How to Hire Good Sales Reps

Hiring the best sales reps or SDRs can be more challenging than it seems at first.

This is because the tasks of an SDR are usually very diverse.

The focus is largely on generating leads by building and maintaining relationships with prospects through inbound or outbound prospecting. One of the most important tasks is recognizing the counterpart's pain points and solving them with suitable advice via several channels.

But a great SDR can also make a significant internal contribution to product optimization through direct feedback from prospects to the management.

So you have to be careful when hiring.

As our world expands and becomes more international and interconnected thanks to the internet, so has the rep role. You can easily work with SDRs from around the world, and get only the top candidates offered directly to you if you play your cards right.

Interested in learning more? Read on!

Define the ideal applicant. This is step one.

Without having an ideal applicant as your north star, the hiring process will become tedious and far more difficult than it needs to be. So before you start any part of the process, screen applicants and recommend candidates using an ideal profile.

By doing this, you will already identify candidates who are a good fit for the job and forward them to the interview stage.

David Mattson advises using the acronym SEARCH to establish the candidate profile and the abilities, accomplishments, and outcomes that ought to correspond to the job profile.

But these qualities are just the scratching the surface of what truly makes a good sales rep.

Salespeople who perform well constantly strive to improve.

They aim to surpass the results from the previous quarter and take the top spot on the sales performance board. However, they don't let the competition consume them to the point where they stop working as a team or become a negative influence.

Examining a candidate's prior experiences will help determine their competitive position. Investigate candidates' motivations by asking them questions. They may be a good fit if they convincingly desire to excel in whatever they do.

It's likely not what you believe it is that separates an average salesman from an exceptional salesman. The general belief is that excellent salespeople are gregarious, polished, charming appointment bookers.

The truth is far more monotonous. Consistency is the key distinction between outstanding salesmen and average salespeople.

So what does consistency require?

For some people, this concept is difficult to grasp because "patient" salespeople are not a dime a dozen. But it takes dedication to get started in any sector where consulting is necessary.

Nurses, doctors, psychiatrists, and financial advisors are examples of consultative occupations that need patience with their clients.

While a job in sales doesn't directly compare to these life-altering professions, it does share one crucial aspect in common: it involves healing pain.

Patience is not just necessary, it is essential in treating pain.

A patient SDR who enjoys his job will automatically perform his strategy constantly, not give up after small failures, and throw everything over.

Try finding these qualities in your next interview with an SDR candidate. Be it through concrete questions or asking for examples of how they solved a situation by being patient.

Good sales reps dislike passivity. They realize there's always room for development.

In sales, slipping into passivity is simple. Reps might get into a routine or daily rhythm that works for them and refrain from adopting new procedures, approaches, or tactics that might enhance their efforts.

A good salesperson is open to new ideas. They constantly learn and incorporate new strategies that could advance their careers as salespeople. This can entail switching to a more customer-centric sales practice or experimenting with different messages during sales conversations.

Excellent sales representatives are willing to keep up with new tactics to help them advance to the next level, even though not everything they do will succeed.

A good SDR can empathize with their prospect and understand their problems. Above all, a good sales rep knows how the prospect feels.

But empathy requires vulnerability and emotional intelligence. To understand someone from their point of view, you must be able to put yourself in their shoes, leaving behind your own attitudes and prejudices.

The same counts for an SDR and their prospects.

This requires more than just understanding another person's reality. Empathy is crucial for sales professionals since there can be no trust without a relationship.

An SDR doesn't need a degree in psychology, but empathy goes a long way to establish trust.

There are many platforms where SDRs and many other candidates can be found. You simply need to post a job, and you will receive many CVs from a variety of potential hires.

But this is not always as easy as it seems.

Depending on the requirements, there are often a lot of applicants for open SDR positions, and the work involved in sifting through and selecting candidates can quickly become a challenge.

Nevertheless, recruiting employees via such portals is a standard method, even if the work involved in finding the right employee can take some time.

Another way to find a good SDR is to build a solid network you can access anytime. A direct inquiry usually does not hurt if you have good contacts with SDRs themselves, managers, CEOs, and more.

You can ask for recommendations from people you suspect know a good SDR, or you ask for SDRs from your own network.

According to Forbes, this method can save up to 92% of your time.

Gold mine? Not quite.

Building up a network with people, as just mentioned, requires time and communicative skills.

It can take months or even years to build up a good network.

However, not everyone has the best SDRs in their network or contacts of managers or CEOs who can immediately tell you if they know good SDRs. As in the offline world, relationships need to be built and maintained.

A LinkedIn research piece discovered that about 49% of participants on the website said they didn't have enough time to network.

So if you have been looking for SDRs for a while and your network, offline or online, doesn't give you much in the way of suitable SDRs, then this method is not the best.

Another option is to look at the competition to see how their SDRs perform and how satisfied they are with their position.

Of course, this way will make you some enemies, but it can also lead to success in finding suitable SDRs.

The methods mentioned so far can get you the right SDRs. But they all have drawbacks.

So what can you do to find and hire a good sales rep?

How does a platform that deals exclusively with the placement of SDRs in companies sound to you?

SalesPipe does not offer a variety of available employees from different fields. It is a specialized resource, specifically offering an extremely high diversity of SDRs with experience in various industries.

This specialization in SDRs makes us valuable for people who want to find and hire SDRs quickly and easily.

You will find an overview of all available SDRs on the platform's main page. You can filter them according to your needs and set the requirements that suit you best.

We also have SDRs from different countries that speak another language besides English. This can allow you to open up new markets or countries without immediately failing due to the language barrier.

SalesPipe can be used to quickly and easily expand your sales team with access to the best local and remote SDRs worldwide.

There are several ways to find and hire good sales reps. Some of them are easier to recruit through, and some of them are harder.

With SalesPipe, you can find the right SDRs matching the requirements of your company and job role in one single place.

With SalesPipe, the question of how to hire the best sales reps no longer arises.

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