Hiring new sales reps may seem like an easy task. You will ask them about their previous experience, they will try to present themselves in the best light possible and you’ll start making decisions based on your hiring sixth sense.
Then in few weeks or months, your expectations won’t be met and you’ll inevitably start a war with your new hire and all because you didn’t explain upfront what it is that you want and what you can give them in return.
Hiring new employees would be so much easier if everyone just asked role-related questions right away and explained what is expected of a certain job title. At the same time, the employee will not be stressed due to unmet goals and will give his best effort to achieve company’s goals.
Sales Careers
HubSpot gives us more advice on how to hire managers in sales, this time with 7 questions that must be asked. For example, the candidate can tell you about the time they lacked skills to reach a certain goal, who are the team members they enjoyed working with and what would they do if they were given an unrealistic quota. By asking these problem-solving questions, instead of a plain overview of their biography, you will have a clear insight into their people and business skills, as well as ambitions and capabilities.
Business Development Managers find themselves in a very uncharted territory – the ever-evolving game of sales that needs to be played the best way possible in order to keep up. That is why Sales Hacker gives advice about setting weekly and monthly goals for your SDRs in order to meet the quota and even offers a free calculator to help you determine your success metrics.
First, set the list of activities your SDRs have to perform, then add them all to a SalesHacker calculator, make sure it’s not too much for your team and sort your priorities. Ensure your team knows exactly why those tasks are selected and why they need to complete them. Determine your ROI for each SDR and see if that is the metric that works for your business model.
HubSpot published two blogs about building good SDR team – knowing when you need it and the strategy of building it. You are ready to establish a sales team once you realize you have no more time to do the selling yourself or that you could exponentially grow your sales once you hire a little help. But don’t let them improvise. Instead, know your selling model and make sure you explain it to your future sales employees. However, before you start hiring, check whether you have enough time to coach them and introduce your sales methods to your new employees. Once they arrive for an interview, explain your expectations and incentives clearly so they know what to expect. This will make everything easier for both sides in the long run.
You may not be aware of it, but sales mindset can get you far. According to the latest Sales Handy blog, sales mindset can help you advance in your career more than you expected. First and foremost, it teaches you how to market yourself and grow your personal brand, making you more desirable as an employee. Secondly, it helps you focus on your customer’s needs which can help you sell more and better. Then, your customer centricity will inspire you to grow your business and think of new ideas and help you grow by teaching you the value of connections and networking, as well as being well informed about the industry trends and challenges. Finally, being a sales superhero means you build your strength more than any other business out there, knowing your boundaries are far bigger than you expected.
Sales Loft suggests you automate your sales processes in order to save time. For example, import certain type of contacts into CRM automatically, set notifications for prospects whose engagement with your email has increased significantly and automatically update the contact and account records.
Sell More With Right Email Addresses and Right Messages
Sales Handy offers a list of best tools for finding email addresses. The best of them being LinkedIn and Google search and tools like Findthat.email, Email Hunter and FindThatLead. They introduce us to the Wholes search which is an engine for researching domains giving you emails of CEOs and owners, while Email Permutator+ gives you suggestions based on the domain and name of a prospect.
Garett Mehrguth in his blog for Sales Hacker explains why good keyword research is essential to sales people as well. You have to find keywords for each stage of buyer’s journey and not just copy paste all the keywords you think are relevant to each page of your website. You have to know what keywords your customers are using depending on the phase of their journey. So research, research, research all the social media and Q&A websites you can until you get your answers.
Sales Handy says you can increase sales by 10 times just by writing good emails. The importance of subject line cannot be stressed enough, especially if you know 33% of email recipients open their email based on subject line and 69% of recipients report an email as spam also on account of the subject line. Then there’s formatting and CTAs that don’t necessarily have to be a hard sell.
Marketing Profs teaches us how to create persuasive selling page with their cute drawn infographic. It doesn’t get simpler than this!