How to Ensure You Get the Right People on Your Sales Team

This is the full funnel freedom podcast, supporting sales leaders, and managers to improve their sales funnels from people to prospects. I'm Hamish Knox. In this show, you'll learn how you can improve your results. Lead a great team and hit more targets with full funnel freedom. Welcome to the full funnel freedom.

I'm your host Hamish Knox. In this episode, I will share ideas and insights on how to get the right people on your team. So you can create full funnel freedom in your organization. The first part of getting the right person on your team is to identify the ideal candidate profile. This may be a bit of an amalgam of people that you have on your team already.

However, there's no reason why you can't design something from whole cloth, because in the course of developing full from the freedom in your team, you're likely to have a little bit of turnover just naturally as people move on to higher roles or to other organizations. And you may decide that the.

People who on your team, who used to be at the top are now kind of moving down into the middle of the pack, uh, and who may even be self-selecting that they don't want to participate in a full funnel, freedom focused organization. So the first part of designing your ideal candidate profile is to take a little.

And R by that, I mean, roles and responsibilities. So this is a document where the roles are chapter headings and the responsibilities are these specific observable, measurable behaviors that individual would do to demonstrate that they're performing in that role. So for example, if you're hiring a sales manager for your team, because you want an extra.

Layer in between you and the salespeople, so they can focus on the day-to-day management of the team and you can focus much more on the higher level leadership and strategy. You might have roles on there, like coaching, like accountability, like supervising, like training. And under each of those roles, there would be a series of specific observable, measurable activities that, that successful candidate would perform in that role.

So under coaching, it might have weekly coaching sessions with each person individually, including role-play under accountability. It might have things like check-in check-out sales funnel reviews with the entire team on a weekly basis. Once we develop our roles and responsibilities document, and also key thing to include on that roles and responsibilities document is what you would expect that successful candidate to do in terms of their own professional development.

We may think. Implied, but we don't specifically stated, we may end up frustrated with someone who ends up in that role, who we think should be taking some training, doing some professional development. And they think that they're doing professional development in their own way, which may actually meet what we're looking to do, but because they're not doing exactly what we think they should do, even though it's unsaid.

Well, now we're going to have an awkward conversation with them that could have been. By us creating clarity, right up front with what professional development activities we expect them. Now that we've got our roles and responsibilities document laid out, write down the headings vertically non-negotiable need to have and nice to have.

I'm presuming of course, you're in a place listening to this where you can write things down. If you're not, please hold off on this until you are in that, in a place where you can safely write down those headings. So again, they are non-negotiable need to have a nice to have. So for every ideal candidate profile, I record.

A minimum of one and a maximum of three non-negotiables for this role. So what a non-negotiable means is it's literally non-negotiable, if a candidate does not have that specific attribute, whether it can be shown on a resume or a LinkedIn profile or demonstrated an interview, they're disqualified. It doesn't matter how awesome they are.

Otherwise, if something is non-negotiable, it's literally, non-negotiable now reason for a minimum of one is we want this ideal candidate profile to be a bit of a filter that we could pretty much hand anyone in our organization and then give them a stack of resumes or a series of LinkedIn profiles and say sort out who actually gets to move forward in our hiring process.

What I've found in working with my clients though, is if you have more than three non-negotiables, we may end up creating false positives, which means we're rejecting candidates who could be ideal for the role with too many non-negotiables. And a lot of my clients discover that things they put down as non-negotiable initially are really more in the need to have cat.

So now we get down to our need to have category. And this is really where we are going to be using this ideal candidate profile as a filter. So in our need to haves, we're going to have somewhere between nine and 15 attributes skills, experiences, habits that our ideal candidates need to have in order to advance down through our hiring process.

So these attributes are likely easy to demonstrate. On a LinkedIn profile or on a resume or in a cover letter or in a video submission, but not necessarily all of them will be demonstrable in that forms. We may have to wait until we get to the interview. One thing that. I include on all of my need to have, is must have, or needs to have achieved a place in a arts organization or in a sport team by tryout or audition.

This tells me that this candidate has the ambition and drive to push themselves. To join an organization through a trial or an audition, knowing the nice app category, I will often put that they were the lead of the arts organization, where they were the captain of the sports team. That's a nice to have.

It's not necessarily a need to have. Now, if you are a hiring a recent graduate, we may need to adjust the need to have attributes to better. What a recent graduate might have instead of someone who's got industry experience. For example, a recent graduate probably does not have the experience of closing six or seven figure sales, but they probably have another type of experience where they could demonstrate the skills and the mindsets required to close deals of that.

So now we are on with our roles and responsibilities document, and then we have our nonnegotiable need to have an, a nice to have filter. And the nice to haves are literally nice to have. We're really only going to get to them. If we've got two candidates who are basically equal, and we are looking to determine a selection based on other criteria.

So for example, if we've got two candidates who are right at the finish line, And one of them happens to be fluent in Spanish. And we have a channel partner who is in Latin America, uh, where this candidate could potentially support our channel partner, uh, in their native language. Maybe we bring them forward as opposed to the other candidate, but that's on the rare occasion where we have two very, very equally qualified candidates.

Let's move on to. Uh, drawback is a filter, not a fly trap. We've seen plenty of stories about how for entry-level positions, there's 1200, 1500 resumes or applications being put in. We just simply don't have the time. And even if we have an HR resource supporting us in our selection process, we do not have the time to plow through that many applications.

So we want our job ad to be a filter, not a flight. And for that reason we recommend, I recommend that you include a must have in all of your job ads, especially in a sales role. We're probably looking at something like compensation. So must have experience earning over $250,000 a year for each of the past two years.

The reason why we say each of the past two years is because we don't want. A candidate who like a professional athlete who's in a contract year has a really amazing year statistically lands a huge contract and then goes right back into their comfort zone with their new team. Who's just paid them a lot of money for the production.

Probably only ever going to do once. So by putting in a must, have we start to filter out bad fit candidates. Again, if we are looking at hiring someone like a new graduate or someone who's outside of our industry, we may want to adjust those must haves so that they can actually apply and not get filtered out to.

The other thing that you may also want to consider on your job ad is getting creative on how to apply. So my friend, Alex, who runs an it company years ago, he was looking to hire inside sales rep and he decided that instead of having them send their resumes to careers@companyname.com, he set up a phone number and on the job at it said, Call me back for all this number and tell me why I should call you back.

And he's said publicly, that he knew within about seven seconds, whether or not he wanted to call that individual back. So think about in terms of your time or the time of the individuals who are doing the initial screening for you, for your candidates. Come up with a creative way for a candidate to apply, to demonstrate that they've got the right ambition and drive in order to be successful on your team and create full funnel freedom for your organization.

Last thing to talk about in terms of getting the right people on your team. Psychometric pre hire surveys. I'm a very, very big fan of these specifically the ones that have nothing to do with intelligence or personality, because to me, those don't necessarily matter. What I'm looking for is communication preference.

And the one that. I've used for many, many years is the extended disc model. Uh, and the, and extended disc north America gives me an idea of how does my candidate like to give and receive information? How do they consume the world? Because w I F M is the world's favorite radio station for a reason. What's in it for me.

And by knowing how our candidates like to give and receive information. We number one, as leaders can more effectively communicate with them because as humans, we tend to communicate the way we want to be communicated with, and we can determine whether or not they have the right communication style to succeed in a particular role.

Someone who is a super reserved, super detail oriented communicator is probably not. Do well in a sales role where that is very transactional and focused on a lot of prospecting. The other type of behavioral profile that I'm really interested in is behavioral preference. So what is the behavioral preference for this individual?

Going back to my example, for the sales manager that I'm hiring. Earlier in this episode, if I run a behavioral preference profile for this sales manager candidate, and it comes out that they really struggle with delegating. That is a big yellow flag for me, because what I want my manager to do is to be able to delegate and be able to take tasks off them that could be done by their team members, as opposed to doing it themselves and losing focus on supporting the team.

So using pre hire psychometric surveys helps us determine how, whether or not the candidate might be. It is not a magic bullet though. Any client who I've ever coached with, I have told them if you use any sort of a survey as a pure go, no, go with a candidate, you're absolutely doing it wrong. It must be taken in as part of a holistic approach to hiring, but they also give us a really good sense of where we may have challenges with a candidate.

If we end up. Offering them and having them accept the role as well as it gives us a good insight into some questions we can ask in the interview, which we'll touch on in a future episode, this has been the full funnel freedom podcast, focused on how to get the right people on your team to create full funnel freedom.

I've been your host Hamish Knox. Thanks for listening. Please share rate. And until we connect with you on the next episode, go create full phone free. Thank you for listening to full funnel freedom with Amish Knox. If you want to increase your sales with ease, go to full funnel, freedom.com.