If you are hiring one person or an entire inside sales team there are certain traits to look for in an inside sales rep. These characteristics provide a picture of what to look for when hiring.
Here are some helpful tips from Joe Cullota, the president of Inside Sales Staff.
1) The Ability To Grind
Inside sales is not glamorous shiny work. The ability to pound the phones all day every day requires the ability to grind. This characteristic can be identified by how many calls a person makes each day on average.
2) A Steady Track Record OF Employment
Job hoppers who leave your company after one year are not good potential hires. The average inside sales rep is not fully productive for on average 6 months. Replacing reps mans lost selling time, empty seats, impacted revenues, and new training time.
3) Aptitude For The Role
Certain people have aptitudes to sell certain things. Thirty-six years of recruiting inside salespeople has taught us not everyone “ can sell anything”. A person who sells valves may not have the same skill set as someone who sells media. Ask yourself when hiring; Can this person do this job?
4) Have The Hiring Manager Define The Role
Passing off the job description to the HR or internal team to define the inside sales function may not be a best practice. They will not have the understanding a hiring manager will for the role. As such we recommend the hiring manager define the role.
5) Use Honest Compensation Numbers
Don’t overstate what a person can earn, it will backfire and the Glassdoor reviews you and your company receive will come back to haunt you. All that an inside sales rep has to do is reverse engineer your compensation numbers to see if they are realistic. If the numbers seem exaggerated you will lose the candidate.
6) Keep your recruiting process tight and short
Long tedious recruiting processes with multiple interviews, psychological tests, that take weeks are a turn-off to candidates and waste everyone’s time as candidates abandon ship and look for other roles ( which are plentiful).
7) Plan On Hiring A Diverse Team
If you are hiring a large team you will need to cobble together an inside sales organization with different levels of experience. While some companies have a plan to hire a team of inside sales reps all with two years of experience and right out of college the reality is that will not likely happen given the supply and demand for BDRs, SDRs, and AEs.
About the author
Joe Culotta is President of Inside Sales Staff, the world’s leading inside sales recruiters. He is a speaker and mentor at the prestigious 1871 business incubator, a mentor at the American Society of Inside Sales Professionals, and the publisher of the Inside Sales Salary Guide and several other hiring white papers for the inside sales industry. He started his career as the Director of Inside Sales for Cellular One.
Over the past two decades, Inside Sales Staff has recruited more inside sales professionals than any other recruitment firm in the world for more than 250 organizations. Clients include Waste Management, IBM, Oracle, Bradford Exchange, Citibank, American Red Cross, American Medical Association, and others.
Inside Sales Staff
www.insidesalesstaff.com