Strategic sales hiring is a core practice that entails securing key sales candidates required to build, grow and expand your organization. They are the crucial employees responsible for developing and executing on the strategic roadmap for achieving your company’s sales objectives. However, the best talented sales candidates for your sales roles may be driving growth elsewhere rather than looking for a new sales position.
How can you locate the most qualified sales candidates that aren’t actively hunting for a new job? You collaborate with an experienced sales headhunter or a sales recruitment agency.
A sales headhunter links companies with highly skilled sales candidates with a proven sales track record, best suited for available sales roles at your organization. They locate people who aren’t actively seeking a new job. Headhunters frequently specialize in a specific geographic area or company function, such as software or tech sales. Working with a headhunter from a sales recruitment firm eliminates the stress and uncertainty of sifting through hundreds of profiles and shortens the hiring period for bringing on a thoroughly vetted sales professional with the necessary qualifications and track record.
Headhunters can be very beneficial for any business, as they bring in the right talent at the right time to help you reach new heights of success. Below are 8 key reasons and benefits for partnering with a sales headhunter or a sales recruitment agency.
1. Target a broader ideal candidate pool
You may believe that by posting to many job sites, social media, and your career page, you have cast a broad net. This strategy could work if you were just targeting active applicants or those actively looking for new employment (typically people who are already unemployed). However, only posting in locations where prospects are actively hunting for work in order to come across your job posting excludes a critical group of candidates: passive candidates.
Unsurprisingly, many of the most qualified salespeople are gainfully employed in sales. These sales professionals are extremely desirable yet elusive since they are not actively searching for a new job. Indeed, according to research, 70% of job searchers are passive, which means they are interested but will not find you; you must look for them.
When you use a sales headhunter or a sales recruitment service, you have access to a large pool of passive candidates in the sales recruiting firm’s network. This not only raises the quantity of available sales candidates, but also improves the average calibre of those you bring in for screenings, interviews, and discussions. Passive sales candidates satisfy the number of years of direct experience required in many sales roles and the existing relationship requirements associated with the employers Ideal Customer Profiles. These two very important factors are indicative of a new sales hire being able to meet or exceed their annual sales targets.
2. Streamline the entire hiring process
Sales recruiters understand every aspect of the hiring process since that is what they do every day. Their sales recruitment approach is based on proven and reliable methods. Everything from correctly labelling the job, sourcing elusive passive sales candidates, asking relevant screening and interview questions has been meticulously designed and prepared in order to secure the best sales candidates.
Whether you are a large enterprise with a Human Resources department or a small business, your internal staff is quite busy and doesn’t have time to effectively source ideal, passive sales candidates which consists of a multi-channel, multi-touch point strategy including sequential messaging and is a highly manual process requiring best practices. This sourcing methodology is required to create interest, attention, engagement and conversations with the passive candidate pool that does not have a pressing need to change employers. A great sales recruiter or sales headhunter has fine-tuned the sourcing and recruiting processes for the passive candidate market.
3. Gain insight into industry trends
A sales recruitment agency specializing in sales employment will know just how to position you against your competitors. Whether you’re looking for account executives, sales managers, sales directors, VP of sales, CRO’s, CSO’s, your sales headhunter will have expertise sourcing for opportunities at these levels and will be able to address any issues you have about the job market.
A professional sales recruiter is going to educate you on these patterns/trends while leveraging market expertise to your advantage, from crucial insight into compensation ranges to eye-opening talks on what perks people demand from their company in the modern workforce.
4. Helps to maximize your strategic ROI
The longer you leave an open position unfilled, the more money your organization will lose. The COV (cost of vacancy) for difficult-to-fill positions, particularly essential sales revenue acquisition and sales leadership positions, can have a significant financial impact on your company. Key leadership roles that stay vacant can cost up to a million dollars every week, based on the scope/complexity of the firm and the quality of the function. This may appear alarming, but there are simple formulas that can be utilized to calculate the economic and cultural ramifications for your company.
The negative impact of a vacant post on an organization has a cascading effect. Vacant sales roles impede top and bottom-line earnings, limit productivity, and degrade market opportunity when potential clients opt to do business with competitors. If someone in your organization is now picking up the slack and taking up the work of two individuals, money is undoubtedly slipping through the gaps.
Working with a sales headhunter to fill a vital vacant position with a highly qualified sales candidate means minimizing the impact on your organization. Finding skilled and well-vetted sales professionals means that these team members will likely stay with the organization for a longer period of time, lowering turnover expenses, increasing employee retention rates and securing sales revenues for your organization while achieving their annual sales targets.
5. Reap the benefits of their extensive network
When your organization collaborates with a sales headhunter, you have access to not just their industry experience but also their extensive sales professional network. Headhunters are experts at developing relationships based on mutual respect, intellect, and rapport. The really good ones understand how to get to the bottom of standard questions. The ambition of a sales headhunter is to make meaningful relationships and develop a volume based, strategically rooted professional network.
Consider a sales headhunter to be your company’s principal networker, cultivating relationships in order to offer you the best, most qualified sales professionals they know—not bulk resume pushers, but sales recruiting specialists presenting you to the right sales candidates with the abilities to achieve their annual sales performance targets.
6. Improve employee experience and find the right talent for your company culture
Strong sales recruiters understand how to connect you with individuals who will fit your company culture in addition to evaluating for expertise and qualifications. Employee retention is heavily influenced by culture, and screening for it from the start reduces needless interviews and, as a result, lowers turnover among your new hires.
A reputable sales headhunter, along with identifying the right talent for the role and business environment, honors candidates and connects with them throughout the recruitment process, significantly enhancing what is referred to as the Employee Experience, which starts with the initial impression of your business and continues through the recruitment process and into employment.
7. You get to focus on what you do best
A solid sales recruiting firm allows you to focus on other parts of your organization while they handle majority of the hiring process. Of course, you’ll be an integral part of the interviewing process and more involved in the final phases, but your precious time won’t be wasted on tasks like sourcing, reviewing resumes when you should be managing your team members and focused on customers. Because of the exceptionally effective and tested procedures in place for these phases, sales recruiters and sales headhunters can get through them swiftly and proceed to the core or main elements of the process.
8. Significantly decreases time-to-hire
One of the most valuable things a sales recruiting firm can do for you is reduce the time it takes to hire. A successful sales recruiter boosts efficiency at every stage of the sourcing and recruiting process while satisfying the objective of providing highly aligned and qualified sales candidates in relation to the job criteria.
You receive high-quality sales candidates early in the recruitment process and can start interviews much faster if you source people from their existing ideal candidate pool. Furthermore, because your sales headhunter can handle all of the early screening procedures, the process is simplified and advances quickly to the point of your first in-person interviews with qualified sales candidates.
Throughout the process, they continue to identify new talent, offering you a steady stream of interview-worthy prospects. No time is lost by keeping the process swiftly moving and properly screening every step of the way, and you will shortlist the most appropriate candidate as quickly as possible.
The decreased time to hire a qualified sales candidate positively impacts your company’s sales productivity, sales acceleration and sales optimization goals.
Final Thoughts
Businesses must have the right sales team in place to stay ahead of the competition and expand their operations in today’s highly competitive business climate. The value of sales recruitment in terms of corporate growth cannot be emphasized enough.
Sales recruiting agencies are specialized firms committed to securing and hiring the top sales talent for your company. You will have access to a large pool of highly talented and qualified sales individuals by working with a sales recruiting agency such as SALES TALENT GROUP. When you work with them, you receive seasoned sourcing and recruiting specialists who know how to locate and persuade top sales talent to take on new challenges. Employers also receive highly qualified sales candidates thanks to their broad network and referral system. Contact Sales Talent Group today to learn how they are the only sales recruitment firm that Guarantees, 1st Year’s Annual Quota Achievement by new sales hires.
