The larger your company grows, the more instrumental your team becomes. More clients and more responsibility means you need to have a reliable, effective team on your side to ensure a consistent brand experience across the board.
Building a successful and supportive sales team starts with the hiring process, but it doesn’t end there. Training is a vital part of ensuring consistent results with your clients, so you need to allow a fair amount of time from the moment you decide to hire someone until they’re seasoned in their role.
Let’s walk through the steps for hiring and training a team that will help you grow your business.
It starts with the job description.
When you’re looking to hire someone new, the job description is the key element that will help you to pre-qualify applicants and find the best fit. Be clear about proposed responsibilities, weekly schedule expectations, and desired skills or qualifications. Include a brief description that gives a general insight into the company, the role you’re hiring for, and what a candidate can expect from your work environment. Be as direct and open as possible about the position details, as this helps to weed out applicants that are under-qualified or don’t see your company as the right place for them.
Once you’ve completed a job description, push it out through multiple channels. Share it to social media, add it to your website, send it to industry colleagues to seek referrals, and post it on job boards like Indeed. Visibility is critical, and you’ll get far more feedback if you can reach people in various locations.
Next, it’s time to prepare for the interview stage.
Although it’s the most time-consuming step of the hiring process, the interview stage is where you can truly assess each candidate and determine who would be the best fit for your position. First, consider some must-haves, as well as your deal-breakers. For example, if someone showing up to an interview in jeans it is a hard pass; decide upon that ahead of time.
It can also help to set up a preliminary stage for phone interviews as a way to further cull down on the applicant pool and leave only the best candidates for face-to-face meetings. This saves you time upfront, while also ensuring that your shortlist is filled with people you can see at your company.
As part of the interview stage, I also encourage you to consider additional assessments beyond the standard Q&A session. To start, I like to have my final round of applicants complete the Myers-Briggs test to get a feel for their personality and how they would fit into our environment. By no means is their MBTI a deciding factor, but it does help to get a better understanding of what each candidate has to offer.
We also implement role-playing into our interview process, which is crucial for any sales role. You need to be sure that a new hire is quick on their feet and knows how to deal with difficult situations before bringing them onboard. I’ll bring in some of my experienced team members to fill in as disappointed or confused clients, then observe how the applicants would handle the situation in a real-world setting. This experience goes a long way in my final assessment of each candidate and gives me a lot to work with when determining the best fit.
It’s worth noting here that hiring the wrong person is arguably worse than not hiring anyone at all. If you don’t find the right fit, you always have the option to circle back and open up the application again. But, if you end up hiring someone who isn’t a good fit for your company, you risk damaging your internal and external relationships, and you’ll likely have to fire them at some point and go through the hiring process again. Save yourself the time and be diligent yet patient when it comes to finding the best person out there.
Finally, it’s time for onboarding.
Assuming you made it through the interviews and hired a new employee, it’s time to get them up-to-speed on all things sales. If they have sales experience in the past, it may be as simple as catching them up on your products and services available. If they’re new to the game, you might need to spend more time walking through effective sales techniques that have worked for you and your team.
Training can take as little as a few weeks or as long as several months — it will depend on the aptitude of the person you’ve hired and the complexity of your business operations. More products to sell means more time needed to review and understand the finer points of each. Regardless of how long it takes, this is the time for you to have an open-door policy and welcome questions from your new hire. You should be able to let your existing sales team support their latest addition for the most part, but don’t assume you can step back and let them run things. Check-in often and be mindful of the new hire’s progress within the team.
If you don’t have a training manual already, it’s high time to create one for this kind of instance. Having a handbook on-hand saves you the time of answering the same FAQs, while also empowering new employees to solve problems and make decisions on their own. It is a bit of a time investment up front, but well worth it as your company grows larger.
Once your new hire gains more confidence and experience in their role, it’s a matter of keeping in touch and helping them to set and reach sales goals that support your business — something you should be doing with all salespeople, new and old.
With 30 years of experience owning event planning, high-end catering, and design and décor companies, Meryl Snow is on a mission to help businesses get on their own path to success. As a Senior Consultant for Certified Catering Consultants and a Senior Consultant & Sales Trainer for SnowStorm Solutions, Meryl travels throughout North America training clients in the areas of sales, marketing, design, and branding. As a valued member of the Wedding Industry Speakers, she speaks with groups from the heart with warmth and knowledge, and covers the funny side of life and business.