The sales industry is undergoing enormous change. The evolution of the Internet as well as innovations in multi-media and technology have altered the buying journey, forcing B2B sales organizations and salespeople to change how they pursue and win business. For sales leaders who take great pride in building and leading high performing sales teams, there is no greater need that hiring talent who can thrive in these conditions.

Unfortunately, recruiting great salespeople is one of the hardest, most resource intensive, and time consuming challenges a sales leader can face. As all employers work to hire strong salespeople, the competition for talent has become increasingly fierce.

Just as the Internet has impacted selling, the Internet has also made it easier for employers to connect with salespeople in hiring campaigns. However, connecting with salespeople is only one small phase in a successful recruiting process. Identifying and separating  great salespeople from average and below average sellers and attracting, recruiting and further assessing them to ensure they possess the unique mix of skills, experience, and sales DNA to be successful remains problematic for most organizations, especially since:
 

• 40-65% of salespeople do not achieve quota each year and the vast majority of salespeople do not consistently achieve quota
• 55% of the people employed in sales are better suited for an alternative career
• 20-25% of capable sales people, are in the wrong sales role and should be selling something else

In this interactive session, participants will learn how to quickly and confidently recruit and retain top performing B2B sales talent, including how to:
 

• Define your unique selling environment and identify the type of salesperson that will succeed in it
• Establish and develop candidate competency scorecards to eliminate subjectivity
• Determine the best places to hunt for proven talent
• Position the role and the company to attract passive talent
• Install and perform a structured and rigorous interviewing process
• Identify and leverage assessment tools and techniques
• Mitigate hiring risk through cross referencing
• Implement a comprehensive onboarding process

 

Eliot Burdett is an author, sales recruiting expert and the Co-Founder and CEO of Peak Sales Recruiting, a leading B2B sales recruiting company launched in 2006. Under his direction, the company leads the industry with a success rate 50% higher than the industry average, working with a wide-range of clients including boutique, mid-size and world-class companies including P&G, Gartner, Deloitte, Merck, Western Union and others.

Eliot has more than 30 years of success building companies, recruiting, and managing high performance sales teams, is a top 40 Under 40 winner, and has been widely featured in top publications including the New York Times, Fortune, Forbes, Inc., Reuters, Yahoo!, CIO, the American Management Association and HR.com. Eliot co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast.