop the ball. Take comfort in the fact that this is not life and death and that there are huge opportunities for growth and learning in these failures. Look for individuals with high levels of character and that mirror the values that are important to your organization. Those with the right combination of characters and the things you value, can be trained on the technical excellence you seek. 

Places to look for character:

Restaurants 

The food service industry in particular breeds a certain type of personality and skillset. It provides someone like a waiter a high exposure to volumes of people from all walks of life. People are very particular about their food and a waiter is seeing people on their happiest days and sometimes their worst. This industry requires a waiter to be an active listener and detail oriented. Waiters need to be understanding, flexible and willing to think on their feet. 

One of the major drawbacks of the food service industry is the hours - typically nights and weekends. This can be a tough schedule that is hard to sustain for those with children or social lives for that matter. 

Gyms

Gyms and any other gathering place of active people presents a great opportunity to meet potential quality hires. Being that the work we do is physical and requires mental toughness, gyms do some of the screening for you. An active, regimented gym-go-er is typically someone of discipline and focus. 

If you are looking to hire a sales arborist or estimator that will be actively out in the field, walking, climbing and bending down, it would only benefit you to have an employee who would thrive in that environment. 

Take notice of the time of day that they attend the gym. Are they going before work? If so strict up a conversation and find out more about what they are doing. You would be amazed at how many people hate their job and would love to have a job that keeps them outdoors and mobile.

Volunteers

Among the millennial population, there is a significant interest in eco-consciousness and the impact humans are having on the planet. Search your local community for groups that volunteer, clean up litter, perform maintenance on parks etc. Within these groups you may find personalities that 1. Enjoy the outdoors 2. Respect and strive to maintain green spaces. This can be a great launching pad for individuals to start a career in arboriculture or horticulture. 

 A good way into this group would be to join their cause and start volunteering right beside them. Lead through your actions and show this cause resonates with you as well. As these individuals start to see the impact they are making at their local level, you may be able to strict up a conversation about their long term goals to see if they have ever considered taking this passion and making it a career.

Students

Often overlooked are young people with limited work experience. Local community colleges, universities and even tech schools may have Horticulture or green initiative-focused programs. These are more often than not a completely untapped talent pool. These are students with ambition and a defined interest in the green industry. As a whole we have done a poor job of marketing the green industry as a desirable and even feasible career path. This means that students interested in these fields may have never even thought of working for a private tree or landscape company. 

Professors and course creators are always looking for case studies about real world industry-specific trends. Reach out to local programs and directors to see if you might have some insight or even if there is an opportunity to do a brief presentation on how their curriculum can practically tie in to factors you are facing.

Of course an interest in arboriculture/horticulture is not the only pool to tap into here. When it boils down to it, if we are looking for a high performing sales person we should consider 

Internships

Expanding upon the student market, those working with young adults are always searching for suitable, real-world internship programs to offer their students. You can structure a very simple, short term internship that allows you to take on temporary help while learning more about how you want to tweak the position for someone full time. 

Internships can be over the Summer busy season allowing you to take on an extra set of hands at a low cost. Students looking for internships for the most part will be entering in with a hunger to learn and grow professionally. Most universities and educational organizations will have a structured set of guidelines as to what an internship will have to look like. There will usually be deliverables, reports and action items that they require you to submit to show the interns performance and what they are gaining from the experience. 

If you can target individuals with an interest in arboriculture/horticulture, it should not be a stretch at all to give them exposure to all aspects of your business: field operations, estimating, admin, back office etc.

Be sure you approach the internship as it is intended, a short term gig giving the individual a taste of what it would be like to work in this industry.