Attracting Sales Talent: A Marketing Approach to Hiring

Hiring the right people is crucial to the success of your business. This is particularly true when it comes to your sales department. According to a study conducted by McKinsey & Company, sales experience accounts for as much as half of a company’s value creation.

But hiring the right salespeople is easier said than done. It's not enough to simply look for candidates with experience and a good track record. You need salespeople who are motivated, believe in your product, and are willing to put in the effort to drive growth.

At Refocus, we treat the process of hiring salespeople like a marketing funnel for attracting leads: we attract candidates, warm them up as leads, and hire only the best of the best. As a result, only 4% of candidates are taken in, which leads to the constant growth of the conversion rate. For example, last month we managed to increase it by 20%.

Here’s how to build a system to attract salespeople effectively and constantly grow your sales force.

Build a landing page

Just as in marketing, when attracting clients, the landing page should highlight your benefits and make people willing to become your employees. Particularly, it should shed light to why it's great to work for your company and what benefits the position will give. To ensure that your page is effective in attracting suitable candidates, you'll want to take a look at what your competitors are doing and see what works best for your industry.

Keep in mind that your goal is to show potential salespeople that they'll have the opportunity to make a real impact on people's lives by selling your product and that they'll have the support and resources to earn a high income. To create the landing page, you should analyze the best practices of your competitors, who have a powerful sales force and ensure that you can offer more than they do.

Here are some tips to keep in mind when creating your landing page:

• Make sure to showcase your company's mission and values
• Highlight the earning potential for salespeople
• Include social proof, such as testimonials, from satisfied salespeople
• Emphasize the training and support that your company provides
• Use compelling imagery and visuals to grab your audience’s attention

At Refocus, we found that investing in a landing page with strong messaging and social proof was essential to attracting the right salespeople. For our landing page, the conversion rate is about 1.5%. It’s a great result for any landing page, but in this case, it’s even better: people who convert are really motivated to become our salespeople and have much higher chances of passing the interview and getting accepted. However, it’s not obligatory to make a proper landing page: a Notion page will be just enough if it fully covers all the benefits you offer to your future employees.

Attract traffic and test the best combinations

Once you have a well-designed landing page in place, it's important to have a strategy for driving traffic to it. There are several channels you can use to lead potential salespeople to your page, including:

• Facebook and LinkedIn: These social media platforms are great for targeting specific demographics and job titles, making them ideal for reaching potential sales hires. For us, LinkedIn is the most effective in terms of attracting salespeople; however, this may vary from market to market.

• Paid job board listings: Websites like Indeed and JobStreet allow you to post your open positions for a fee, which can be a great way to attract candidates actively looking for work.

By focusing your recruitment efforts on warm leads who have already expressed interest in working as salespeople, particularly in your company, and have gotten acquainted with your mission, you can reduce the overall workload and cost of your recruitment efforts. Previously, recruiters had to spend days manually looking for candidates and reaching out, not knowing if they were actually interested in working in your company. But following this approach, effective hiring is always scalable by testing the best combinations of creative materials you use to attract people to your landing page.

In our case, only 23% of the people we invite to the next stages of recruitment are “cold” leads who were never contacted without materials, know nothing about the company, and were found by the recruiters.

Interview candidates in two steps

Interviewing salespeople is a crucial step in the hiring process. This is where you get to assess their skills, experience, and personality to see if they would be a good fit for your company. There are several key things to keep in mind when conducting interviews to ensure you find the right person for the job. Firstly, it's essential to structure the interview in a way that allows you to gather as much information as possible. At Refocus, we conduct a two-stage interview process.

The first stage is a group interview with an HR representative. During this interview, we ask candidates to do three things:

• Tell us about themselves and their experience in sales. If people are unable to “sell” themselves, they definitely won’t be able to sell such complicated products as ours.

• Role-play a sales scenario to see how they handle themselves under pressure. During this, we ask the candidate to sell us the product they used to sell at their previous workplace. This gives us a good sense of their communication skills, ability to think on their feet, and overall sales acumen.

• Tell us about their motivation. We ask candidates about their minimum, optimal, and desired income levels. This helps us weed out candidates who are not serious about their career in sales or are simply looking for a job to pay the bills. We also look for candidates who have a strong desire to succeed and are motivated by the potential to earn a high income. In certain regions, such as Asia, it's important to look for candidates who are breadwinners or who have a strong sense of responsibility to support their families.

  
  

The second stage of the interview process is a one-on-one interview with their future manager. This is an opportunity for the candidate to speak directly with someone who is experienced in sales and can provide more specific feedback on their abilities. During this interview, we ask more in-depth questions about their sales experience, including their successes and challenges. We also assess their compatibility with our company culture and values to ensure they will be a good fit for our team. Moreover, we ask about salary expectations once again: we are sure that people who want to earn only a minimum wage without performance bonuses will not become top performers.

These interviews weed out the largest part of candidates. Only 25% of the candidates pass the first stage, and 56% of the remaining get the offer after the interview with the Head of Sales.

Ultimately, the key to hiring successful top-performing salespeople is to find candidates who are not only skilled in sales but also have the motivation, drive, and cultural fit required to succeed in your company. By structuring your interviews in a way that allows you to assess these factors, you can ensure that you hire the right people to help grow your business. So, when the most motivated people are determined, we don't face the problem of them rejecting offers; as much as 89% do accept them.

Conduct an onboarding: test week

The onboarding process is just as necessary as the hiring process. At Refocus, we have automated the onboarding process to ensure that every new hire is given the same level of training and resources. We have created a sales academy where new hires can learn about our company and study the sales script. The academy and onboarding materials should be constantly updated; according to McKinsey, this process is one of the five most important factors for building an effective sales force.

During the test week, each new salesperson must make a minimum of two sales to the actual client from our cold base to prove they have what it takes to succeed. While one sale could be a fluke, two sales are a clear indication of skill and potential. The test week is crucial in ensuring that our sales team is made up of top performers who are capable of meeting the job’s demands.

However, if your system of hiring people is built effectively, you don't have to worry about having to fire people after the test week. For us, only one person from the 49 who are onboarded doesn't pass the test period. Moreover, in our model, it costs around $180 to attract one person — the cost which gets fully paid in just the test week.

Hire the best salespeople only!

Streamlining your sales team's hiring can and will have a significant impact on your business's success.

By automatizing the process and providing a comprehensive training program, you can ensure that your new sales hires are equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in their roles. This will result in improved productivity, increased revenue, and better overall team performance. We have conducted internal studies and found out that the motivation of salespeople directly affects their performance.

With the right approach, you can set your sales team up for long-term success and achieve your business goals.