The goal of hiring new salespeople is always simple: to increase sales. However, making that happen is a lot more challenging. Hiring the wrong salespeople will eat at profits, damage customer relationships, and can lead to a bad reputation in the marketplace. Your sales team is not merely responsible for building up your bottom line. They are also the people who have the most contact with customers. To those customers, the sales team is the company. That’s why it’s important to know what to look for when building a sales force.
Type of Experience Matters
While industry experience is extremely important, it’s critical to seek out software salespeople with the right type of industry experience. It’s important to look for candidates who have a strong track record in organizations that are similar to yours in terms of size, notoriety, and customer type. Think for a moment about car dealerships. It would be difficult to take a high-performing salesperson out of a Toyota dealership and drop that person into a Porsche dealership and expect them to be successful. The nature of each type of car deal is different, and while the salesperson may be extremely talented, they may flounder when it comes to selling luxury performance vehicles when they are used to selling family cars.
The same can be true of enterprise software salespeople. It might seem like a big “win” to score new sales staff from well-known, brand names in the marketplace, but if your organization is smaller and lesser-known, those salespeople may struggle. Why? Because in their previous position those salespeople probably did not have to educate prospects too much on the products they sold, nor would they have had to spend much time building trust in the company – with big names, prospects are already familiar with what they’re buying. Small companies, new companies, and niche companies need salespeople who are experts in the early stages of the sales cycle, and who are rock stars when it comes to relationship-building, and larger, well-established companies need top-notch closers.
Identifying the Right Experience
Knowing how to identify the right industry experience for your enterprise software company can be more complicated than it seems. It means understanding your customers, and learning about the things that they expect from your product, your organization, and your sales team. It means knowing where to look to find the right people, and it also being able to lure them away from their current position – because most talented salespeople are actively employed.
That’s where Strategic Search Solutions can help. We are a niche recruiting agency that focuses our efforts on the enterprise software niche. We can help you find, attract, and hire the right team to help drive sales and move your business forward. If you need help building a team of sales rock stars with the right type of industry experience to be successful, contact us today to learn more about our process.