Successful Sales Management: How To Hire A Sales Manager

Hiring a sales manager?can feel like playing Russian Roulette. Get the selection right, and the business could fly. Get it wrong and the risks are too frightening. A bad choice might drive an exodus of customers, and sales staff, before anybody spots it, and can stop it.?

Why Is It So Difficult?

For large organisations, recruiting a sales manager, who's guaranteed survive and succeed,?can be difficult. For smaller businesses, its close to impossible. ?And its not much fun for the sales manager either.?In fact, the downsides for both employer and employee are scary.?
Larger businesses have advantages. Candidates are often selected by guys who've been successful sales managers themselves, who have insight, knowing which bits of the story to test. Who know which essential skills to look for.?Who know which questions to ask, and how to rate the answers.?

Candidates will be more comfortable, too. Big businesses already know how to succeed, even if they could do a better job some of the time. New hires are likely to hit the ground running, not spend months educating colleagues in the way sales works. An experienced manager joining an established business is as good as it gets.

Smaller businesses aren't that lucky. They find attracting quality candidates difficult, don't know which questions to ask, and can't make sense of the gobbledygook answers. ?

There's a world shortage of great sales managers.?Good ones don't leave secure jobs, and when they do, it's for more secure, higher paying positions with better prospects of promotion.?They don't interview at small businesses without a very good reason. Which means, most often, the candidates aren't great, they probably aren't very good, and sometimes they're downright dangerous.

A smaller business hiring failed, or inexperienced, sales managers is as bad as it gets.?

What's a business owner supposed to do? She's built the operation from the ground up, developing her value proposition, making the product, delivering the service, keeping the books, and probably making the coffee, too. The company isn't going to achieve its promise, unless there's a way to leverage the track record into profitable growth. That takes sales management.?

Like it or not, the successful business owner will face the dilemma at some point. How to hire a sales manager.

Which Are The Options

The simplest answer is do what the big guys do - poach the best people from the competition. It isn't easy, and certainly isn't cheap. Persuading a top performer to switch horses will take a pay increase, a vision of a brighter future, a lot of assurances and maybe even a promise of equity. Not easy and not cheap, but the best chance of bringing in proven skills, and with a collateral benefit - weakening the competition in the process.

Next best would be hiring experience from similar markets. It's easier to head hunt from a different industry. There's less loyalty, and more comfort during the negotiations. There's more chance of improved career prospects for the candidate. Skills are often transferrable from one market to another, provided there's some common factor.

Offering the competitor's sales rep a promotion to manager can be a good move, but risky. The very best sales people don't want to be managers. ?They make more money and have more fun selling. Ambitious sales professionals do want to be managers, and will often take a chance on moving to get the promotion. But they won't stay around long. And past performance as a sales rep doesn't guarantee success in management.

Hiring friends, or friends of friends, in such an important role is another option fraught with danger. Working with a sales manager is a business partnership, not a drinking partnership, or a golf partnership. Neither boss nor manager can afford the luxury of accepting the other's foibles. There are times when tough talking is what makes a business better. ?The last thing anybody wants is the sacrifice of business results because of sensitivity to a friends personal preferences.?

Social media might prove a useful source of candidates. Linked In particularly offers ways for owners and employees to find each other. It's also overflowing with pretenders. Posting an open position is obviously attractive - low cost, impersonal, no commitment, ready to listen, no promises. ?It can certainly be worth a try, but with caution ?When it comes to the Internet, what is says on the tin isn't necessarily what's in the tin.? Professional recruiters are awfully expensive. They do have experience in selecting candidates to suit client requirements. Some even offer guarantees. If the candidate chosen doesn't work out, they'll find another for free. The professional recruitment firm can do stuff the company boss can't. ?It can make impersonal approaches to the best people around. It can present the opportunity in the best possible light. It can manage the advertising, sort through the responses, validate references, arrange interviews, play the middle man in negotiations. Using the right firm of recruiters is the preferred option for businesses with a lot of hiring to do. But with fees at up to 25% of first year earnings, it might be just too costly for the smaller business.

Last but not least, there's always the cheap, fast, simple,approach. Put an ad in the paper. More often than not, the resumes will flood in. Unfortunately, most won't be suitable. ?That's the disadvantage of advertising jobs. Sorting through hundreds of letters sent by people who didn't read the ad properly, couldn't write the application clearly, and are obviously desperate for a job, is depressing. Replying to them is a chore. And there's no guarantee of attracting the right candidates. ?The best people rarely spend evenings and weekends with the help wanted sections.

Selecting The Right Candidate

Whichever of these less than ideal options the hopeful employer chooses, the biggest problem is still to come. Interviewing is a challenging, time consuming, frustrating task. It's about finding the best candidate from a list of suitable candidates. In the case of sales managers, its a search for value add - the right skill set, with the right philosophy, compatible culture, and credibility.

Credibility is a question of track record, references, aspirations and manners. A mixture of personal characteristics and measurable results.?Compatible culture is a question of fit with the rest of the business. ?Will the candidate work easily with everybody else.

The focus on the interview should be skills and philosophy. That's where the value add will be. But value added to what. Does this candidate, who's going to cost a lot, offer promise of what the business needs? ?Will the business be stronger. Will the opportunity be more likely achieved.?

No two businesses are the same. There is no silver bullet to guarantee successful sales operations. There is no substitute for on the ground, buried in the trenches, experience of markets and customers, of what works and what doesn't. The interviewer needs to have that, of course. ?She's looking for somebody to add value to what she already knows. She's looking for somebody to add experience of turning the handle, to her expertise in creating happy customers, serviced by a happy team, in a profitable business.

Anybody looking to hire a sales manager should already have a good idea of which people buy what and how. The successful sales manager should be able to explain how that experience can be turned into a self sustaining sales organisation.?

There's good news for the boss who knows the questions to ask, and how to evaluate the answers. Quality sales managers will know they're talking to somebody who's got it. They won't be risking their career working for a pilgrim. The pretenders will slink away, looking for an easier slot.?


Why doesn?t the traditional approach to selling and sales management work so well any more? What can the modern sales professional do to stay relevant in today?s customer driven markets?? Check out our eBook?Reengineering Sales Management?for ideas on how to embrace the new order of customer driven buyer/seller relationships.

Source: http://successfulsalesmanagement.stevensreeves.com/2012/12/how-to-hire-sales-manager.html

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