One of the central challenges for companies attempting to scale their sales teams is the ability for HR leaders and their teams to deliver qualified candidates in a timely manner. The time-to-hire gap is long—estimated at roughly 2 months—and once a rep is on the job it takes them 10 months to onboard. Put in context, in which the average tenure of a B2B sales rep is 24 months, this leaves very little time for a rep to deliver a return on investment.

All told, this leaves sales organizations with eroding revenue and a weak pipeline in times when they should be growing. The typical mad-dash recruiting approach, which tries to fill seats as soon as headcount opens, fails to bring in candidates fast enough and tends to attract low-grade hires that soon voluntarily turn over.

HR leaders and sales leaders must collaborate on a new recruiting strategy designed for top sales talent that uses long-term relationship building to prime them for an interview. This is called the Virtual Talent Bench strategy, which shortens the time-to-hire gap, shortens ramp-up time, and lengthens a salesperson’s tenure.

Why a virtual talent bench strategy attracts A-players

Think of A-player sales candidates as “customers” who require time to travel through a buyer’s journey. When you sell a product to a customer, you don’t expect them to purchase the moment they hear about your company. Instead, you might expect an average lead time of weeks, months, or even years where you build mutual trust through check-ins and nurture content, like eBooks, articles, and videos, to educate them about your brand and benefits.

Top talent requires a similar approach. Push candidate leads along a hiring nurture funnel with content and check-ins until you have a pool of talent that knows and trusts your employer brand.

Dr. Geoff Smart calls this the virtual talent bench strategy. He writes, “When the star pitcher pulls a muscle and has to leave the game, the coach gets the number two pitcher off the bench and play resumes immediately. No problem.” Hiring managers should think like a baseball coach: nurture candidates until you can put a rep in the game as quickly as you like.

The virtual bench strategy eliminates last-minute dashes and establishes a recruiting machine that predictably incubates high-quality hires. It decreases time-to-hire and gives A-players the time, relationships, and information they need to join your company.

There are three steps to the virtual bench strategy: Generate leads, put infrastructure in place to track your interactions, and nurture them with personal outreach and content.

Step 1: Identify A Players

Start with a workforce planning exercise to anticipate the number of reps you plan to hire in the next year. Then, build a picture of the ideal candidate with the specific attributes and skills needed to do the job. Because you are hiring salespeople, educate your team about the importance of Sales DNA, which are the intangible traits that help top salespeople excel. Sales DNA almost always beats the resume as a form of screening and selecting a candidate that will perform well on the job.

Next, find candidates. They will be more likely to act on a word-of-mouth referral from someone they trust, so mine your company’s extended network, starting with your top salespeople. Conduct an internal brainstorming exercise by asking key sales leaders and reps to make a list of 10 potential candidates in their network. Top performers immerse themselves in successful communities and have deep networks of other talented sales leaders. Ask them to browse their own LinkedIn networks to make sure they haven’t missed anyone.

You can do a similar exercise by identifying people in your network who are “connectors”—advisors, mentors, influencers, and other business partners—who can recommend candidates and make a connection.

Next, look at the competition’s sales force, as well as peripheral competitors and industries. These are companies and industries adjacent to yours that have similar buyers, sales cycles, and deal sizes, but don’t compete head-to-head. You can also participate in professional associations, network at trade shows, and even host events for education, networking, and industry interest presentations.

Consider creating a talent community, which allows top talent to submit their resumes to your company without committing to a certain position. People who are attracted to your brand can simply express interest, share contact information, and upload their resume, separate from any job postings. There are many benefits to this for both you and the candidate:

• You can attract potential candidates year-round, even if you don’t have a job posting written.
• You can see where they best fit within your company and have more flexibility to match them with a role.
• For a top candidate, it’s less time-consuming to join a talent pool than to apply to a position. It’s low-barrier and low-commitment to begin with, and opens the door for a long-term nurture relationship.

Over time, you’ll amass a list of prospective candidates who are already genuinely interested in your brand and you will have the contact information to begin engaging them with nurture content via email, phone, and live events. Lockheed Martin, Santander Bank, and Carvana, an auto tech startup, are examples of companies that use talent communities to recruit.

Step 2: Create a tracker

Once you have a list of talent prospects, put them in a candidate CRM, ATS, or manual tracker—you wouldn’t keep lists of customers in your head, and you don’t want to do this for candidates either.

If you don’t have technology in place, a simple spreadsheet can suffice to hold candidate information and track your interactions over time. Share the document with your organization’s leads and any other team members involved in the recruiting process. Then, update it with new leads and set a ritual or reminder to repeat the lead brainstorming exercise from Step 1.

The tracker should at minimum have these fields :

• Name
• Priority ranking — To sort your dream leads
• Current title
• Source — Where you got the idea for the lead
• Connectors — Your mutual “connectors” that can provide an introduction or reference
• Timing of contact — We recommend logging the first outreach and the latest outreach at the very least. You can also log any in-between contacts and content sent to the candidate.
• Selling Performance — Did the candidate hit quota the past 3 years?
  • •  

(See Rob Kelly’s explanation of his candidate tracker for more background.)

Step 3: Plan your buyer’s funnel

Once you have a list of leads to reach out to, create a funnel that nudges a candidate through the stages of the buyer’s journey, similar to an inbound marketing funnel. Just as it takes consumers many touchpoints to purchase a product, top candidates typically need high-quality, repeated exposure to your employer brand before accepting an interview invitation. All the more so if they’re comfortably employed and doing well in their current job.

This is why your first outreach to a candidate should simply get your company on their radar, because they likely aren’t familiar with your company yet. The first conversation is a “meet and greet,” and ideally comes through a warm introduction. Do not treat it as an interview or an opportunity to pitch your company. Instead, it should entirely center around the candidate, their career aspirations, and their interests. Get a head start before the conversation: research the candidate to understand their career trajectory, recent increased responsibilities, patterns across jobs, and any associations they’re affiliated with or articles they’ve published.

After that first contact, let the candidate progress through a funnel of regular check-ins over email, phone, or coffee so that they can learn progressively more information about your company and the position. Even if they’re not ready to leave their current job, they’ll become more familiar with you over the long term, increasing the chance they’ll consider you for the next stage in their career.

What does this nurture funnel look like? It’s similar to the way a marketing team uses content like articles, webinars, and testimonials to push a lead forward. In the same way, an employer brand uses candidate nurture to slowly communicate selling points and build trust.

Sales teams can collaborate with marketing to create digital nurture programs using emails, ads, and videos that paint a picture of the career that’s in store for a candidate. They should highlight the benefits of the working environment, spotlight successful employees, and communicate key aspects of your company’s growth story, like new product developments and milestones. It’s a way to cut through to what really matters to millenials in a new job and illustrate opportunities for accomplishment, self-actualization, challenges and recognition.

Emails to candidates might take the form of:

• Employee profile stories demonstrating their accomplishments, providing a model for career growth and an example of external recognition
• Newsletters that include industry news and business milestones like new high-visibility partnerships and customers, helping candidates understand the exciting challenges they could experience
• Stories about culture and sales team events
• eBooks, blog posts, whitepapers, webinars, and videos about the industry or the specific team a candidate is interested in
• Glassdoor ratings
• Invitations to in-person events
• Job alerts
• Gentle reminders to finish an application
• Thank you messages

Consider using personalization to improve candidates’ engagement rates (like any good marketing team would). This starts with collecting clean data about each candidate: use standardized forms fields and email questionnaires to collect their name, contact information, and the type of job they’re interested in, as well information about skill sets and areas of interest.  

Then, dynamically insert this data into emails—or segment your candidate database into major groups or personas that require different types of content. For example, junior candidates are more likely to identify with employee stories that match their experience level and early career goals, while senior candidates may be more interested in strategic content about the market and executive team. Other ways to segment a candidate database include job type, areas of interest, and geography.

Netflix is an example of a company that has invested in their nurture programs and employer brand. They cultivate candidates with content such as videos about their internal culture, podcasts about how they hire, and a Facebook page for their talent community called We Are Netflix. Bain & Company has invested in in-depth content to help candidates explore roles and navigate the interview process, complete with videos demonstrating sample interviews and tips. E-commerce tech giant Shopify also invests in automated email nurture campaigns in which recruiters partner with hiring managers to actively check in with candidates who are in the interview process.

Like these companies, persistent nurture will help you bring candidates through the buyer’s journey—all while they’re not actively searching for a job. When they’re ready to consider a change, your company will be top of mind.

A virtual talent funnel is a support structure for building deep human relationships over time. Courting excellent candidates requires a long timeline, but without the disciplined follow-ups of a nurture campaign, they’ll slip through the cracks and go elsewhere. A tracking and outreach system ensures that you’re intentional about building high-quality talent relationships—just as your best reps would for your dream customers.

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Eliot Burdett

CEO at Peak Sales Recruiting

Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.

Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.

He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.

Connect:

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As the holiday shopping season comes to an end, were the gifts we purchased for family and friends truly the brands we know and love? Sunglasses, jeans, sneakers, headphones, jewelry and more. Products that looked like our beloved brands but may not be the case. As the global market for counterfeit products grows – to the sum of half a trillion dollars – one company is waging a successful battle to protect corporate brands from the unscrupulous business of fake goods. For Simon Baggs, online infringement attorney and CEO of Incopro, legal action is effective to an extent, but not enough. He believes the solution lies in technology.

In 2012, Simon teamed up with technology expert Bret Boivin and founded Incopro.  Starting from small beginnings, Simon and Bret have built a successful global operation with a laser focus on providing innovative technology and supporting services to stop brand infringement taking place online. Today, the venture capital-backed company has offices in London, Wales, the U.S. and China with a client base that includes a who’s who of enterprise customers with well-known brands across multiple verticals — sports, fashion, luxury, automotive, consumer products, pharma and more.

Through its comprehensive technology solution, Incopro automates the entire process of identifying commercial scale operators that are working in the counterfeit world and removing these products from sale across major social and retail platforms. The company protects these iconic brands against infringement across all digital platforms, in any language, tracking down and stopping perpetrators anywhere on the internet.

U.S. sales effort key to global plan

Shortly after Incopro’s inception, Simon and his team moved forward with plans to build a strong sales effort in the U.S.  Simon explains, “It was an ambitious thing to do early on. We had big goals for our sales effort in America and virtually no U.S. footprint established at the time. This person would be the first tasked with building our U.S. sales effort, and would also be our first employee in America.”

“We were fortunate to have a couple of rock star sales people early on in the UK, so we knew what good looked like, but we also experienced some poor performers who delivered little,” he continues.  “When it came to expansion in the U.S., we felt even less sure of our ground. In America, we had less familiarity with the companies and a limited candidate pool. There were also cultural differences to consider and time differences that could result in a lengthy recruitment process.  It became clear we needed to work with a qualified recruitment partner.”

Peak steps up to the challenge

Through a referral from another VC-funded startup company, Simon turned to Peak Sales Recruiting to launch Incopro’s U.S. sales effort. With a goal to hire the very best sales professional on the East Coast, the stakes were high but the Peak team stepped up to the challenge. Adds Simon, “We needed someone who had some experience in brand infringement, possibly an analyst who had used technology like ours but also had strong sales experience. This person would also need to hit the ground running in an entirely new market.”

As a start-up, Incopro’s sales culture was very entrepreneurial and customer centric. “Our focus has always been on the customer. This was especially true early on as we built out our product to meet our customers’ needs,” he says. “Our approach to selling has evolved but it has always focused on understanding the customers and the need, not selling the wrong benefits to the wrong persona. If you’re selling to a brand protection manager, you will have one dialogue, and if you’re selling to a marketing or e-commerce manager, it’s a different conversation.  It’s all about being in the shoes of the customer and understanding what they are looking for. At the same time, you need the right people, structure and culture to empower your sales team to succeed.”

Peak Account Manager Kara Ragsdale and her team met with Simon to gain a good understanding of his criteria for the position, business objectives and selling culture, and quickly started identifying and evaluating candidates to find the perfect fit.

“The key advantage in working with Peak was the team took the time to understand our company and our needs and then they focused hard on finding candidates with the right background and fit,” Simon explains. “Each candidate was presented to us very carefully, with a full personality profile and reference check.  It gave us good control over the recruitment effort and a high level of confidence.”

Peak’s talent acquisition process relies on a 4-step sales recruiting methodology that includes determining corporate objectives, identifying the profile of an ideal candidate, targeted headhunting to find the top candidates and scientific assessment. Through its proprietary P95 assessment method, Peak takes the process one step deeper and evaluates candidates’ selling behaviors through three phases of advanced assessment that are critical in determining whether candidates have the sales DNA to perform in a client’s selling environment.

“We liked Peak’s approach and believed it was very effective in helping us find the right candidate to launch our U.S. sales effort. Kara was very good at finding candidates that were suitable and pushing forward quickly and thoroughly. It was a well-structured, responsive and professional process.”

— Simon Baggs, CEO of Incopro

Incopro’s U.S. sales team now a reality

At the time the company retained Peak’s services, Incopro was also in the process of finalizing a deal with a leading trademark search company that had a small team in the U.S.  Incopro acquired the company’s operations as well as the U.S. staff. Incopro now had a Boston-based candidate that Peak had found as well as a sales team member from the trademark search company based in Orange County, California.

“The timing was amazing. We had 10 staff members in the U.S. right at our doorstep about the same time that Peak had found our ideal U.S. candidate. This came together at the same time and gave us an effective east-west bridge. We also gained a team member in Washington state and New York,” he explains. “We now had to integrate the team but this all went very well because of the caliber of candidate that Peak recruited. We were now able to offer Peak’s candidate the luxury of a bigger footprint in the U.S. so it would be easier to get up and running.”

U.S. sales team contributes over 50% of global revenue

For Simon, Incopro’s expansion in America has been essential in delivering revenue targets for the business. “It was critical that we faced the challenges and moved ahead with our U.S. plans. Peak was a true partner helping us take this significant step to put our U.S. sales team in place.”

Chris Hardy, Incopro’s Chief Revenue Officer, agrees. Chris joined the company in 2018 to grow Incopro’s revenues and leads the Sales, Marketing and Partnership functions.

“Prior to building our U.S. sales team, our revenues were 100% from UK and European customers. Today, over 50% of our global revenue comes from our U.S. operations. This is a significant accomplishment from a relatively young, evolving company.”

— Chris Hardy, CRO of Incopro

With a goal of doubling revenue worldwide in the following year, Incopro is on a strong trajectory for success.  The candidates secured by Peak are still driving revenues for Incopro’s U.S. operations, now part of a 6-person strong sales team across 4 states.

Are you ready to take your talent acquisition to the next level?  Learn more about Peak’s services or contact us today to recruit top sales talent.

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Eliot Burdett

Latest posts by Eliot Burdett (see all)

• 31 Must-Know Sales Follow-Up Statistics for 2024 Success – December 21, 2023
• 7 Success Characteristics That Define Top Performers – December 19, 2023
• 5 Reasons Your Top Employees Quit (Stop Doing This to Stop Them Leaving) – December 14, 2023

At the end of the day, the primary goal for any CHRO is to ensure organizations remain high-functioning, productive, and efficient. L&D departments vary in size and scope across industries; however, many share several successful practices in common. By interviewing and surveying organizations that have demonstrated innovative and effective practices in the leadership and development field, we can draw strong correlations between success indicators, the insight of which can inspire other organizations of any size to improve their own practices.

If they aren’t already, CHRO’s can, for example, embrace new technologies, promote a culture of learning, and improve reporting processes for the best ROI. A vast majority of executives are willing to invest and make the changes necessary to drive their organizations forward. Thus, with the right ideas and the research to support them, CHRO’s can lead company growth and success.

Understand the Challenges

Aside from limited budget, many organizations reported that small team sizes, illustrating ROI on talent development initiatives, getting employees engaged in L&D, and getting executives involved in the organization’s professional development rounded off the top-five challenges facing their L&D departments. Before CHRO’s can determine the best way to lead organizational development, they need to understand the challenges they are up against.

Although intimidating, once an organization has an idea of their most pressing challenges, they can begin to prioritize where they would like to make the most improvement and craft a strategy to put the changes in effect.

Measurement is Key

Over half (55%) of the companies surveyed who reported that they do not measure L&D success also noted that they perform at a lower or much lower level than competitor organizations that do. In effect, when the metrics related to L&D are not collected and analyzed, companies do not have the necessary information to make vital decisions concerning organizational development.

Consequently, budgets to fund such initiatives are also negatively impacted. Many CHRO’s report that their L&D budget will either decrease or remain the same, despite the need for more resources to develop their organizations. On the other hand, 100% of companies who plan to increase the budget are also the ones who indicate they measure the impact of L&D.

Therefore, the take-away is that if they aren’t already, CHRO’s should ensure that their initiatives are being measured in order to demonstrate the full impact of their efforts.

Learning is Fundamental

Retention rate is a measurement that nearly all companies collect, analyze, and often worry about. It’s common knowledge that low employee retention has a large impact on monetary and personnel resources. Organizations struggle to come up with ideas to increase retention; yet, the numbers suggest that companies can benefit from funding learning initiatives for employees that increase not only employee engagement but also employee competency.

Thus, it’s a win-win for CHRO’s who are concerned about their organization’s retention rate and employee training. Companies without staff engaged in learning are twice as likely to lose staff before three years. On the other hand, nearly half (42%) of L&D professionals indicate that employees were noticeably more engaged in the overall operations of the organization when they were being engaged in professional development and training.

So, for CHRO’s looking to increase their organization’s employee satisfaction rating, consider requesting funding be dedicated to training employees on all levels across the company.

Embrace Technology

For CHRO’s with limited budget or small team sizes, technology is your best friend. In the past few years, the popularity of virtual learning has dramatically increased. E-learning and virtual classrooms still lead the list of popular forms of virtual learning, but as technology becomes more innovative, so do organizations in the way they use such technology.

Companies are now reporting that they use online game-based learning, mobile learning, and virtual reality to get their employees engaged in professional development. Oftentimes, these are cost-efficient alternatives to sending employees to training providers or large conferences. It also allows for flexibility when it comes to time management and productivity, as employees can login and do their training whenever time allows.

It also provides a great way for CHRO’s without a big L&D budget to kickstart their training initiatives and begin tracking ROI.

Get Executives On-board

Support from top management is integral for any organizational decision. A CHRO’s best chance at initiating leadership and development success is to, therefore, get the executives behind their ideas. With upper-management support also comes the funding and time necessary to get the best ROI. Unfortunately, over 30% of professionals surveyed reported that top management could value L&D initiatives more or didn’t value them at all.

By comparison, 90% of companies with strong learning cultures also said that senior executives were actively engaged in L&D. This suggests that employees across the organization from entry- to senior-level are more likely to get involved and take their professional development seriously when they see executives are supporting and encouraging them.

Assess the Impact

Measuring ROI is the most efficient practice to monitor the impact of L&D training, and for good reason. Of the companies who had grown in the last financial year, 100% reported that they tracked the ROI of training. However, for CHRO’s there’s other indicators of success that should be taken into consideration.

Most important is the feedback from the employees themselves. Feedback regarding their professional development training allows CHRO’s to see what’s working and make changes where things are not. The result is a more effective training program that capitalizes on both time and money. In a similar vein, CHRO’s can also ask employees who directly manage teams to assess how they think training initiatives have positively impacted their work flow and how they can still be improved.

Another good indicator is to keep track of which employees who have completed training are also promoted internally. The higher the correlation, the more likely the training being invested in is having a positive influence.

The Key Takeaway

Leadership and development is a priority for top-performing organizations.

Companies who have figured out that training initiatives at every level within their organization are key to employee engagement, revenue growth, and innovation are reaping the benefits and ready to share.

Therefore, it’s a great time for CHRO’s to get invested in L&D and promote organizational growth. With the right information, CHRO’s will have no problem convincing top-management to buy into their ideas and support initiatives that have proven successful for competitors.

To see all the statistics and learn more, check out the full 2018 L&D Report.

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• About
• Latest Posts

Eliot Burdett

Latest posts by Eliot Burdett (see all)

• 31 Must-Know Sales Follow-Up Statistics for 2024 Success – December 21, 2023
• 7 Success Characteristics That Define Top Performers – December 19, 2023
• 5 Reasons Your Top Employees Quit (Stop Doing This to Stop Them Leaving) – December 14, 2023