Role of Sales Leaders in Hiring a Top Sales Talent

Posted by C Rajasekaran on October 24th, 2022

Great sales leadership can make the difference between a mediocre and an outstanding sales company. A sales leader's responsibility not only focus on achieving revenue numbers but also on building a high-performing team.

Because a high-performing sales team will be the deciding factor in whether the organization will meet its sales revenue targets

Most leaders feel their role in hiring a top sales talent starts once the HR team has built the shortlisted pipeline and they are not ready to take any blame for any delay in sales hiring.

The sales leader’s role starts with your go-to-market strategy, based on which you have to create your sales talent strategy. This is based on analyzing what types of skill sets are required to perform the job to meet the desired outcome.

Sales leadership requires the ability to make strategic, big-picture decisions that drive the talent structure and need to follow the following.

• Create a job profile that outlines the mandatory skills and what would be the challenges in the role.
• Identify how to create a candidate pipeline—Who is accountable for this? Are we using our internal recruiters to build this or using some professional sales recruitment company for this?
• The end-to-end hiring process and who is accountable at each stage
• List down unique selling points for the role and communicate the same to recruiters and Sales recruitment agencies

The entire hiring process is the same as your sales process, wherein you will focus on who your prospects are, how you reach out, and focus on identifying needs and how your solution can solve them.

You have to focus on building the candidate pipeline and keep selecting the best talent from it.

It is always recommended to use multiple sales recruitment agencies that can focus on building the candidate pipeline, but it is the responsibility of sales leaders to communicate the ideal candidate expectations while building the pipeline.

As a sales leader, you will have absolute visibility of the status of a sales opportunity and what is required to close it. In the same way, you should know what it takes for good talent to join your organization. We have observed most of Sales leaders take time to shortlist and conduct the candidate assessment and finalize the right talent, but they feel it is not their role to convince a candidate to take the role.

They often think it will be the role of HR or the sales recruitment agency to sell the role and the brand. If the sales leaders put this extra effort into selling the role, then it will have a much bigger impact on hiring the right sales talent.

Most organizations think using an external recruitment agency adds to the hiring cost, and try to use internal resources to fulfill the sales roles. Delays in sales hiring cause a more significant impact on the bottom line than using a recruitment agency.

Sales leaders prioritize Sales opportunities when compared to the hiring process, which is a wrong approach. Your prospective candidates are like your sales leads where if you do not reach out on time or do not give a good experience during every touch point then this will fizzle out. Clearly, put a plan with a timeline and accountability and focus on the same.

Hiring a top sales talent is important for consistent revenue growth and to incorporate your success.