How to recruit a good sales team

Several characteristics that should be paid attention to when recruiting a good sales team:

● Intelligence: the ability to quickly understand and process information.

● Problem-solving skills: analyze advantages and disadvantages and find solutions quickly; Understand the problem from past experience and summarize the analytical framework for solving the problem.

● Creativity: the ability to think positively and put forward original ideas.

● Consumer knowledge: enthusiastic about consumer demand and purchase behavior.

● Perseverance: strong in principle, able to remain strong under pressure, and dare to adhere to a fact-based point of view; And it can be eclectic.

● Comprehensive ability: the comprehensive ability of combining point, line and plane and interdisciplinary.

● Adaptability: able to cope with changing external conditions; Able to propose solutions to complex problems.

● Logical thinking ability: verifying various judgments; Can draw credible conclusions from a series of actual situations.

● Communication skills: able to have a clear and calm debate with others.

Good work record: excellent background and work experience.

If your existing sales team lacks these characteristics, don't expect them to recruit talents with these characteristics. After all, birds of a feather flock together. In addition to hiring your existing staff, you should also look for the talents you really need. This kind of defect is the most difficult for company managers to correct, and the only solution is to start from the top.

Avoid an inverted team structure.

Sales is an industry that needs experience inheritance. Successful salespeople grow by learning from experienced seniors. However, the organizational structure of most sales teams cannot meet this demand. In most cases, the company sends the lowest-level personnel to the front line, rather than selecting sales personnel according to the requirements of the current sales environment. This approach obviously does not attach importance to the front-line staff's ability to analyze the company's value proposition and return on investment. On the other hand, the regional sales manager is too busy with administrative affairs to take care of the front-line sales staff.

Experienced salespeople are often promoted to management. This means that people with little experience in the field of management will undertake the task of strategic decision-making. They always integrate into the organizational culture of the company quickly, and can no longer see or adapt to the subtle changes in the competitive environment. In addition, top salespeople are usually promoted to management, although they may not be suitable for managing or supervising others.

If the reward policy can motivate top sales staff well (the percentage of performance commission has not increased rapidly, but there is no upper limit), then the best way to solve these problems is to encourage regional sales managers to return to the sales front line. On the one hand, they can keep up with the development of the times, on the other hand, the company can also benefit from their superb sales skills.

The company also needs to consider launching a set of novice training plan for at least 12 months, introducing sales skills, setting sales targets and guiding the whole process (the first two or three months are centralized training). Its purpose is to spread experience and knowledge in the front line, and at the same time save the intermediate link of management.

Salary is linked to the company's operation.

Few companies will associate their salary system with the company's growth and profit. However, if a company links the salary system with the company's operating conditions, its sales performance and profit level will be greatly improved in less than six months. An effective salary system should closely combine the reward for the sales team with the company's development goals, accurately and fairly measure the sales performance, encourage every salesperson to forge ahead, and attract and retain those top employees.

On the contrary, a poorly planned salary system may inadvertently mislead the sales team to find the wrong customer base, provide unnecessary discounts or over-motivate the sales staff. Such a system will hinder the development of the team and prevent the sales team from fully investing in recommending new products to customers. It will also send the wrong signal to the sales staff: leaving the sales front line is the right decision. Remember, a successful incentive system must be accurate, fair and concise.

The accurate performance of the system ensures that the reward for sales personnel is completely linked to their sales performance. Fairness ensures that the same effort can get the same reward. Moreover, the system must be concise-no more than four or five parts-which is convenient for sales staff to understand, weigh and master. Incentive system must reward outstanding performance, and can reflect the merits of individual performance from the reward. Of course, the incentive system should also consider the collective performance of the team, because for example, when a multi-task sales team sells a series of products to retailers, it needs cross-industry and cross-product teamwork.

Team size should adapt to market changes.

The system of most sales teams is too rigid to adapt to the changing external environment. If the market changes too fast, the gap between the expected demand and the actual demand of resources will become very large or change very fast. In order to reduce the influence of changes in sales channels and market fluctuations, the size of the sales team should be approved at least once every two years. Take the changing retail industry in various countries as an example. At least 20% of the working hours of the sales team need to be readjusted every two years.

Before the launch of new products, it is also a critical period to update or adjust the scale of sales team and redeploy tasks. When a new product comes on the market, the company usually invests more than half of its sales staff. Therefore, mature goods are ignored and it is easy to lose market share.

In order to avoid too scattered sales team, the company should make greater efforts to expand the size of the sales team. In view of the relatively small and short-term resource gap, the company can solve it by adjusting internal resources-for example, mobilizing marketing personnel to spend the busy period of operation. For the relatively large and long-term resource gap, the company can solve it through strategic negotiations with agents and distributors, and even reach a market cooperation agreement with non-competitive companies.

Flexibility is also crucial in customer segmentation. When a company subdivides its customers from the perspective of operation and strategy, it often finds that the resource allocation for key customers is insufficient. Appropriate resource allocation for key customers can generate income 0.5 to 2.5 times higher than the average resource allocation 1.5. For non-strategic and shrinking customers, the company can adopt outsourcing strategy. For these customers, the company's main goal is to control the shrinking situation according to the principle of cost performance under the premise of ensuring market share.

Determining the number of salespeople in each sales field can be analyzed by top-down and bottom-up methods. The top-down method is to calculate the income and cost of each additional salesperson until the increased income and cost are equal to get the optimal number of salespeople. The bottom-up approach is to measure the necessary customer contact depth-for example, how many target customers should be contacted, how often, how long each contact takes, and how many salespeople are needed to complete the project. Combining the two aspects, we can find the best balance between the long-term and short-term scale of the sales team.

Make full use of the sales staff's working hours.

For any company, the average cost of a salesperson working at full capacity is an important expense. The company has employees' working hours, so you should know where these working hours are spent. Unfortunately, in most cases, the reports handed in by salespeople are always vague, and managers are even more confused after reading these reports. Working hours are thus swallowed up by "black holes".

Salespeople are often trapped by numerous administrative trivial matters. Paperwork, budget, internal meetings, training, business trips, and marketing needs are all consuming the working time that salespeople should have used to develop customers.

In order to increase sales time, we must first streamline redundant or outdated documents. Then consider centralized management to obtain economies of scale and practical benefits. This may require more resources-work efficiency may be temporarily affected-but the investment will eventually prove worthwhile. Specific practices are varied, including adopting backstage office procedures aimed at simplifying red tape, contacting more dealers to complete exhibition activities, hiring part-time workers to do low value-added work (simple sending and receiving work), adopting IT technology to reduce handwritten documents, and implementing office automation.

It is necessary to establish an accurate recording system to count the time invested or wasted by sales staff on a task or a customer. Otherwise, it will be difficult to formulate an effective salary system, let alone optimize resources and maximize work efficiency.

Let customers define "added value"

Gone are the days when salespeople traveled around the world with "smiling faces and sweet mouths". Now, big companies are beginning to redefine their brands. Brand is no longer just a product or product image, but a comprehensive customer experience-from buying a product to using it and then to after-sales service. Salespeople are no longer the channel to deliver products to the outside world. They are regarded (and they will think so themselves) as providers of information and solutions. The sales team will help customers and sellers improve their experience of products. World-class sales teams no longer just sell products, but also prove to retailers that their brands can bring customers the value they need.

High-level dialogue between suppliers and retailers is very important. Both sides can * * * enjoy strategic goals, recognize common interests, and set specific goals and standards for resource investment and result evaluation. Such a high-level dialogue must be based on an objective knowledge, which comes from the end-to-end supply chain economy of both sides and a deep understanding of the consumption behavior, dissatisfaction and internal innovation of the target customers. For salespeople, the best way to retain important customers is to provide the value they need. This requires salespeople to seriously consider some specific issues: innovation and creative display of new products and product categories, or streamlining the cost of supply and marketing chain to reduce product prices.

Equip the sales team with technical equipment.

Most sales teams are far behind the times in technical equipment. Many salespeople don't have cell phones, personal computers or wireless handheld devices. In order to contact customers in time, sales staff must have corresponding technical equipment. Careful department managers will find this demand urgent. It is very complicated to convey the right information to salespeople at the right time, but this is the competitiveness of salespeople.

In addition to improving sales efficiency, technology can also improve the efficiency of sales. For example, a North American company recently invested in a new order quotation system, which greatly shortened the time to provide quotations to customers. The salesperson enters the customer information on the laptop, and by contacting the system center, the quotation can be received the next day. Companies can also use this system to count the success/failure ratio, and these data will be used to adjust the quotation. Equipped with this system, the company faces two choices: one is to reduce the sales team and improve efficiency; The second is to rearrange the working hours of sales staff in order to make more sales attempts. Because the latter can better track the number of quotations and the proportion of transactions, the company decided to choose the latter.

More and more companies are beginning to benefit from real-time information and corporate LAN. No matter when and where, the company can find salespeople. They can respond to the specific situation in their jurisdiction every day. Once a customer asks a question, he can immediately answer it with detailed facts, instead of the previous "let me know the situation first and then give you an answer". In the morning, the vice president in charge of sales asks his subordinates about competitors' actions or shortages, and all the data can be collected and compared on the same day.

In order to create this value, IT investment should be focused and cautious. Avoid buying expensive and huge IT systems, and the success rate of small incremental investment is higher. With the passage of time, the value brought by the sales team adopting real-time information system will gradually increase.

Establish a system of sales leading the overall situation

In most companies, the sales department is always in a very low position-whether in terms of reputation, credibility or power. Sales staff are often not involved in the formulation of enterprise strategy, and the opinions of sales staff are not sought for the priority adjustment of policies, and there is no suggestion from sales staff for the determination of enterprise goals. Salespeople often complain that they are just tools used by people and have no say in the rules and goals involving them. Although this is the status quo, it does not mean that it will be the same in the future. The sales team is the face that the company presents to the world; They are the bridge between customers and companies.

When quantifying the value brought by the sales team, you will marvel at its potential. While improving the overall work efficiency, an excellent sales team can bring obvious sales growth and competitive advantage to the company. Remember, gradual changes will eventually make a mickle and achieve great things.