A Different Look At Recruiting Salespeople

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(By Loyd Ford) A lot of talk focuses on recruitment around sales. Recruiting good and solid sellers has never been the most fun you can have with your clothes on.

Some clusters don’t have the sellers they would like to have to continue growing revenue at the levels their bosses would like to see in the coming months. That means recruiting sellers. Of course, we all know that if you can recruit sellers, you’ll get good ones and not so good ones. That’s what makes it not so much fun, right? While much has changed in radio over the years, you don’t hear robust stories about how much fun recruiting is today.

What if we reshape our thinking about how we are recruiting and where we are looking for the next generation of radio sellers?

What if we looked at recruiting in a less traditional sense?

  • What if we stopped trying to hire radio salespeople or even media sellers and looked at industries inside our local markets where we can find hungry sellers who don’t have jobs nearly sales jobs that are as fun or freeing as radio sellers? Don’t think you can find them? You can. You don’t think radio sales is fun? Take a good look at other sales jobs in other industries.
  • Perhaps we look at tougher industries, with tougher reputations for selling, collection and getting paid.
  • Perhaps we start looking for sellers toughing it out in more unfriendlier sales management environments.
  • Today hiring a seller seems different, harder. Consider this: Nearly half (approximately 45%) of all sales professionals are in the following 3 industries:
        1. Retail & Consumer Products
        2. Technology – Software
        3. Professional Services (i.e., real estate, marketing and advertising, public relations and communications, etc.)

Take a deep dive look in your market. What is in your market? Where are the underappreciated sellers? Where are the hungry ones?

Technology changes. But people really don’t change. The people you are looking for are performers, competitors, achievers. Looking for them in the same old places at this point might be like that old saying, “If you keep doing the same thing you’ve always done expecting different results….”

Maybe it’s time to shake up our thinking about hiring sellers.

 

Loyd Ford is president and chief strategic officer at Rainmaker Pathway Consulting Works (RPC).  Reach Loyd at 864.448.4169 or [email protected].

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