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You have a shortlist of candidates for your next sales leadership position. Choosing between candidates based on a few interview meetings is risky. You need to understand how the candidate’s leadership skills and strategic thinking will apply to your context. The solution is to invite your top 2-5 sales leadership candidates to present a sales plan for the organization.
There are a few reasons adding a sales plan presentation to the process of finding the right VP sales for your organization can help you to make a good hiring decision.
1 You Can See The Candidate In Your Company’s Context
Asking a candidate about their past sales leadership experience is helpful. For example, you can learn about their strategy to coach salespeople. However, each company’s sales situation is different.
For example, your company might have problems retaining skilled salespeople. A Harvard Business Review estimate in 2017 found that the annual turnover of salespeople can reach 27%. If high turnover is a challenge for the sales organization, mention this challenge so that the candidate’s sales plan can consider hiring and retention strategies.
2 See The Candidate In Action
For years, companies have offered free samples to consumers as a marketing strategy. It lets the customer directly experience the product. In a hiring context, some organizations give coding tests to technology professionals. It isn’t easy to simulate a leadership situation with a test. That said, seeing how each candidate thinks about the process gives you insight.
3 Speed Up The Onboarding Process
Ideally, the sales plan presentation should not be a theoretical exercise for the hiring process. Instead, encourage candidates to view the sales plan as a valuable document to help them onboard to the company. Further, the sales plan will help the candidate feel an immediate sense of ownership when they start because they will execute a strategy they have developed.
That said, a sales plan presentation represents a significant amount of effort for the candidates and the hiring company. To make the most of this process, use the following tips to fine-tune your process.
1) Outline Your Sales Plan Expectations
Providing a few simple guidelines to sales leadership job candidates will make the process unfold more smoothly.
2) Limit The Sales Plan Presentation To Your Shortlist
Sales leadership candidates are busy people, so asking them to spend several days on a sales plan presentation is a significant time investment. Asking ten candidates to prepare a sales plan presentation is probably unwise. Instead, we recommend only asking a maximum of three candidates to prepare a sales plan
3) Invite A Few Key Stakeholders
To reduce bias, it is helpful to have three people listen to the sales plan presentations and provide feedback. Specifically, invite stakeholders who are likely to interact with the new sales leader regularly, such as the CEO or President, head of marketing, and customer service. Inviting multiple stakeholders will also help to gauge how the candidate may interact with their future colleagues.
4) Use A 0-10 Scoring System
Rather than relying on highly complex scoring systems, use a simple 0-10 scoring system. Use the following definitions as a starting point:
A candidate who has met your other criteria in the hiring process and scores about 7 is well worth pursuing.
Now that you have selected a sales leader to join your organization use the sales plan document as a resource during onboarding. Provide your new hire with additional sales data like customer lists, sales statistics, and sales representative performance reviews. With this additional data, the new sales leader will be able to fine-tune their sales plan and start to grow revenue.
Managers and leaders play a critical role in setting the tone for the ethical climate in sales. Colleen Francis, good friend and author of Honesty Sells, states “Those who are in the top 10% of the sales profession have mastered the art of open, honest communication with their clients.”
Is your team in that 10%?
Are you modeling ethical behavior? Allowing for extensions on sales quotas, backdating contracts, or permitting a sleazy rep to thrive, demonstrate the philosophy that “cheating” is acceptable. Make sure the behavior you exhibit is the behavior you want modeled by your reps.
To ensure that the principles of your sales team jibes with the company philosophy, set formal ethical standards. Include an ethics clause on job descriptions, and discuss sales morality during team meetings.
Countless reps have come into our offices for interviews and quickly demonstrated that they have fabricated many of the achievements they touted. It follows that the best reps admit their failures and are honest about their experiences.
Where does it start?
Sure it starts with each and every one of us, but individual responsibility goes hand in hand with company standards. If we want our reps to be ethical, then we as sales managers have to lead by example. Be honest and open with customers, partners, and team members. You’ll be rewarded with a happy team and repeat sales.
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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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.
Meet Kelly Ruddick, Chief Spirit Officer at Peak Sales Recruiting
00:00 Intro
00:10 Remote Company Culture
00:54 Onboarding Process
1:48 Onboarding Tools
2:08 We Like to Celebrate!
2:44 Hashtag Days!
3:55 Companies Should Adopt This Role
4:12 Pointer
Reach out to the Peak Sales Team for your hiring needs: www.peaksalesrecruiting.com
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What if your VP of Sales or star sales manager left for a new job tomorrow? Your sales team might be thrown into chaos. Sales is a highly competitive profession, so it pays to be prepared in advance with a succession plan. Peak Sales Executive Search can help you avoid the pain of lost sales leadership by developing a succession plan.
According to Inc, “A succession plan is a written document that provides for the continued operation of a business if the owner—or a key member of the management team—leaves the company, is terminated, becomes incapacitated, retires, or dies.”
With this definition, every person will ultimately leave their role. Yet, a significant number of companies have not planned to mitigate this risk. For example, a PWC survey found that only 30% of family-owned businesses have a succession plan in place in 2020. Consequently, a significant number of these businesses encounter difficulties after the founders retire, sell or leave the business because new leaders are not equipped to take over.
After the CEO, sales leaders are the most crucial part of the organization. Without their guidance, revenue growth is likely to stall if not fall. That’s why we recommend developing a succession plan for your sales leadership positions. At first, focus your succession plan on one sales leadership position (e.g., Vice President of Sales).
At a minimum, a sales succession plan will include the following elements:
Repeat the above process for each key sales leadership role in your organization. The same process can also be applied to other critical executive roles such as chief financial officer and chief marketing officer.
Writing the plan on paper is a critical first step, but it is not the end of the process. It is essential to validate your succession plan by talking to people.
Kathleen Hogan, Chief Human Resources Officer at Microsoft, told Gallup that “successful succession planning is more than just identifying who will take over in the case of a role move — it means having a conversation to see if the identified individual is interested in being the successor. It sounds obvious, but you can’t just put somebody on the list without having talked to them first.”
By following Hogan’s advice, you may find some of your sales succession plan assumptions are incorrect. For example, you might find out that your top two internal candidates identified as “Ready Now” do not want the position. In this case, the succession plan has a gap that cannot be filled with employees.
If you already have a sales succession plan in more than a year old, it is time to update it. Use these techniques methods to bring your succession plan up to date.
Most succession plans, if they are realistic, note that a successor probably lacks specific skills. For example, a sales manager might not have the skills needed to manage and update the sales compensation program. A different person might have gaps in their public speaking skills.
For each internal successor with a confirmed interest in advancement, ask them to propose 3-4 learning resources to grow their skills. For example, reading a book like “Compensating the Sales Force, Third Edition: A Practical Guide to Designing Winning Sales Reward Programs” by David Cichelli might a good starting point. For leadership skill development, hiring a speaking coach to provide feedback is another option to consider. Online courses from providers like LinkedIn Learning like Building and Managing a High-Performing Sales Team provide a helpful starting point for employees interested in growing their leadership skills.
Formal learning is only part of the equation for development. Consider inviting a more junior person to shadow an executive in a series of meetings or through a process. For example, a VP of sales might invite their potential successor to plan the company’s annual sales meeting.
When executives actively participate in shadowing, it helps to bring the succession plan to life. Further, watching a potential successor in action gives some insight into their readiness to take on additional responsibilities. If the shadowing process reveals that an individual is uninterested in moving forward to a new role, that is helpful information to consider. Based on that insight, update the succession plan accordingly.
Succession planning is often conceived as a top-down exercise. The senior management team, CEO, or Board often lead the effort to develop a succession plan.
However, there is also merit in inviting managers to create smaller-scale succession plans in each of their departments. Invite managers to look at their direct reports and look for traits and capabilities that may make an employee a good fit to take on leadership roles. For example, a customer service representative who consistently resolves customer complaints and retains customer relationships might contribute even more in an account manager role. In this scenario, inviting the top-performing customer service representative to explore account management opportunities may be the next step in bringing a sales succession plan to life.
Ask hiring managers and human resources staff to consider succession planning in new hires. While it is reasonable to focus on whether the candidate can be successful in their primary role, take some time to ask about the person’s career goals and leadership interests.
For example, a new junior sales professional with a track record of leading nonprofit organizations in college may be interested in taking on leadership responsibilities over time. By showing employees that they have a path to grow their career with the company over time, you can achieve company objectives simultaneously (e.g., reducing employee turnover).
You’re not alone if you find gaps in your succession planning for critical sales roles. Many organizations have these gaps but do not discover them until it is too late to take proactive steps. When the VP leaves for a new job, the CEO may temporarily take on that person’s duties. As a result, the CEO will have less capacity to manage other parts of the business. This kind of ad hoc succession plan can be solved in new ways.
The first solution to gaps in succession planning is to look into remote talent. As a result of the pandemic, many companies have embraced work from home. According to a PWC survey released in January 2021, 83% of employers say the shift to remote work has been successful. Most executives (52%) report that average employee productivity has increased thanks to remote work arrangements. Despite these successes, challenges remain. The survey also found that many companies are not providing enough training to managers or employees to succeed in a remote environment.
There are several implications to draw from the success of remote work. First, employers with multiple offices may recruit staff from other states without the complexity of providing relocation packages. Second, recruiting an employee in another city or state is a practical option to grow your business. Recruiting remote employees may be challenging if your company is unfamiliar with the process.
The second solution to gaps in succession planning lies in expanding your recruiting strategy by working with Peak Sales Executive Search to introduce you to more executive sales leaders who can help your company grow. By meeting with candidates right now before there is a pressing need, your company is more likely to make a seamless transition when your top sales leaders eventually leave.
Psychological research has found that employers tend to fall victim to “hire like me” bias. That means you are likely to overlook outstanding executive talent different from your current sales leaders. There is a shortcut to overcoming this type of unconscious bias: leverage an outside resource’s capabilities.
The solution is to leverage outside expertise by working with Peak Sales to identify new candidates. Peak can work confidentially to identify new candidates for your succession plan even if you are not ready to advertise a vacancy. Your succession plan does not have to rely on internal talent.
Success breeds success: In the end, CogencyGlobal made a single offer, which was accepted. From initial contact with Peak Sales Executive Search to the candidate’s acceptance of the offer, was under 120 days. The conversations with CogencyGlobal developed into an ongoing relationship with Peak Sales Executive Search helping to continue build out the sales and marketing team.
For most companies, growth is both desirable and difficult to manage. Too much growth can overwhelm an organization’s capacity; too little starves it of resources. Choosing the right pace and path can make or break the company.
Legal services provider CogencyGlobal had come to a fork in the road when it reached out to Peak Sales in late 2020. With offices in North America, Hong Kong and London, the New York-based firm works in jurisdictions around the world, offering compliance, statutory and registered agent services. Many of its clients are law firms, who resell the services to individual clients. These law firms are able to offer a large menu of services to their own clients while having a trusted partner, Cogency, handling critical and exacting details in the background such as formation, required corporate filings, IP, research, independent directors and managers
FIRST STEPS
The first step was for the team at Peak Sales to understand how Cogency planned to go to market and — most importantly — to understand the nature and culture of the organization.
“We spent time talking with them about the company. The CEO was very engaged with sales,” Moore notes. “It’s a familial kind of organization. The CEO knows everyone’s name, and the sales team was accustomed to having ready access to him. Now, they were going to interpose a CRO between sales and the CEO, so that was a big change, and they knew they had to get it right.”
Armed with that understanding, the Peak Sales team got to work.
CASTING THE NET
“We didn’t want to go after someone from one of Cogency’s competitors,” Moore explains. “Instead, we focused our efforts on someone who was selling similar kinds of services into big legal firms, from a company that would have a real CRO themselves.”
As a world capital of law and finance, New York is a fertile ground for hunting legal sales talent. The first round turned up about 55 candidates. How to screen such a large pool? Peak Sales had its filters ready.
SURFACING THE GEMS
“We use psychometrics to help understand candidates’ natural preferences” Moore says. “In this case, the cultural fit was very important. We needed someone with the leadership experience to build out the sales organization and improve efficiencies, who would also fit into their culture seamlessly.”
Having found dozens of potential candidates with the sales leadership skills and right resumés, they dove into understanding each one’s management philosophy: how to blend into the culture of a new workplace, how they chose to lead their teams and how they coached and mentored their staff.
That process narrowed the field to six optimal candidates. Those six were all technically qualified; they had the skills, background and experience needed to tackle the new CRO job and were a good fit for Cogency’s culture.
FINAL SELECTION
“There was good diversity in that pool of six,” Moore continues. “They had different backgrounds, skill sets and tenures. Cogency also asked us to include candidates who had worked for smaller, nimble companies. All of the candidates were people we felt would do very well, each bringing different strengths to the table. That allowed Cogency to pick the candidates whose strengths most aligned with strategic growth plans.”
With a set of potential CROs in front of them, Cogency began its own evaluations. “The first two rounds checked off all the professional boxes,” Moore says, “followed by an in-person lunch to get a feel for the cultural fit. Their eventual choice was someone who strongly mirrored culture and had the ability to push the sales organization forward.
SUCCESS BREEDS SUCCESS
In the end, Cogency made a single offer, which was accepted. From initial contact with Peak Sales to the candidate’s acceptance of the offer was under 90 days.
“The candidate started with Cogency in mid-December and is onboarding into the organization extremely well.” Moore notes.
As often happens when Peak Sales places a leader, the relationship continues, and discussions move to further build out the sales organization in support the new leader.
“In these cases, we have a leg up because we’ve already completed the background work of understanding the organization, how they are structured, where they are headed and what they need. We become a true strategic partner with the ability to help them shape the future of the sales organization beyond purely recruiting.”
Meet Ryan Thornton, Operations Manager at Peak Sales Recruiting
00:00 Intro
00:14 Best Practices of Remote Training
00:47 Onboarding Material
1:29 Structure in Remote Onboarding
2:27 Updating Training Materials
03:19 Timeline for New Employees to Get Acclimatized
03:45 Measuring Success
Reach out to the Peak Sales Team for your hiring needs: www.peaksalesrecruiting.com
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Meet Zain Al Jaber, Client Manager at Peak Sales Recruiting
00:00 Intro
00:20 Best Practices for Interviewing Remotely – Three Key Tips for Remote Interviews:
02:15 How to structure the interview process in order to gain the needed information from candidates?
02:32 HELPFUL TIP
02:50 Questions to ask candidates to ensure they have done their homework
Reach out to the Peak Sales Team for your hiring needs: www.peaksalesrecruiting.com
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Meet Kyle Fletcher, Vice President Delivery at Peak Sales Recruiting
00:00 Intro
00:27 Best Practices of Hiring Remotely
01:24 Evaluating talent: Testing an individual’s ability to work remotely while interviewing is important, but even more so critical is to evaluate and understand if someone has been successful in a previous remote setting.
02:14 Setting Up Your Potential Hire for Success: Internally do you offer the proper support and tools? Ensure a new hire feels a part of the team and will ramp up quickly in a remote environment.
03:39 Remote Onboarding Tips & Tricks: Make sure you have a full onboarding program in the first few weeks of settling in. Find out what we do at Peak Sales Recruiting from Day 1
04:44 A few key takeaways
Reach out to the Peak Sales Team for your hiring needs: www.peaksalesrecruiting.com
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Your company sells a service to other businesses and you need a strong salesperson. So you turn to the usual source: Job boards. No doubt, you’ll get plenty of candidates. Unfortunately, most of them will be people whose experience is in selling products. In our experience, many highly successful product sellers struggle when selling services.
The nature of product salespeople is that they’re hunters: They may be very good at tracking down potential clients and closing deals. However, product sales can be all about comparing features, benefits and price against a competitor with a similar product.
If you’re selling a service — especially a complex technology service — you’re not selling something the prospect can immediately see and touch. You’re selling a solution to the client’s problem.
All salespeople want to get a return on their investment of time, and as their employer, so do you. Product salespeople can be transactional, chasing deals that can give them a quick win. Selling services on the other hand often requires the patience to build relationships, and to see the bigger picture even if it’s 12 to 18 months away.
Service salespeople must be willing to invest time in that longer sales cycle. To sell a complex solution to a client’s problem, the salesperson first has to understand the problem in detail. Some salespeople are very good passive listeners, taking in all of the information the prospect offers. But to extract everything needed to properly scope a solution, you need someone who’s skilled at directed listening — they need the ability to direct their conversations with the prospect to get all of the information they need.
In addition to directed listening, it’s crucial that the salesperson search out everyone on the prospect’s side who will have input on the decision to buy. Especially for software services, people within the prospect’s IT department — who may be two or three levels below the director who initiated the conversation — will get involved. The salesperson must engage with those stakeholders directly to understand their needs and their potential objections in order to close the deal.
Candidates who come to you with large, well-known corporations on their resumes deserve a look, but don’t be blinded by the notoriety of their former employers. Especially for a start-up or a company pivoting into a new market, someone from a big-company background may not be self-starting and self-managing. They may have been in a series of positions where they were fed qualified leads and in turn passed them on to a sales engineer to work out the details. If you’re expecting them to find their own prospects and work the deal all the way through to implementation, they may not have the experience — or tenacity — you need.
Everyone you interview will tell you they obliterated their quota every year. And those big company people will tell you they can do it all, from soup to nuts. We want to know about the sales process at those big companies, We ask questions of the candidate and can network with that company’s former salespeople and their competitors to find out what their sales process really is. Sometimes we find that the candidate may not have done their own prospecting for years.
If you post on a job board, it’s a given that you’ll get resumes from people who match your requirements. Here’s where experienced recruiters prove their value.
Beyond the requirements, it’s critical to find someone who will fit in to your organization and succeed. We spend a lot of time up front understanding our client’s culture and what kinds of people have been successful in their environment.
Especially for small-to-mid-sized European companies looking to break into the North American market we’ve found that cultural fit is essential to success. Companies headquartered in Norway or Denmark for example find the business culture in the U.S. is very different, and that can pose challenges for both the company and the new hire. These companies need someone who’s comfortable working with thin resources and with colleagues who have a very different view of business. When you add in the fact that headquarters is six to nine time zones away, we find that excellent communication skills and a commitment to use them are key.
When we screen candidates, we take culture into account and do an in-depth assessment of their character, their personality, their work style and how they like to be managed to make sure they’re a fit for our client’s needs and their organization.
To hire someone who can successfully sell services we start by verifying their skills. We delve into likes and dislikes, into common sales situations and their reactions, into past victories and defeats. We get a firm fix on their personality traits. And we spend the time up front to know our client’s culture. When we present a candidate, we’re confident they can be successful in that company. Remember, even mediocre salespeople still have the skill to sell themselves. Separating the pretenders from the performers takes skill and experience — and that’s where we stake our reputation, hire after hire.
