Top-performing salespeople have one thing in common – they consistently achieve their sales goals. To recruit these talented and rare salespeople, employers need to take a hard look at what they are offering prospective candidates, and if they are doing what it really takes to attract ‘A’ players.

Hiring managers fail to acquire top performes when they don’t evaluate how their company is positioned to attract salespeople who are not actively looking for a new employer. “Organizations rarely examine what they can specifically offer to entice salespeople who are happily employed and progressing well in their career, and so they are continually disappointed by their recruiting,” says Brent Thomson, CSO at Peak Sales Recruiting. Companies need to evaluate the financial and intangible attributes they offer salespeople and outpace competitors who vie for the same stellar candidates.

Elite salespeople look for a specific set of characteristics from employers: they want to work for market leaders with strong value propositions that offer high earning potential and career growth opportunities. Shifting a company to embody these characteristics sets a clear path toward attracting and hiring the best talent.

Here are 3 ways employers can attract the best sales talent:

1. Define and Build an Employer Brand

An attractive employer brand is the primary reason great salespeople want to work for a particular company. As defined by Richard Mosley, author of The Employer Brand, this term denotes “an organization’s reputation as an employer, as opposed to its more general corporate brand reputation.” LinkedIn reports that 59% of executives are investing more in their employer brand in 2016 than last year, bringing new emphasis to marketing for job candidates. Appealing to top salespeople requires that executives develop their employer brands with these aspects in mind:

Position the Company as a Market Leader

Top salespeople are always interested in working for industry leaders or high-growth companies that are poised to dominate their sector.  If there’s no track record of success at a company and reps aren’t making quota, great salespeople are savvy enough to realize it’s not their best option to make a move. Respected employers, therefore, demonstrate their legitimacy by leveraging key client logos in the recruiting process and highlight the number of reps making and exceeding quota. By emphasizing their reputation and resources, they gain the attention of top talent.

Offer a Pro-Sales Culture

High-performing sales reps seek respect, not just within their immediate teams, but throughout an organization; they want to work for companies that value what they do. Therefore, in order to recruit top talent, sales executives need to highlight their pro-sales culture and underscore how they recognize that their sales reps are the primary drivers for company growth.

This kind of pro-sales culture stands out to prospective candidates because it emphasizes both team-wide collaboration and individual competition; both of which are job qualities that great salespeople want to experience on a day-to-day basis. A strong community of support that pushes salespeople to meet consistently high standards appeals to leading sales reps. Ideally, hiring managers emphasize this balance, as well as the willingness of a company to support the autonomy and ingenuity of their sales teams.

Create a Strong Career Track

To encourage top talent to join their company rather than a competitor’s, executives need to offer prospective candidates more than a better job. Top talent appreciates educational opportunities to build on their skillset and learn different selling methodologies, and want to know that a potential employer will provide the support necessary for them to build extensive sales portfolios. Outstanding companies combine these opportunities with fast career tracks, giving salespeople more agency to take on bigger accounts and move into management opportunities.

2. Offer Market Leading Compensation

If business leaders want to attract sales professionals with strong records of success, they need to provide competitive compensation. Mark W. Johnston and Greg W. Marshall, authors of Contemporary Selling: Building Relationships and Creating Value, explain why:

“Holding down sales compensation may appear to be a convenient way to hold down selling costs and enhance profits, but this is usually not true in the long run. When buying talent in the labor market, a company tends to get what it pays for. If poor salespeople are hired at low pay, poor performance will almost surely result. If good salespeople are hired at low pay, the firm is likely to have high turnover, with the resulting higher costs for recruiting and training replacements and lost sales.”

Top-tier talent only works for above-average compensation that matches their skill set, experience level and selling potential. When targeting these salespeople, executives need to offer premium compensation with simple-to-calculate commissions that have an immediate impact on their income.

3. Emphasize Job Meaning and Impact

The sense of meaning salespeople expect to experience on the job also motivates high performers to change companies. Patty McCord, who worked as the chief talent officer at Netflix for 14 years, believes that advertising meaningful work is an integral aspect of any recruitment plan.

At start-ups, in particular, sales reps can be part of a growth story, helping to form a company from the ground up. Instead of investing in outrageous perks — in-office bars, razor scooters, and pre-paid Uber accounts — emphasize the opportunity for employees to take ownership of their role within a company and have a material impact.

According to Fast Company, employees who derive this sense of meaning from their work are three times as likely to stay at their company, while reporting 1.7 times higher job satisfaction and 1.4 times more engagement on the job. Executives also need to recognize the role of these less tangible factors in motivating high-performing candidates to accept to a new position and stay with the company for the long-term.

Offer The Best to Get The Best

Talented salespeople are highly sought-after — they are used to receiving numerous job offers from a range of employers. Directly competing with other companies for a limited pool of top-tier candidates requires that leaders emphasize their employee brand, offer above-average compensation and stress the potential for each job candidate to impact their company in a meaningful way.

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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:

Latest posts by Eliot Burdett (see all)

• 20 Of Our Favorite Books About Sales Management and Sales Leadership – October 20, 2023
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• Augment Your Recruiting Strategy During “The Great Resignation” – July 26, 2021

San Jose is the largest city in Silicon Valley, home to a world-class roster of companies that have defined our era and irrevocably influenced the global economy. The region is a base for established Fortune 500 businesses while new, innovative startups are fueled by the highest concentration of venture capital in the world. The area offers world-class universities, produces the most U.S. patents, and attracts top talent to usher in the latest cutting-edge technologies.

San Jose is an ideal city for growth-minded leaders who want to build a team of the best salespeople in the country. Indeed, the Milken Institute ranked it as the #1 U.S. metropolitan area where jobs were created and sustained in 2015. The area is prosperous, and its rapid growth presents an ever-changing sales hiring landscape in which companies compete for talent.

Here’s how to successfully hire top salespeople in San Jose, with a look at the region’s sociocultural landscape, local job market, key drivers of economic growth, business challenges, and sales-specific hiring and compensation trends.

San Jose and Silicon Valley: an overview

Silicon Valley refers to a group of cities that were defined by the semiconductor industry of the late 20th century and named for the silicon used to make computer chips. The area is still dense with high-tech engineering and manufacturing companies, but today, it is best known for the internet and software companies that have originated in the area over the last two decades. The established giants and brand-new startups in the area make it the global epicenter of innovation in technology. San Jose is situated at the southernmost point of the Silicon Valley and accounts for most of the area, sprawling over 180 square miles.

Its neighboring cities are impressive and world-renowned in their own right. North from San Jose, on the peninsula that separates the Pacific Ocean from the San Francisco Bay, are a group of cities that includes Cupertino (Apple headquarters), Mountain View (Google headquarters), Menlo Park (Facebook headquarters), and Palo Alto (Stanford University). Palo Alto is also home to Sand Hill Road, the world hub of venture capital firms. San Francisco lies at the very northern point of the peninsula, about an hour and a half’s drive from San Jose — a cultural mecca and hotbed of young companies developing mobile applications, cloud-based software, biotech inventions, social media tools, and more.

These Silicon Valley cities form an interconnected network of suburban residential neighborhoods dotted with commercial areas and small downtowns. Residents commute across borders daily, living and working and playing in the mix of cities that blend to form a world-renowned nexus of tech businesses, startups, and venture capital.  

As the largest city in Silicon Valley, San Jose gets the lion’s share of its residents — and companies have taken note. San Jose boasts a population of one million residents and is the tenth largest city in the United States. It’s the largest metro area in northern California (for comparison, Los Angeles and San Diego dominate southern California with populations of four and one and a half million, respectively).

Silicon Valley’s cultural mindset values innovation, tinkering, big bets, and meritocracies, leading to a professional population that embraces risk and late nights in the office in search of big payoffs and products the world has never seen before. It’s also a self-aware culture, with shows like HBO’s hit “Silicon Valley” and Amazon’s “Betas” that parody the slang and archetypical characters of startup life.

San Jose is delightfully diverse, with immigrant populations from all over the world forming the majority of the workforce. It is also one of the most highly educated communities in the nation; over 46% of adults in the area hold a bachelor’s degree and 21% hold a graduate degree (while the national level is 11%). 30,000 students from San Jose State University supply local companies with recruiting opportunities for interns and new grad talent, and over 10,000 new science and engineering graduates come from other top area universities each year, including Stanford, Santa Clara University, and University of California at Berkeley and Santa Cruz. Local sales education programs include business programs from San Jose State, Notre Dame de Namur University, and Stanford’s MBA program. Professional groups and networking sites like Meetup.com give local sales talent ongoing opportunities for education, training, collaboration, and networking.

The Silicon Valley Leadership Group surveyed 218 Silicon Valley CEOs in 2015, and not surprisingly, they cited the entrepreneurial mindset (83%) and access to skilled labor (81%) as the top two reasons for doing business in the area.

Larry N. Gerston, Ph.D., a San Jose State University researcher leading the study, sums it up well: “The Valley’s stellar achievement is not an accident. Brilliant technologists and scientists, innovators, visionary corporate leaders and a 21st-century workforce have produced an environment nurtured by world class universities. Investors have provided incredible support for creative ideas, many of which have become the outputs of booming companies.”

And let’s not forget the quality of life.

San Jose gets an average of 301 days of sunshine per year, with a mean temperature of 60.5 degrees Fahrenheit. It is a lively cultural center with family-friendly arts and entertainment and has a growing young professional population in the downtown area.

The city offers many museums, including the beloved Tech Museum of Innovation and the Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose. The arts are in full swing with the San Jose Repertory Theater, San Jose Ballet, San Jose Symphony, San Jose Jazz Festival, film festivals, musical theater companies, improv schools, and dance companies. Charming shopping districts like Santana Row are ideal for an evening stroll amid live music, frozen yogurt vendors, and designer shops. The active population partakes in rock climbing, yoga, and mountain biking in nearby hills, while sports stadiums and local hockey and soccer teams attract spectators (and a short drive away, Santa Clara’s Levi’s Stadium hosted the 2016 Super Bowl).

The San Jose International Airport links the city with countries around the world. Locally, residents can commute around the Bay Area with buses, light rails, train, and a planned subway expansion to San Jose connecting it to the rest of the Bay Area. Unfortunately, the transit options haven’t kept up with the economic and population booms, so vehicle traffic is a huge issue for residents. Innovative organizations are testing fixes for this problem, from Bike Share programs in San Jose, to rideshare startups like Uber and Lyft, to Google’s early pilot programs for self-driving cars.

San Jose’s subdivisions

San Jose’s sprawl can be divided into a number of neighborhoods, but for businesses, the city acknowledges three basic divisions: Downtown, North San Jose, and South San Jose.

Downtown San Jose stands out amid Silicon Valley suburbia and is marked by housing high-rises, a growing nightlife scene for young professionals, and many leading companies. Over 100 high-tech firms like Adobe and Oracle have buildings in Downtown alone, joined by top companies outside the tech sector, such as Ernst & Young, Deloitte, PWC, several banks, the San Jose Mercury News, and the U.S. Trademark and Patent Office. Stanley Yang, CEO of NeuroSky, explains why: “Our company has chosen Downtown San Jose, the region’s only urban experience, for its first headquarters. As the creative cultural center of Silicon Valley, Downtown helps recharge today’s top innovators.”

Nearby North San Jose is a growing live-work district spanning 5,700 acres of land, with the highest growth potential for jobs, housing, and office space. The local government boasts the area’s growth potential in terms of employment, employee housing, and office space, and the fact that 20% of residents in North San Jose have a science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) degree. Stretching to the southernmost tip of Silicon Valley, South San Jose is a spacious residential area with stretching green spaces and parks; some companies are gradually moving to the area for the reverse commute and open space.

San Jose labor market and business landscape

San Jose is the land of opportunity for professionals, and sales talent is no exception. As Patrick Lo, CEO of Netgear in San Jose, puts it: “There is no other place in the world with the concentration of businesses, entrepreneurial energy, financial capital, talent pool of educated employees and government commitment to business development.”

San Jose had the #1 highest job growth rate in the nation in 2014 (4.6%) among United States metropolitan areas with a population of over 1 million people, and ranked #2 in the overall 200 largest metro economies. In 2015 alone, the Silicon Valley area added 58,000 jobs (11,000 more than the previous year); impressive compared with San Francisco, which added 18,000 in the same timeframe. According to the Milken Institute report, professional, scientific, and technical jobs grew 7% in 2014, while and information services jobs grew 23%. Over the past five years, the area added nearly 67,000 jobs in professional services.

A large share of San Jose’s economic boom comes from companies related to high-tech manufacturing for computers, electronic components, semiconductors, networking, telecommunications. The fastest-growing industry, meanwhile, is made up of high-tech services companies that create software and internet products. Other thriving industries include Energy and Cleantech, as well as financial, professional, and venture capital. The high wages and affluence that come along with tech jobs stimulate the local economy, driving housing, services retail stores, restaurants, landscaping, entertainment, healthcare, and more.

Economic growth and job opportunities are driven by large companies and tiny startups alike. Thirty-one Fortune 500 companies are located in the Bay Area; three of them are in San Jose itself, including internet retail giant eBay, Cisco Systems (networking), and Sanmina (semiconductors). In 2015, the metro area hosted 23 initial public offerings and served as a home for 8,600 startups (beating San Francisco, which had 7,400 startups).

The region’s unemployment rate reflects this at 3.9%, compared with the national average of 5.0%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

What is driving growth?

The city’s population is projected to grow by 40% by 2040. It’s also making plenty of room for business growth — double the room, in fact. San Jose has 100 million square feet of currently-developed office space, and its capacity for office space is 200 million square feet.

Let’s not forget that growth in San Jose and the Silicon Valley are fueled by the highest concentration of venture capital investments in the world.

Venture capital investments reached $9.8 billion in 2015 — the highest level since the year 2000 during the dot-com era. Software companies received more than half of that capital. Patents and research in the area are key to the growth ecosystem and are a great indicator of innovation in the area. One out of every eight patents in the United States originates in San Jose, and registrations hit 17,000 in 2014 — a historical record. And with 8,600 startups based in San Jose, the city hopes to see some of them undergo rocketship growth.

The sheer concentration of companies in the area is a growth driver in itself. Companies move to San Jose to be close to potential customers, competitors, and world-class corporate partners — a key success ingredient for sales teams looking to build deep relationships with prospects and other business development contacts. In addition, much of Silicon Valley’s professional workforce lives in San Jose (it’s the most populous city in the area). Creating San Jose offices gives these employees better work-life balance and shorter commutes.

For these reasons, companies based in other parts of the Bay Area are expanding into North and Downtown San Jose — and tech giants are no exception.

Apple has signed impressive land and building deals in North San Jose that could bring over 10,000 employees into the area. Chad Leiker, vice president at commercial real estate brokerage Kidder Mathews, tells the San Jose Mercury News, “This is really incredible. It is aggressive. It’s a land grab … a major investment in Silicon Valley.”

Meanwhile, rumors circulate about Google scoping out land in the city, which Mayor Sam Liccardo welcomes with open arms. “It’s no secret that a good share of Google’s employees live in San Jose and we would certainly encourage Google’s expansion here,” Mayor Liccardo said. “We can accommodate a great deal of space for Google or other companies in San Jose. We have the advantage of scale. We offer ample room to grow that companies cannot find in some of our smaller neighbors.”

Samsung Electronics currently has its North American headquarters in San Jose, and recently announced plans to nearly triple its city footprint in a state-of-the-art building. “We will make this 1.1 billion square foot building a place of growth, with two thousand local jobs here,” said Dr. O.S. Kwon, CEO of Samsung Electronics.

Even smaller, growing companies headquartered in San Francisco are choosing to open offices in San Jose rather than expanding more of their the existing San Francisco operations. “This office will help our employees balance work and life so they can continue to make our customers successful, while also being a big help with recruiting new employees,” according to Sherry Lowe, the Vice President of corporate marketing at Splunk.

We also see growth activity in San Jose coming from businesses moving in from other countries. SMTC Corporation, a global electronics manufacturing corporation with 1,300 employees worldwide, moved its headquarters from Toronto to San Jose in 2015 to take advantage of the city’s location. “This new direction will better position SMTC Corporation to its investors while continuing to develop new customers globally and serve existing customers with the same world class service levels that we have been known for,” said Sushil Dhiman, the company’s CEO and President.

Sales hiring in San Jose

These businesses, large and small, depend on the best sales executive talent in the world to keep business booming. Demand is strong, and Peak Sales Recruiting has seen steady increases originating in the San Jose area: since 2010, the demand from late stage start-ups in the area to recruit senior-level reps and above has risen more than 15%.

These companies are looking for the best of the best. Sales hiring requirements for Peak Sales Recruiting have concentrated on the following advanced skillsets:

• Successful experience managing and growing an international territory
• Successful experience growing company-wide revenue
• Successful experience increasing profit margin
• Successful experience managing a sales team of 15+ reps
• Successful experience selling enterprise solutions

The local culture breeds top-notch sales teams, and some of San Jose’s top companies are led by CEOs with strong backgrounds in sales. Cisco’s Chuck Robbins, for example, was the Fortune 500 company’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations, which includes the sales organization, until he was named CEO in 2015. David G. DeWalt, Chairman and CEO of cyber security giant FireEye, served as Vice President of Sales at Segue Software and Quest Software.

Strong, experienced, pro-sales executive teams that set clear sales objectives and growth targets are one of the primary factors that Silicon Valley’s best salespeople evaluate in prospective employers. And, of course, they assess compensation packages.

Sales salaries in San Jose

Pay levels in the San Jose region are much higher than the national average. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, workers in all industries in the San Jose-Santa Clara Metropolitan Area earn an hourly wage about 60% higher than the nationwide average.

Sales positions are no exception. Our data shows that companies requesting support from Peak Sales Recruiting in the San Jose area must offer compensation plans with on-target salaries that are 30% to 35% higher than the national average in order to successfully attract top producers.

Although pay levels for specific positions vary, the tables below provide a glimpse of how much higher sales job wages are in the San Jose area compared to national pay levels using the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data. Annual wages for all occupations stand at $75,770 for the San Jose area, compared to $47,230 nationally. Sales managers come with a significant premium at $165,570 in San Jose (versus the national average of $126,040) while sales engineers command an average pay of $133,060 in San Jose (versus $104,660).

And, according to our data, sales salaries are rising:

• For senior sales representatives selling software and SaaS solutions, annual base salaries have risen 6.58% ($95,899 to $102,209) since 2014.
• Regional sales managers base salaries have also increased, with top performers earning a base of $125,192, up 5% from 2014.

Business challenges

The economic boom in San Jose comes with challenges for businesses looking to operate in the area and employ top talent. Companies and employees cite ongoing problems like traffic, the high cost of living, and the cost of doing business in a relatively restrictive regulatory environment with high taxes. Indeed, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group’s annual CEO survey found that 90% of the CEOs consider housing costs to be the largest issue for their employees, followed by traffic congestion (63%) and taxes (56%).

The median home price in San Jose was $965,000 in the third quarter of 2015, an increase of 12.2% compared to a year earlier, according to data from the National Association of Realtors. Meanwhile, the national median price for a home in 2014 was $298,100.

California is well known for its high taxes and large number of regulations impacting businesses, like The California Environmental Quality Act. In the 2015 Silicon Valley CEO Survey, 54% of CEOs surveyed think that state legislature is on the wrong track for creating a healthy business climate (while just 18% think it’s doing well). These businesses also ranked their top requests for the local government: invest in traffic relief programs, create affordable home developments, and streamline regulatory and permit approvals.

San Jose officials are aware of these issues, but it remains to be seen whether they can implement changes quickly enough to ease the issues and prevent more of them as the city grows. As San Jose’s vice mayor Rose Herrera said, “The big thinking is more transit; we have to bite the bullet, and spend the money.”

Looking ahead 

Opportunities are abound in San Jose for businesses focused on growth, world-class innovation, and hiring top sales talent. The area provides access to a vibrant community of sales and business professionals coming out of the nation’s top universities, amid a culture and legacy of amazing innovation and entrepreneurships. Not to mention the perfect weather.

It’s for these same reasons that companies need to contend with stiff hiring competition from tech giants and hot startups. To build a sales team that will continually hit aggressive growth targets, businesses not only need to offer a salary at or above market rate, but also differentiate themselves with a positive, pro-sales culture and disruptive offerings. They need to show top candidates that sales is a priority, express interest early and consistently, and move the hiring process forward. If companies can keep up, San Jose is the place for business growth stoked by the best sales talent in the world.

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Ryan Thornton

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• 3 Ways Your Employees Will Sabotage Hitting Year End Targets – December 27, 2023
• 7 Ways to Hit Your Year End Target With Ease – December 20, 2023
• How to Handle Counter Offers — and Win Top Talent – December 18, 2023

Sales conferences can be extremely beneficial for sales teams – attendees are introduced to new strategies, hard-earned insights, and new connections from B2B sales world. In fact, SalesForce notes their past events have proven to increase sales productivity of attendees by 30%, increase marketing campaign effectiveness by 59%, and increase customer retention by 31%. While not all conferences can lay claim to results like these, the best provide the tools, resources and insights required for attendees to justify the cost of attendance.

In 2015 we laid out the steps on how to choose a sales conference that would produce a return on investment. Using that process, sales executives can determine which conference(s) from our list they and their teams should attend this year.

In no particular order, here are the top sales conferences of 2016:

1. Sales Conference 2.0

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2. Inside Sales Leadership Summit

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3. CRM 2016

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4. MarketingSherpa Summit

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5. LeadsCon

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6. SiriusDecisions Sales Leadership Exchange

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7. Topo Sales Summit

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8. INBOUND

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9. Dreamforce

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10. CEB Sales and Marketing Summit

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What sales conferences will you attend in 2016? Are there any that we didn’t list that deserve a mention? Let us know in the comments.

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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

Hiring poor and underperforming salespeople comes with a costly consequence. Mis-hires account for the vast majority of turnover rates (nearly 80%), have a lasting impact on sales team morale, and can cost businesses >$690,000 per hire, including wasted leads and lost customers. For sales executives with aggressive growth targets, failing to hire great salespeople will ultimately determine whether or not these targets are hit on a consistent basis.

The unfortunate reality for business leaders alike is that the majority of managers suck at hiring salespeople. The Corporate Executive Board found that managers think that one in five hires are “bad” or “regrettable”. In fact, a recent survey from DePaul University revealed that 33% of new sales recruits didn’t make it past their first year of employment with a new firm. So why are hiring managers having such a difficult time recruiting and hiring the elite salespeople?

Here’s the 10 reasons your sales hiring sucks and how to fix it:

1. You don’t fully understand the role 

Many hiring managers mistakenly assume that every sales role is the same and that any sales person could be successful in that role. They fail to identify the behaviors and selling activities required for a new hire to be successful in the role.

Solution: Map out and list the key selling activities and behaviors required to be successful in the role. For many hiring managers, this means determining whether the ideal candidate needs to be a farmer, someone who can manage and upsell to an existing client base, or a hunter, someone who can actively acquire net new business. Farmer and hunter roles require separate skills sets, experiences, and sales DNA to be successful. Using these 5 interviewing secrets to identify Sales Hunter DNA, a hiring manager can effectively spot a hunter during the interview process.

2. You’re not looking in the right places

Hiring managers and recruiters often begin their search for a new salesperson by posting job advertisements on popular job search websites such as Monster or LinkedIn. This approach is bound to fail since the best salespeople are those who are currently gainfully employed and not surfing job sites. With some exceptions, the vast majority of salespeople who are actively reviewing job boards are likely either poor performers who are not focused on hitting or exceeding their sales targets, or are unemployed because they consistently failed to reach quota. These are not the types of candidates world-class companies hire.

Solution: Headhunt employed salespeople who have reached or exceeded sales targets for the past 5+ years in selling environments similar to yours. Hiring or assigning specialized sales recruiters to develop and execute a comprehensive search that only targets and delivers great salespeople will reduce time-to-hire, accelerate ramp-up time, and mitigate your hiring risk.

3. You aren’t listening in interviews  

Since great salespeople only make up a small percentage of the 20 million candidate pool, hiring managers often make the fatal mistake of only selling job opportunities to “A” players, rather than questioning and evaluating the candidate’s competencies and fit in the organization. Particularly with small businesses, hiring managers desperate to hire a salesperson often turn the interview into a sales pitch, where they do all the talking instead of listening and making an objective assessment on the candidate’s skills, experience and DNA.

Solution: Sell the job opportunity during the telephone interview to establish interest among candidates and entice them to continue with the interview process. By choosing to continue with the interview process, they are demonstrating a genuine interest in your company. During in-person interviews, sit back, listen and let the candidate do the talking.

4. You’re hiring who’s available and not who you really need

In a day and age where great salespeople only make up between 10-15% of the total sales population, many hiring leaders are realizing that attracting and hiring the best salespeople takes tremendous time, effort, and resources. Unfortunately, instead of taking time to hire the right sales person, they are exposing themselves and their company to risk by simply trying to fill a seat. When hiring managers are desperate to make a hire, they see what they want to see in candidates and do not look at them objectively – virtually guarantying that they are going to hire the wrong person.

Solution: Develop and implement a talent acquisition strategy that is built upon the principle of “always be recruiting”.

5. You’re not conducting thorough reference checks  

The majority of salespeople are expert interviewees since they have to sell themselves to prospects every day. As a result, inexperienced hiring managers are often tricked into thinking that that they are hiring a great salesperson, and that checking that candidate’s references is a waste of time.

Solution: World-class hiring managers know that a reference can, in many cases, be as important as the interview itself. Embrace a reference check process that is scripted and structured and allow for the questions to reveal information that can be put into quantifiable data for a better assessment. The best references an employer can contact are those who were in a management position, equipped with the ability to comment on a candidate’s work habits and selling success, and those not necessarily provided by the candidate.

6. You have too much trust in your gut 

The saying “go with your gut” shouldn’t be embraced by hiring managers, but it frequently is. The gut is a non-objective, emotional response to external stimuli that often causes hiring managers to fall to the recruiting ‘halo effect’.

Solution: Use a structured and rigorous sales hiring process that includes a standardized interview process comprised of all the hiring stakeholders. A great sales interview process should contain, at a minimum, three stages:

• 1^st Interview – High Level Qualification: Short interview focusing on the core elements of your hiring criteria. I.e. are the activities performed by the candidate in their current and past positions in line with the role and corporate sales objectives? Are they a hunter or a farmer? What compensation package would the candidate require in order to accept the role?
• 2^nd Interview – Skills and Experience Screening: Lengthy interview focusing on the candidate’s specific skills and experience as it matches against your organization’s needs. I.e. What market segments have they sold to? Have they navigated through a complex, multi-stakeholder sale? What is the average deal size they have sold over the past 5 years? Do they abide by a specific selling methodology?
• 3^rd Interview – Behavioral Interview: Lengthy interview that focuses on developing an understanding of how the candidate acts in a given situation by asking about past examples. I.e. What sacrifices have you made to achieve your sales objectives?

*Bonus tip: Ask the same interview questions multiple times in unique ways and be on the lookout for any inconsistent responses. Here is a detailed list of great interview questions you can ask a sales candidate.

7. You don’t have an effective on-boarding program

Contrary to popular belief, the recruiting process does not end after the offer is signed. If a new hire walks in on their first day to chaos and disorganization, it creates a poor first impression and frustration. Without the implementation of an effective on-boarding program, you can expect the new hire to resign quickly or accept another offer from a competitor.

Solution: A hiring manager must ensure that the new hire’s integration into the company is planned, organized and seamless. An effective on-boarding program, leverages key tools and includes: A welcome plan, training details, and standardized progress measurements. It is built around the following tenants: orientation and training, coaching to success, action plans, and accountability.

For more details on how to implement a successful orientation plan and get your sales reps to start producing results quickly, download the free e-book: The First 90 Days.

8. You have a bad online reputation

Often, the first exposure a candidate will have with your company is online. Hiring managers often neglect the fact that if their organization isn’t known as a marquee brand or their company doesn’t have a professional and attractive online presence, that they can forget attracting “A” level talent. Moreover, if their company has a poor reputation on employer ranking sites such as Glassdoor, they should be prepared for the best candidates to pass on the opportunity, regardless of the compensation or future growth prospects offered.

Solution: Work with the marketing department to establish an online presence that promotes your organization as an ‘employer of choice’. An attractive website that has a dedicated page which communicates your organization’s functions, achievements and growth goals is an easy to way to reinforce the message your company is committed to greatness. Monitoring online reviews from current and past employees, and developing a plan to showcase positive reviews and manage and address poor reviews is another way to demonstrate your company’s commitment to excellence.

9. Your compensation plan sucks

Compensation plays a huge role in enticing already successful salespeople to make a career change and join your company. In fact, most salespeople rank it at the top of their list as the most important factor when debating whether or not to consider an employment opportunity. Too often, compensations plans are too flat, handcuffing top performers and their employers from reaping rewards derived from the right selling behaviors and activities.

Solution: Offer a compensation plan that is at or above market and abides by the following 3 principles:

• Simplicity – Simple compensation plans align sales rep efforts with company goals. Complex plans detailing different rates and bonuses for various types of sales activities can cause candidates to be confused as to whether or not they will be set up to succeed.
• Short waiting period between activity and reward – Since salespeople are motivated by immediate rewards for behavior, the compensation plan should avoid long wait times between secured sales and commission payouts.
• Stability– Many compensation plans are regularly altered by managers in order to generate higher outputs and lower costs of sale. However, it is frustrating for sales reps, in particular, to continually reevaluate how these changes affect their effort and reward quotient. Simply put, successful sales comp plans are stable.

10. You’re not evaluating their DNA

Many hiring managers make their hiring decision based off of experience first and sales skills second, with little to no formal evaluation on the candidate’s personality traits or ‘Sales DNA’. However, different selling environments require salespeople with unique characteristics or ‘sales DNA’, which is one of the most important elements a hiring manager needs to consider, yet the hardest to evaluate.

Solution: Look for key indicators of Sales DNA in your interviews or use third-party psychometric assessments. DNA consists of the sum of the key traits great salespeople possess either through genetics, education and learning, or successful job experience.

To meet aggressive sales targets, your organization requires great sales people. If you find yourself engaging in any of these hiring mal-practices, take a step back and consider the solutions proposed or risk high costs and lost sales opportunities.

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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
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• 5 Reasons Your Top Employees Quit (Stop Doing This to Stop Them Leaving) – December 14, 2023

Fans of college sports are no doubt familiar with the Raleigh, N.C. area. The University of North Carolina Tar Heels in Chapel Hill, the Duke Blue Devils in Durham and the North Carolina State Wolfpack are perennial competitors in the NCAA men’s and women’s college basketball tournaments.

And those in the tech community know that Raleigh is part of a world-renowned tech and bio-tech hub called the Research Triangle where leading organization’s like Cisco, IBM, and Glaxo-Smith-Kline have established significant operations.

But, there is more to Raleigh than tech and college sports – much more!

The city and its surrounding areas boast rich cultural opportunities, state-of-the-art research and development facilities, leading academic institutions and state and local government determined to attract businesses to the area.

With all the elements necessary to support a thriving business community, Raleigh has become one of the most desired places for CEOs and VPs of Sales to build their sales team and for salespeople to look for new career opportunities. 

This has created a sales hiring and recruiting landscape that is changing at a rapid pace, with competition over top performing salespeople heating to levels not experienced since the late 1990s. 

The Raleigh Landscape – An Overview:

Equal parts college town, state capital, economic engine, and R&D hub for many industries, Raleigh fulfills all those roles with ease. However, it is difficult to talk about Raleigh alone.

The city is part of the famous Research Triangle, so named decades ago to reflect the research prowess of the region’s three major universities – North Carolina State University, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina.

The building of the Research Triangle Park (RTP) in the 1950s cemented the area’s reputation and led to the rapid growth of another city in the area, Cary, N.C., which is close to RTP.

Today, the Research Triangle remains a key driver of economic growth for the region as one of the most successful hubs for research supporting new technologies and biotechnology. It is arguably the reason why North Carolina is named #2 out of 50 on Forbes’ list of Best States for Business.

That fact alone would be enough to generate strong growth in sales jobs, but other industries are also drawn to the region. Newsmax indicated that the top 5 industries in North Carolina in 2015 included aerospace and aviation, automotive, biotech and pharmaceuticals, energy, information and communications technology. This diverse business mix is generating attractive opportunities for sales professionals.

Finally, the area is also a hotbed of entrepreneurial activity for sales professionals interested in working for small, but high growth companies.

Not surprisingly, the Research Triangle attracts some of the best and brightest talent from throughout the U.S. and around the world. This a key reason why companies of all sizes, both new and established, are drawn to the region.

As a result, the city and surrounding areas boast strong salary levels and increasing competition for the best sales talent. For example, Peak’s requests for senior salespeople from technology and professional service organizations in Raleigh has exponentially increased over the past five years.

“Raleigh is one of the nation’s best places to start a business because of the wealth of intellectual capital, low cost of doing business and the incredible lifestyle the area has to offer,” said Jesse Lipson, vice president and general manager of workflow and workspace clouds for Citrix Systems, which has significant operations in the area.

In Raleigh, sales opportunities are abound. The city and Research Triangle are home to the headquarters of two of this year’s Fortune 500 companies (Quintiles Transnational Holdings in Durham and The Pantry in Cary, which has since been acquired). In addition, the privately held SAS Institute, with 5,200 employees, has been an anchor of RTP for many years.

Global companies looking for an ideal site for their U.S. headquarters also frequently turn to the area. As a result, companies that include GlaxoSmithKline, Syngenta, Bayer Crop Science, ABB, BASF, and Novozymes all have their U.S. headquarters in the area. CBC Americas and Merz Pharma Group are among the latest companies to decide to move their headquarters to the region.

Other major companies, like IBM and Citrix Systems, also have a significant presence in the area. “One of the great things about our Research Triangle Park campus is that every single unit of IBM has a presence here,” said Fran O’Sullivan, general manager for IBM systems strategy and operations. “When our clients are using Watson (artificial intelligence computer system) in the cloud, it’s right here in RTP.”

Mid-size companies, including technology company Red Hat Inc., also have their headquarters in Raleigh. North Carolina has “world class infrastructure, world class research and good leadership,” said Mark Yusko, founder and CEO of Morgan Creek Capital Management. It has “all the makings of a great tech scene, but it is still emerging.”

The lifestyle is another plus that resonates with many companies and their executives. The area offers plenty of cultural events— from the North Carolina State Fair in autumn, to concerts and music festivals year round.

In addition, the North Carolina Museum of Art anchors a strong line up of museums in the region. “It’s a dense and growing area with lots of alternative music, lots of alternative lifestyles and that tends to breed a pretty high-tech culture, a designed-focused culture, which is what we look for in our team.” says Tobias Dengel, CEO of app developer Willow Tree which recently opened an office in the area.

Put all this together and it is no wonder that Raleigh has been a mainstay on the “best” lists for more than a decade.

Most recently, Glassdoor ranks Raleigh as the best city for jobs with more than 24,000 job openings and a median salary of more than $50,000. Numbers like these underscore the various opportunities for sales professionals looking for a career in Raleigh.

Moreover, Forbes magazine rates the city as the second best place for business and careers in the country, which further demonstrates the city’s viability as a top business hub for organizations today and into the future.

What is Driving Growth?

Raleigh’s success has not been an accident. State and local governments have worked to nurture a business-friendly climate. The state provides incentives to attract companies to the area and for companies already in the area to expand existing operations.

For example, Evalueserve, a research and analytics company, recently received incentives from the state’s Job Development Investment Grant program to create 400 new jobs in Wake County by the end of 2017. Such programs are one reason why Chief Executive magazine rates North Carolina third out of the 50 states for business.

As for future growth, researchers point to three major industries—health care, professional services and construction—as the drivers of job growth and these projections are showing signs of coming true.

NC State’s employments statistics revealed that the top industries their MBA graduates begin their career in included consumer products, technology, consulting, and pharmaceuticals, biotech and healthcare.

The latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics also shows employment growth in these industries in the Raleigh/Cary area, while mining and manufacturing contract. For sales professionals working in/or targeting those industries, opportunities are plentiful and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, a study of technology job growth puts Raleigh in second place in the number of technology jobs (38,853) created between 2004 and 2014, a growth rate of 62.3 percent. STEM job growth increased 39 percent over the same time period to create 49,593 of these jobs.

Bayer Crop Science is just one example of a company expanding in the area. “We’ve spent about $78 million over the last couple of years and more than doubled the size of our footprint,” says Jim Blome, the company’s CEO.

This expansion includes a $33 million headquarters renovation and a $27 million state-of-the-art greenhouse to support the company’s research and development efforts. The company is also developing a strong sales force. For example, Bayer Crop Science’s 12-month Commercial Excellence Leadership Program is available to promising new employees in sales, marketing and general management.

Start-ups

Entrepreneurial activity is also strong in Raleigh and its surrounding areas. Raleigh and the Research Triangle area routinely land on the top 20 lists for attracting venture capital.

A recent report from the region’s Council for Entrepreneurial Development found that the Research Triangle attracts the vast majority of venture capital in the state of North Carolina. Of the 90 venture capital deals completed in the state during the first half of 2015, 74 involved companies in the Research Triangle area—24 deals in Raleigh, 21 in Durham and 14 for companies based in Research Triangle Park.

Since many sales professionals enjoy the challenge of meeting competitive quotas in a start-up environment, the strong entrepreneurial activity in Raleigh will attract those seeking careers in non-corporate environments. In fact, late stage start-ups looking to recruit senior sales professionals with experience in entrepreneurial environments has doubled in Raleigh over the past two years.

Overall, the state attracted more than $426 million in venture capital during the first half of 2015 for life sciences ($268 million for 26 deals), technology ($114 million for 48 deals), advanced manufacturing and materials ($34 million for ten deals) and clean tech ($9.7 million for six deals). This represents a 70 percent increase in venture capital secured compared to 2014.

There are other types of investments occurring as well.

In the RTP, the Alexandria Center for Science, Technology and Agriculture is about to launch the first phase of its development. This includes the MedBlue Incubator, which focuses on investing in and developing the science and technology from the departments of surgery, pathology and anesthesiology at Duke University Medical Center.

There will also be an accelerator called LaunchLabs that is currently nurturing nine start-ups. This facility joins more mature venture capital firms, accelerators and other entrepreneurial infrastructure in the region.

Google Fiber’s investment in ultra-high-speed fiber optic network in the Raleigh-Durham area is another sign of the area’s importance. “It’s huge,” said Chris Heivly, co-founder of The Startup Factory in Durham. “It is another big validation of everything that is going on in the Triangle. Google obviously sees what we see: a vibrant and intellectually curious community poised for great things.”

Others agree that Google Fiber represents “a new frontier for innovation in the Triangle” said Adam Klein, chief strategy officer for American Underground. “There are industries, companies and jobs that will be founded on this infrastructure that don’t exist today – much the same [as] when the smartphone was created.”

All of this activity is beneficial to entrepreneurs, however challenges remain.

According to research from North Carolina State University’s Entrepreneurship Clinic, talent acquisition is one of their top challenges, along with gaining access to capital, dealing with competition and finding new customers. Even so, they remain optimistic with 81.1 percent anticipating an increase in sales and 56.7 percent expecting to add to their workforces.

Raleigh’s Challenges:

Like any city, Raleigh is not without its challenges. Given its growth prospects, there are concerns that the flow of qualified new graduates will not be sufficient to meet future hiring needs.  (For more on how hiring managers can attract millennials to join their sales team, read this Forbes article).

More specifically, with growth in well-paying technology and STEM jobs projected for the area over the next several years, there is concern about whether the region will offer enough qualified candidates to fill those jobs.

To address this for the future, the state has developed a “STEMAccelerator” program.

“High quality STEM education is critical to North Carolina’s future prosperity,” says Gov. Pat McCrory. “To address the gap in education and workforce needs, we must provide resources and support for teachers’ professional growth – especially in the critical areas of science and mathematics.”

There is also concern about graduation rates at the Research Triangle’s key universities. “If native North Carolinians are going to be competitive for future jobs in our state, our universities must not just successfully enroll students, it must successfully matriculate and ultimately graduate them” noted the Predicting North Carolina’s Job Market in 2020 report.

For example, graduation rates after four and six years need to improve across the board. The report noted that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which offers a Bachelor of Business with a major in sales, is one of two of the only public universities that graduate more than 50 percent of their first-time, full-time freshmen in four years.

UNC-Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University, which offers an undergraduate and graduate degree in Business Administration, are the only public universities to graduate more than 70 percent of their first-time, full-time freshmen in six years.

“This failure represents not only an expense to the state’s taxpayers, but also lost opportunities for these students to compete for employment in the job market with more educated in-migrants,” the report concluded.

However, there is opportunity for sales leaders looking to recruit junior salespeople in Raleigh. There are several sales specific programs offered in the city’s central and surrounding areas that allow students to build sales specific skill sets.

For instance, 28 and 75 miles from Raleigh are the University of North Carolina: Kenan-Flagler Business School and North Carolina A&T State University. Both institutions were ranked among the top universities for professional sales education in 2013. In fact, NC A&T State’s School of Business offers a marketing program with a concentration option in sales for marketing students looking to enhance their sales acumen.

Impact on Sales Salaries and Compensation in Raleigh

If jobs in Raleigh are all about skills, employers have to be willing to pay for those skills. Unemployment in the Raleigh (4.7 percent) and Durham (4.9 percent) areas has remained steady over the past year and now stands just below the national rate.

Still, Raleigh led the state in job creation in September 2015 with 3,000 new jobs. This recent growth in jobs represents a window of opportunity for sales professionals and employers interested in relocating to a growing region with a great deal of opportunities.

Looking more closely at wage data provided by the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics, employers can get a more nuanced view of the occupation as whole in the city.

Looking Ahead

As long as technology continues to drive growth in the U.S. and broader global economy, Raleigh and its surrounding area will continue to flourish. Even as companies expand and contract or become part of a larger organization through a merger or acquisition, chances are excellent that a new, growing organization will take its place in the area.

If there is anything that might stand in the way of Raleigh’s continued success, it would be the region’s ability to keep up with the demand for top talent and specialized skills required to sustain the growth of Raleigh’s employers.

Attracting and retaining a strong workforce, including key sales positions, could require greater effort for companies in this region. However, Raleigh has proven that it is a magnet for migrants moving in from other states and countries. That, along with the excellent array of colleges and universities in the area, makes Raleigh a good bet for continued success.

Are you an employer looking to expand your sales team in Raleigh? Our team can help. Learn more about our Raleigh sales recruiting operations here.

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Ryan Thornton

Latest posts by Ryan Thornton (see all)

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