JOB DESCRIPTION.
The first step in recruiting professionals to join your
team is the development of an employee job description. The job description documents a job’s major functions or duties, responsibilities, and /or other critical features, such as skills and attributes required, education requirement, and position classification. Based on your organization’s needs, the job description may be specific and detailed or generic and general. The job description is an important recruiting tool, because it ensures that the candidate clearly understands the duties and expectations associated with the
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Position Title
Employee Status
Employee Name
Office Location
Department
Supervisor
Effective Date
Primary duties:
Develop and implement sales plans for assigned
accounts, create prospecting campaigns, maintain sales
activity in CRM tool, negotiate and close deals
Additional duties:
Act as client advocate, communicate client needs effec-
tively to staff, perform client satisfaction audits, other
duties as assigned
Skills required:
Proven consultative selling skills, excellent verbal and
written communication skills, superior organizational
skills, deep computer proficiency
Attributes required:
Flexibility and ability to work under tight deadlines; ability
to multitask; comfortable with change; able to command
respect; high degree of integrity; creative, innovative, and
brave
Education/experience:
College degree or commensurate work experience
Position classification:
Exempt or nonexempt
Exhibit 4.2
Standard Categories for Sales Job Description
specific sales job. This helps you to achieve a win-win hire, in which the new hire understands his or her role clearly, and you have a clear road map as to how this sales professional will fit into your organization.
Standard categories to include in your job description, with sample detail included in the duties, skills, and attributes categories, are shown in Exhibit 4.2.
While the job description provides you with great insight into the skills and attributes you are looking for, it is important that you stay connected to the recruitment philosophy of looking for sales professionals. Do not try too hard to make somebody into a sales professional. Key skills and attributes to look for include:
• Discipline
• Competitiveness
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• Proven sales success
• High activity in past roles
• Fearless on the phone
• Hungry to learn
• Willing to be responsible for their own success
• Sturdy and relentless—not deterred by “no”
SOURCING CANDIDATES.
Now that you know what you are looking for
in candidates, where do you find them? Depending on the size of your firm, you might have a human resources or staffing team available to help you locate sales professionals, and help from these internal partners can be extremely valuable. In addition, ways to source candidates for your sales organization include:
• Partner with recruiters. Don’t hesitate to employ corporate recruiters and outside recruiting firms; they form long-term relationships with leading sales professionals and have the lead on when certain high-performing individuals might be ready for a career move.
• Answer the phone. Sales professionals who are at the point in their career at which they know what they want and where they want to go will often target you. Respond to those who cold call you—a new superstar might be on the other end of the line.
• Institute a referral system. Referral programs teach employees to be internal headhunters and result in prescreened candidates for you. Cash is the most popular award given to employees who refer individuals, with awards varying based on the role being filled. For example, FTI offers a bonus of $5,000 for any sales referral hire. In addition to being an excellent recruiting tool, the referral system also results in improved retention rates.
• Remember who has called on you in the past and impressed you. Go through your Rolodex and call those sales professionals you have met in the course of doing business. Seek out those who have sold you, those whom you wanted to buy from. Call them.
• Ask your clients. Reach out to your clients for names of sales professionals with whom they have been impressed over the years.
INTERVIEWING TACTICS.
The next step in hiring sales professionals is the
actual interview process. Possible interviewing questions include:
• Tell me about a time you identified a problem and came up with the solution? What did you do? Why did you follow that course of action?
Were there other alternatives you could have pursued?
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• What’s been the most difficult obstacle you have ever overcome? Why was it difficult? What plan did you execute to get past it? Why do you believe you were successful? Based on your experience today, what
might you have done differently?
Are you familiar with these questions? All of these questions focus on specific past behavior, and they come out of the structured behavioral interviewing technique, which I recommend for interviewing your sales candidates.
Structured behavioral interviewing is a standardized way of getting information from candidates about their past behavior and performance. The premise of this interview technique is that past behavior is the best indicator of future behavior. According to Kathryn Neiner, principal with The Chrisa Group and an expert on employment interviewing, two reasons for using behavioral interviewing are:9
1. It’s more valid than traditional interviews. Questions are designed to evaluate only competencies that have been shown through job analysis to be required for successful job performance. This prevents you from assessing irrelevant knowledge or skills.
2. When used properly, behavioral interviews reduce legal risks because all candidates are treated the same. Regardless of who conducts the interview, all candidates are asked the same questions, assessed against the same set of job-related competencies, and rated using the same method.
An effective structured behavioral interviewing program requires you to develop job-related competencies (which you developed in your job description), write behavioral questions about those competencies, and train interviewers to use the system. To institute this technique in your sales organization, don’t hesitate to bring in outside consultants who will help you to identify the key behaviors of sales professionals in your organization. These consultants will rigorously detail the nature of the sales process and the behaviors that make an individual successful. For leads, ask your peers who they use and search for vendors via the Internet. Find 5 to 10 people who conduct interviewing workshops and talk with them on the phone, take a look at their materials and approach, and meet with them. If after meeting with the various vendors you find that you don’t have the budget to work with an outside consultant, through conversing with the various salespeople and consultants, you will have already learned a great deal. You can use this insight to inform and guide your interviewing process.
Training
Professional services staff come to work every day wanting to play at the top of their game. Salespeople are no different, and the aggressive ones are
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going to be demanding about what they need to deliver consistent, outstanding performance. It is your job to deliver on resources and training. Don’t hesitate to give your people everything they need to succeed, if you believe they have the potential—and the heart and attitude—to be successful. Training is core to your job as a sales manager; and to a willing heart and mind, you can teach all the skills a person needs to succeed at selling. Although you can’t make someone a superstar—you can help all of your professionals develop along the lines of skills, knowledge, and process.
SKILLS, KNOWLEDGE, AND PROCESS. Sales training needs to be focused
on three core areas— skills, knowledge, and process. The skills component is behavioral; for example, the ability to communicate, listen, present, and negotiate are skills. The best training techniques for skills development are role-playing exercises, video training, and group work. Regardless of industry or company, sales-specific skills are universal and include:
• Prospecting
• Qualifying
• Precall planning/strategy
• Engaging/probing
• Closing
Knowledge is information and understanding, and the specific knowledge areas on which you train will be unique to your particular firm. The best training techniques for knowledge development are studying and reading, video training, e-learning, and experiential learning, for example, accompanying client service professionals to client meetings or client engagements. In the professional services industry, knowledge includes an understanding of:
• The firm—its history, mission, and key strengths
• The key service lines, or practice areas, that you are selling
• The consultants, or intellectual property and capabilities, that you are selling
Sales professionals at FTI, for example, are trained on the core knowledge areas of litigation process, forensic/litigation, complex data, web hosting, and trial services; they are also trained to “mine” consultants or know who their key consultants are and what they’ve delivered. In this way, when an existing or potential client has a specific area of inquiry, the sales professional can immediately identify the proper expertise.
In addition to skills and knowledge, process training is another core area for sales training. Process includes all of the structures, systems, or sales processes unique to your firm, for example, account management, running conf lict checks, or using customer relationship management (CRM) systems.