Your salespeople are the beating heart of your company.
But snagging the best-of-the-best is tricky.
Simply posting a job ad and crossing your fingers won’t get you very far. There are a number of important things you can do to up your chances of enticing great candidates to apply for your sales job, even ones who aren’t necessarily looking!
While you should be consistently working on making your company brand attractive, download our guide for six ways you can start to steer great candidates towards joining your sales team today.
Here is Tip One: Check your company culture
Check your company culture
Your company culture has a huge impact your company’s ‘happiness level’ and in turn, the results you achieve. Making sure your current staff are actively engaged brings benefits to your bottom-line, but also ensures your business is positively promoted to the wider public (and that potential great candidate pool!).
In fact, word-of-mouth from your people matters. A LOT. A recent LinkedIn study found potential candidates trust employees’ opinions about their workplace three times more than the employer’s.
So what are your people saying about you?
To find out if your company culture needs a tune up, ask your employees what they love about working with you, but also what they would change.
Some specific questions might be:
1. What makes you proud to work with us?
2. Do you feel we help you with your professional development and career growth? If not, what would you like from us?
3. What benefits do you find most valuable (monetary, flexible work hours, commission structure etc.)? And invaluable?
4. What sort of leadership style do you enjoy? Do you think we have that here?
5. What else would you change?
How to review and communicate your company culture
Hold a ‘question-and-answer’ session with employees using some (or all) of the above suggestions. The format could be group brainstorming or an anonymous online questionnaire. What matters most is that people feel they can express their true opinion without feel of reprisals. A combination of formats might work best.
These sessions should offer up a goldmine of information about your company culture. But for it to have any impact, you must act on what you’ve learnt.
While some of the changes suggested may take some time to implement, there are likely a few you can quickly take on board i.e. lacking in the professional development area? Invest in some e-learning options for your staff. While you’re at it, consider how you can benefit from the same.
Finally, if you’ve got great feedback, spruik it during recruitment. As we’ve mentioned previously, potential employees trust current ones so sharing their positive experiences is one of your greatest selling points.
For our final 5 tips, download our guide for six ways you can start to steer great candidates towards joining your sales team today.