Find the right sales person?

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iBlogHosting

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Hi, We would like to add new sales person in our team. I have an important question. How to find recognize the right sales person in be in your team that can stimulate good sales?

I appreciate your time & experience!
 
iBlogHosting said:
Hi, We would like to add new sales person in our team. I have an important question. How to find recognize the right sales person in be in your team that can stimulate good sales?

I appreciate your time & experience!
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Have you any long term clients that you could trust, If so first ask amongst your clients to see if any are qualified or interested and offer then discount on their hosting or even their hosting as part of their fee.

you could also check out forums such as

http://www.hostingdiscussion.com/employment-opportunities/
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=33
 
Well the first thing you need to do is look locally.

You want to make a choice from your local people in your state.
This is important because if anything goes wrong you need to be able to have legal recourse against them to the max.
You can't get that if they are from another state or even another country. Well you could but it would be very cost prohibitive and the powers that be aren't going to give to rips about you and your customer unless it amounts to a very large number of people affected and lots of money involved. If it isn't high profile then you are pretty much lost.

Also if the legal route doesn't work you want them close enough to strangle the day lights out of. Okay that last part is a joke. Although you will feel like it if they screwed you and a customer over.

Another very critical thing is you have to be able to research that person up one side and down the other and that is very hard to do if they are from another state and impossible if they are from another country. Okay well you could find out information about them, but it would be very costly and very hard unless you had a local office in their area.

Google/Bing/Yahoo anything attached to them you are given so that you can find out what kind of traces of information they have on the net.

You also need to compile a top list of problems and issues that your company faces regularly. Go as high as you wish with the list. Top 50, top 100, you get the idea.

Then give them that list as a test and see how they handle it.

Give them some issue you know that nobody will most likely know as well this will help you see how they perform under pressure and when they really don't know are they going to lie their way through it or fess up that they don't know, or they don't know and will surely find the answer.
You will see some that will try to polish their way through with technical nonsense and you will see some that just throw their hands up and say I don't know, then there is those that have an honest streak and will let you know they don't know but will be more than happy to tackle the issue and find out the answer. That last one is a keeper. Those are the ones that will go to the mat for you and don't mind tackling a problem till they find a solution.

Before you go through all that you could just make them an affiliate and let them prove themselves. Most likely if they can't make sales with your affiliate program then they won't be much better on your staff.
The reason why sales people get the large paychecks they do is because they are tasked with the most difficult task of all and that is finding more clients for your business.
There is a huge difference between a salesperson and an order taker.

For sure make them sign a nondisclosure agreement, and possibly a noncompete agreement.
You don't want them to possibly expose any sensitive information about your company they learn as a salesperson. And for sure don't want them deciding they will just cut you out and open up shop on their own. Or even worse take clients over to your competition. I have seen the latter happen on occasion with different fields.

Hope that helps.
 
iBlogHosting said:
Hi, We would like to add new sales person in our team. I have an important question. How to find recognize the right sales person in be in your team that can stimulate good sales?

I appreciate your time & experience!
Click to expand...


A good sales department representative should be always professional and polite while communicating with clients. A sales person should know the products he/she is selling and should know what this or that customer needs for his site.

To determine what the user needs, you are to analyse each client thoroughly and you discuss all the details with the client personally by phone or via email.

Moreover, a sales person should be always ready to provide a test period for his client to test some products for free for a couple of days.

Only after testing some clients make a decision to buy the offered product.
 
From experience, get someone who is very polite, patient and is not completely clueless in hosting (or at least in the tech stuffs).
 
I would pick someone that does not over promise and over sell. A lot of sales tend to do this and get the company into deep trouble.

Find someone that knows the products and can get trained up pretty quickly for other things as well.
 
The best sales reps in this or any other industry are those who network, surrounding themselves with others (who are successful) in that industry. In web hosting, that would be primarily be IT consultants and web designers. Partnerships can produce huge dividends.

A lot depends on how you market because it takes a different type of individual to be a "hunter killer" than it does a sales rep who will give up some commission for long term security.

Product knowledge is important, but not nearly as important as internal training - so they understand your mission and procedures. Saying that - are they trainable? Will they agree to a trial period?

Hiring the wrong person can become a huge liability when that rep, even if highly qualified, doesn't fit in with your team.

Good luck finding the right sales representative :)
 
Ok, here's what works for us...

We operate from within a Manchester based office so it's essential that our workers are local to us. We have a form on our website where applicants can apply to work for us. They can upload their CV to us via the online form. We keep their CVs on file and obviously dependent on our needs, the right one is potentially offered a job on a trial basis.

Depending on your setup, this might not work for everyone but perhaps the ability for your applicants to submit their CV via an online form will help you to gain an idea of the quality of applicants coming to you.

Hope this helps.
 
WTP Admin said:
Ok, here's what works for us...

We operate from within a Manchester based office so it's essential that our workers are local to us. We have a form on our website where applicants can apply to work for us. They can upload their CV to us via the online form. We keep their CVs on file and obviously dependent on our needs, the right one is potentially offered a job on a trial basis.

Depending on your setup, this might not work for everyone but perhaps the ability for your applicants to submit their CV via an online form will help you to gain an idea of the quality of applicants coming to you.

Hope this helps.
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I think this is a nice way to do it.

Also, you better share a personal interview to take a decision. You will probably be more satisfied if you look directly at his eyes and find what you are looking for.

Regards.
 
If possible try to promote from within - your best customer service rep can often turn into your best sales rep., if given the opportunity.
 
Hiring

It is not an easy thing to do -- here is one idea (after you know WHAT you are looking for):

Run your ads saying what you are looking for, expected experience level, etc., and tell them to email their resume + up to 150 word reason why you should hire them.

You'll find that most don't follow directions. Then rule out anyone with anything more than a typo type mistake. You'll be left with a handful of viable candidates.

This saves us considerable time in setting up interviews and weeding through resumes.

hope this helps!
 
CeraNet said:
Run your ads saying what you are looking for, expected experience level, etc., and tell them to email their resume + up to 150 word reason why you should hire them.
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This is what we do for our other businesses, but we only ask for 100 words, but at the end of the ad we state "please ignore emailing these and post to us on pink paper". only about 2% actually send on pink paper the rest are either emailed or faxed to us (which we never mention).
We got 1 CV that was perfect for us, but because he emailed it to us, we took him no further. a few days later he phoned us as a followup and this is when we asked him if he read the ad, which he said yes and he had it infront of him, so we asked him to read it again and then he went quite and then said he missed the part about posting and hung up
 
CeraNet said:
Run your ads saying what you are looking for, expected experience level, etc., and tell them to email their resume + up to 150 word reason why you should hire them.

You'll find that most don't follow directions.
Click to expand...

This is an excellent suggestion and one that I practice all the time when looking for candidates. Usually, I'd ask for a custom written 50-100-word brief that applies for each position.

I'm shocked by how many people do not read the SIMPLE instructions when applying for a job. In my mind, if someone can't be attentive enough to follow primitive directions, what is the quality of their work going to be? I almost always ignore such candidates, moving to those who spent more than 5 minutes of their time to submit their resume.
 
Also, if it is a sales position that requires extensive phone use, you can do this same approach with a recorded message give them 30 seconds to tell you why you should call them back.

Most people hang up, some call back and stumble through it, and some jump on it. Call the jump on its back asap.

You can track them by using caller ID and not letting people through that are blocking their ID (at least in the US). There are also several services that will take care of this for you.

We've done it written and on the phone, pick the one that fits your needs.
 
I definitely agree that someone local would be the way to go. We have tried a variety of ways to get less expensive options (i.e. hiring someone cheap from guru or elance), and we've had ok results, but not near the results we started getting when we spent the money that was needed to get someone local and of very high quality.
 
People will become loyal to you once they feel connected to your company. You cant expect to pay a sales person on commission only and expect them to perform. Even if you want to implement the commission basis you should offer them a fixed salary for them to feel secure within the job. Also, you will need to have regular updates with them and always encourage them to provide feedback for the growth of the organization and they will want to perform to make the company better not only for you but for themselves as well.
 
I would try to summarize the key aspects in obtaining the best sales staff in a few easy pointers:

- The CV - in my opinion it provides the least helpful information. I had previous experience in HR and although the CV is a reflection of the employee profile, some very good people can be missed that way and vice versa. Some people possess great sales skills without even knowing it, so a personal interview is a must. And who is to say that a great looking CV wasn't written by a more experienced friend/relative?

- The Personal Interview - its where you put the raw CV facts into a test. I, myself, try to avoid standartized questions and a one-way communication. Try to engage the person in a friendly conversation, see what is their view of the business, check their ability to offer solutions when they face a simple problem, this will help you greatly in understanding their mindset. We are all clients in our daily lives so putting the person in this position and checking their reactions to certain scenarios is priceless

- The Initial Training - the key milestone in my opinion. I`ve seen companies that might hire an employee without any previous experience and turn them into a Sales God :devil: This is what separates the companies with a vision for the future from all the rest. Showing your new employees the willingness to invest in them and their improvement builds company loyalty and eagerness to help your project move forward. The initial training is where it all happens - provide enough time and manpower to give your new staff everything that they would need to start and see how they perform on a daily basis. At the end of this traning period keep only the brightest so you can avoid people that work just for their monthly salary and just come and leave like robots.

- The Side Projects - this can also be implemented in the initial training. Engage the sales staff in personal projects, giving them basic outlines and see how they deal with it. The creative and ambitious ones will surely shine in such environment

- The Trust in Seniors - having a healthy work climate and strong employee loyalty also helps in future hiring. As most of us would be looking for local staff, setup a nice internal Referral Program. Whenever you need a new hire, post your requirements internally first and ask your employees to recommend suitable people. We cannot be sure how many people will see a job ad, but having some info about the person before you meet them can also prepare us for a more personal approach. Decorate this with a nice prize for the people who refer, for example, if the new employee is still in the firm after 6 months, give a bonus to the one that referred them

I hope you find these pointers helpful :rolleyes2
 
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