Top Business Tips for Hiring the Right Salesperson

Hiring the right people is one way to encourage long-term business success and also reduce employee turnover, saving your business time and money. Hiring the right people can seem like a highly daunting prospect for many businesses, especially for entrepreneurs looking to build a solid team for their new brand.

Ensuring you hire the right person for the job is critical, no matter whether it’s a marketing assistant, a receptionist, a customer service contact, or an accountant. One area where it’s particularly crucial nonetheless is with a salesperson. This person — or team of people — is going to be responsible for chasing leads, driving sales, and ultimately succeeding in making a profit.

With this in mind, here are some top tips to get it right.

Set Your Wants, Needs, and Expectations

With sales comes a lot of potential, which means a high number of applicants and the need to wade through a great number of applications. While interest in the position is, of course, a good thing, you need to make sure you’re not wasting valuable business hours looking through candidate resumes that simply aren’t a good fit.

Setting strict requirements of what you’re looking for before advertising and interviewing will help you to stay focused and only receive applications from those people who fit the bill. Not only will this help you to preserve business time, but it’ll also prevent you from wasting the time of candidates too.

Experience May Not Be Everything

Of course, the ideal candidate might be someone who understands the sales cycle in detail, has a lifetime of successful sales experience, and is an exceptional people person. However, if you’re setting too much store by experience, you may be missing out on a compassionate people-person who has a great rapport with customers and the potential to shine with the proper training.

All of this will depend on the time and resources you have for training up candidates with less experience, but if you do have the resources, you may want to be flexible about experience and think about people eager to develop their sales career who have great personalities (compared to someone with 30+ years sales experience whose personality may not fit your brand).

Look for People Who Understand Your Brand and Fit Your Ethos

While the ability to make sales and work hard is naturally key, you want your salesperson to be the perfect fit for your brand — both for the success of your company and to ensure that they can have a job they’re passionate about too. Sales work more easily when the brand representative truly believes in and aligns with what the company and product is all about. You could have a highly experienced and likable salesperson who simply doesn’t understand your brand’s mission, and this could be a problem over time.

If you want your potential clients to get excited about your product and invest in you, then the salesperson needs to be someone who genuinely feels that way, too.