Category Archives: Employer Advice

If you take Simon Sinek’s advice and ignore past success and developed skills in favor of a great attitude you will fill your B2B sales team with a friendly and fired up sales force that has never sold a damn thing! This hiring “strategy” gives you nothing to indicate future success. Let me know how that works out for you and your sales leadership career.

At Zag Worx, we chose to focus on past performance as the leading indicator of future success.

We start to identify high performing sales executives far in advance of any job order from a client, and our verification of the characteristics of high performing sales executives begins in a brief 30-minute initial phone conversation.

The top sales professionals we are working to engage for the benefit of their careers and the growth of our clients are not too difficult to identify.

So you’ve got a candidate to phone screen? Now you need to sell them on the opportunity, right? WRONG!

Just like in sales, you can’t sell until you’ve conducted a proper client needs/solution fit analysis. You must first seek to understand the candidate. Over the course of a quick and very focused conversation, you will determine the right title/opportunity within your sales organization that this person might fit into. You may have a great Major or Enterprise Account Executive in front of you and you’re preemptive pitch of an inside sales role may ruin your chances of landing the candidate.

Only when you’ve determined which opportunity makes the most sense for this prospective candidate can you start selling said opportunity. Here is a basic pie chart outlining the WIIFM sections you’ll need to cover to initially sell an opportunity.

Don’t sell the wrong opportunity to the right person!

As a Sales Recruiter much of my success and failure is determined by the quality of the candidate that we find, engage, present to our clients, and guide through the interview process. To maximize our efficiency and efficacy throughout this process we employ a few habits we’ve all heard of and that we’ve modified for the recruiting we do.

Be Proactive

Remaining focused on ONLY Sales Recruiting allows us to concentrate all efforts and resources on engaging ONLY sales professionals. Developing professional relationships with like-minded sales executives and sales leaders in our marketplaces creates efficiencies in our ability to proactively nurture value-based relationships with more individuals.

Begin with the End in Mind

We do not believe that the end is the date of hire, 30-days after hire, or when the candidate clears his/her guarantee period. The End we have in mind is 1 year after the candidate has started and both the candidate and the hiring manager agree that it was a good career move/great hire.

Put First Things First

We focus our search efforts to surface the candidates with experience in the most important imperatives of the role. Successful experience in those activities and accomplishments which the client organization deems most important and most urgent are what we seek in our candidates. A firm grasp of these key responsibilities are the foundation of our interviewing/screening.

Low unemployment rates mean that companies need to move fast to hire the talent their goals demand.