Building a strong talent pipeline in 6 steps
Hiring and developing sales reps are two of the most important responsibilities that sales leaders have. Yet time and time again, they find they’re on the wrong side of the supply and demand chain when business is good and there’s a need for more sellers—fast.
As an executive, this can have a damaging effect on your organization’s ability to hit revenue goals. And when the average sales rep only stays in post for about 18 months, a leader needs a steady stream of talent ready to draw from.
At Numentum we caution against rapid, reactive hiring. CEO Dan Swift shares this telling anecdote from early on in his own career:
“I was offered a bonus contingent on bringing new sellers into my team, the problem was I didn’t have enough time to do it properly. I chose to forego the bonus because I knew the repercussions of hiring the wrong candidates in a rush would be more costly.”
It’s a catch-22. Executives shouldn’t rely on their sales leaders to make this compromise, or take risks that jeopardize the bottom line. There should be a system in place that makes it quicker and easier to add sellers when it’s required.
The way to do this is by constantly building a talent bench. In practice, that means living by the maxims we teach at Numentum around personal brand, networks, and content strategy.
Streamlining the sales recruitment process
Executives can support their sales leaders with the following six best practices to ensure a healthy pipeline of candidates that can be seamlessly brought into the business when the time is right.
1. Advise against too much delegation
It can be tempting to hand off recruitment to someone who has the word in their job title, but a sales leader is closer to knowing what their team needs than anyone else. Recruiters can play a supporting role. Encourage your leaders to follow the steps outlined here to source candidates, then lean into their HR business partners to ensure every prospective employee has a positive recruitment experience.
2. Deploy LinkedIn Sales Navigator (if you haven’t already)
Sellers commonly use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to track down their ideal leads and build meaningful connections; sales leaders can take the same approach to build their talent bench. Advanced search features help to narrow down specific skills and experience. For example, sellers who have experience with competitors, are located in a particular geography, or work in the same industry.
This is a practical way to source talent from beyond your team’s existing network, which can help to build a more diverse talent bench. For specific actions your sales leaders can take to increase diversity, experiment with this range of search criteria to surface underrepresented talent.
3. Showcasing management style
Your sales leaders should be consistently growing and nurturing their LinkedIn networks. Especially as they add potential new recruits, LinkedIn is the ideal place to share a range of information from company news to insights about their own leadership style.
For example, sales leaders can look for articles on leadership approaches that resonate in places like the Harvard Business Review, Forbes Leadership, and the Numentum blog. These articles can be shared on LinkedIn, along with a personal perspective to give their audience an idea about why the approach stands out.
People join (and leave) companies because of leaders. By sharing these types of insights, your sales leaders are helping to give prospective hires an answer to the question, “What would this person be like as my manager?” before a job opportunity is even on the table.
4. Network nurturing
Regular readers of articles on the Numentum website will be familiar with our strategy of empowering sellers to engage buyers with a combination of authentic people skills and high digital competency.
In the context of nurturing prospective talent, this means sales leaders should actively look after their networks so they can leverage them when searching for new recruits, or for personal introductions to new connections.
Posting content is explained in the previous best practice. It’s just as important not to neglect engagement with posts shared by others. Set aside time each day (as little as 30 minutes) to like, comment, and give recommendations in order to stay visible.
5. Leverage informal references
When the time arrives to add a new sales rep to a team, it’s important that your team can act quickly. Due diligence via shared network connections is a useful way of getting ahead of the game before interviews begin.
Fit is paramount for the success of a new seller, and efficient sales leaders can use just 15-20 minutes with a trusted shared connection to get a candid reflection on a possible candidate. With a full talent bench and warm connections, this vital step won’t slow the recruitment process down.
6. Candidate invitations
Writing in Forbes, HR leader Sameer Penakalapati, says, “A highly engaged talent pool is statistically much more likely to respond positively to the opportunities you present because of a friendly prior engagement.”
This is when the time your sales leaders spend nurturing their networks will pay off. Rather than broadcasting the job advertisement, they can reach out with personal invitations to apply. Candidates—especially those not actively looking—are more likely to be willing to consider the role if they’re already aware of the manager’s style, and they receive a personalized invitation to apply.
A strong sales team needs a strong talent bench
Sales leaders play a critical role in motivating their frontline sellers to be successful. Recruitment is undeniably an important part of the job, but it shouldn’t detract from that central mission. This proactive, six step approach to building a talent bench complements the network-building that benefits the organization’s existing sales team, while also making it easier to source high quality candidates quickly and easily.
Revenue Forward
Numentum is a buyer experience consultancy that helps B2B organizations go to market faster, bigger, and more effectively without the need for an expensive and time-consuming overhaul of existing processes and systems. We partner with CEOs, CMOs, CROs, and CHROs to develop customized training programs that integrate brand, sales, and marketing to deliver accelerated revenue momentum.
By efficiently focusing on the buyer experience, we advance the skills, information, and interactions sales professionals must deploy to engage with today’s hyper-informed buyers effectively. Our approach aligns sales with marketing to maximize the utility of brand investments, content, and digital channels—dramatically improving pipelines, shortening buying cycles, and increasing conversion rates.
Learn more about our approach with this introduction to the Connected and Empowered Enterprise, and follow us on LinkedIn for more strategies and tactics that drive revenue forward.
