If you work in sales, you know that keeping on a good sales force is not easy. Nearly one third of sales representatives currently employed have only been working at their company for a year or less. Typically, the yearly turn over rate for a sales force is 40 percent. When you think about how much money it takes to search for and recruit sales people, that is an awful lot of capital being thrown away.
Bringing on and retaining a great sales force long term is a challenging but fiscally worthwhile endeavor for every sales organization. Hiring and training brand news sales and marketing reps is expensive, which is why it is so important to get it right the first time. Executive recruitment firms employ sales and marketing headhunters that vet prospective candidates for sales and recruiting jobs so that you do not have to. Your recruiter will manage the hiring process from beginning to end, and during the hiring process, she will access an extensive list of contacts through the executive recruitment firms under which she is employed.
If your company uses any type of contact management software, working with executive recruitment firms can help you tease out whether prospective hires have the desired technical skills. Headhunters working at executive recruitment firms test for fluency in many computer programs vis a vis a variety of metrics. For example, executive recruitment firms often give candidates a timed computer test on any software program they must know how to use in order to perform the job correctly.
The vast majority of the job a sales rep performs is dependent upon intangible qualities rather than hard skills. In order to be a good sales rep, a person must have patience and perseverance. So too is confidence an important trait for successful sales reps. It is true that confidence can be built over time as the salesperson becomes more comfortable with and knowledgeable about the product he is selling. However, determining whether a candidate has what is takes to succeed in sales necessitates a well developed sixth sense of the sort sales headhunters working with executive recruitment firms are famous for having. Having placed many salespeople in jobs in which they have excelled, the headhunters at executive recruitment firms develop a finely tuned intuition over time that can serve clients like you extremely well.