In last week’s post we talked about growing your company to the point where it makes sense to hire a sales manager and we discussed some of the common pitfalls that companies experience when they promote one of their sales people to become a sales manager. Today we want to focus on some of the pros and cons of bringing in an experienced sales manager from the outside.
Whichever approach you take to recruiting this new sales manager, we strongly recommend using a predictive pre-employment assessment to really measure what their strengths and weaknesses as a sales leader might be and whether or not they match your environment. These assessments also help you interview better, so you really know whether a sales management candidate will be a good fit and how to approach the interview. Assuming you find a good candidate pool after these assessments, as a CEO you need to explore and focus on their experiences when it comes to the following:
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Growing the Team: How strong are they at growing a sales organization? Ask them for examples of past experiences where they took an organization from X sales people to Y sales people (whatever is relevant to your situation). Not only did they grow the team in terms of number of sales people, but how did they
grow each sales person individually to make them more effective and productive? -
Coaching Style: How much time do they spend coaching their sales people? What does coaching mean to them? Many sales manager spend all their time having coaching conversations where all they do is review the pipeline. To me, it's about situational coaching and the ability to model the correct behavior through effective role play. Really press them on their coaching experience because that's going to lead to growing the team (see above).
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Motivation: What's their approach to motivation? How important is it to them to understand the individual goals of each sales person? How do they get to know what makes each sales person on their team tick? How do they adjust their management style and communication methods to match each salesperson?
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Accountability: How do they hold people accountable? What does accountability mean to them? What are some of the key performance indicators that they monitor to hold people accountable? Ask them for examples of leading and lagging indicators. Ask them for examples of forecast accuracy and date integrity (i.e. things close when they project they will close).
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Systems and Processes: Ask them about their experience building systems and process. If you're a scaling company and you're at the point now where you need to invest in a sales management function, how much better is it to bring in someone who's done it before? What CRM tools have they used in the past? What inbound marketing and lead generation tools do they recommend? Have they developed and implemented a sales playbook? Look for examples of success.
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Recruiting: Lastly, as you continue to scale, one of the core competencies that your manager is going to need is the ability to effectively recruit and onboard new salespeople. This ties back to accountability. Part of accountability is not holding onto mediocre salespeople. We can't really hold them accountable unless we have a strong pipeline of sales candidates, so what's their recruiting philosophy? Are they always recruiting? Do they only recruit in a reactive, as-needed basis? How are they recruiting and what's their approach?
Twice a year we offer a comprehensive, live interactive 12-week online training program that brings our STAR hiring system alive. This training teaches hiring managers how to effectively attract, select, and onboard strong salespeople and sales leaders. If you’re interested, please respond to me directly.