This week, LinkedIn News has been featuring stories that show that in-person sales—particularly within retail spaces—have been quickly climbing. And yet, many are also recognizing how few millennial and Gen Z workers want to work in sales. What’s worse, even if you manage to hire a worker for a sales position at your organization, the post-Great Resignation era we’re still in makes employee retention very precarious. So, how can you both hire and retain top sales performers long-term?
How to Use Benchmarks to Hire Top Sales Performers
As trainer, coach, and consultant Gary Zermuehlen recognizes, sales is “one of the best paying occupations on the planet if you’re good at it. But it’s also one of the worst if you’re bad at it.”
And certainly, there are effective sales training programs across North America that can improve the existing skills in your sales team members. But more often than not, a long-term career in sales is something that someone either is or is not well-suited for.
Of course, the abilities of your salespeople will depend on your organization’s products/services and its environment(s). But in many, if not all cases, there are some soft skills that are crucial for working in sales—especially highly competitive, commission-based positions.
These skills include being very money-driven, comfortable with conflict or asking difficult questions, and assertiveness. And sure, you could determine if a candidate has these skills/abilities in an interview, but you can never guarantee that the candidate is always telling the truth or if they’re just saying what they know you want to hear.
With our soft skills assessment called Packfinder, not only can you find out if a candidate is answering their questions accurately, you can also determine to what extent candidates have these soft skills needed for sales. And crucially, once you hire one top performer, you can hire multiple!
The Workwolf platform uses both psychometric profiling—such as in Packfinder—and benchmarks to effectively build candidate pools that aim to replicate existing talent. Just establish the benchmarks with the Packfinder results of existing team members and use those benchmarks to automatically filter for only the most likely suitable candidates.
4 Tips to Retain Top Sales Performers
Once you measure, filter, and on-board your top ranking candidates, then, you’ll need to retain them. But retaining these employees goes much further than merely offering work perks and a good work-life integration. You’ll need to implement sales-specific employee retention strategies. Here are our top four tips for retaining the top sales performers within your organization.
1. Offer Competitive Compensation
As previously stated, sales can be one of the best paying jobs in the world. If you’re not offering salaries that at least match your competitors, you may be out of luck for top performing salespeople. If your organization has a tight budget, offer performance-based commission, bonuses with milestones, and other incentives to encourage employees who are competitive and self-managing.
Eventually, the goal is to get your top performing employees to earn their deserved salary in sales commissions and keep your company growing at the same time.
2. Provide On-going Learning and Development Opportunities
As much as soft skills—specifically, those people either have or don’t have—play into the success rates of most salespeople, some skills can be learned. Encourage your top sales team members to stay ahead of the curve by taking workshops and online courses regularly. And crucially, pay for these programs so the employee has no reason to not improve themselves. Even better yet, the employee will then feel more loyal towards you for having learned and grown on your watch.
In addition to self-regulated programs and courses, encourage your top sales performers to seek out mentors online or in nearby industries. Offer opportunities to meet with and shadow their mentor(s) whenever possible so they can experiment with techniques and learn from some of the best in the business.
And eventually, when these employees become confident and ready to share their knowledge with the next generation, set up an internal mentorship program to encourage a long chain of strong salespeople within your organization.
3. Offer and Encourage Growth within Their Career
Because salespeople are often highly goal-oriented and self-regulatory, it’s natural they’ll want to keep moving within their career span. So, from the very beginning of their time with you, make sure your salespeople know what options they have for growth within the company.
And importantly, check in with them regularly to see if they’re being challenged or if they’re ready to move onto a new position with more responsibilities—and perhaps a raise to go with it. If options seem slim—even if they seem content—they might take all of their growth and successes elsewhere.
4. Recognize and Celebrate Achievements
A little recognition can go a long way! Even a small pat on the back once in a while can assure your employees that you recognize and appreciate their hard work. This can be as simple as a verbal acknowledgement or even a post on a cork board that announces a recent significant sale. See what makes your salespeople smile and feel recognized. You never know what might inspire them to keep going.
Conclusion
Retaining top sales performers is particularly crucial nowadays in the wake of the Great Resignation. Competitive and commission-based sales can be a very rewarding career path, but it can also be a very challenging and discouraging one if someone is not well-suited for it. So, start building your dream sales team by ensuring your employees are all well-suited for the position based on their soft skills. You can measure their soft skills in terms of their potential in sales by offering them an online assessment, such as Workwolf’s very own Packfinder. This way, you can know for sure the kind of person you’re hiring for the position.
Once you’ve found your star staff members, then, make sure to retain them long-term by following our top four tips: offer competitive compensation, provide on-going learning opportunities, foster their growth within the organization, and acknowledge their successes and hard work.
