Another round of sales hiring is underway as baseball season gets under way. Sales teams can acquire new talent in the same way as they do in sports. The bottom line is to evaluate which players have the potential to succeed. If you don’t have the best people to help you win, you will lose out to your competition.
Training Versus Assessment
Although quality training is a great way to make a salesperson as competent and successful as a professional, it’s not the only thing that matters. As in any other sport, sales success is largely dependent on your natural talent and ability.
What’s more important than the ability of a sales manager to teach sales skills, is their ability pick the right candidate from a large pool.
Better Assessment Techniques: Their Value
Sales is not complete without career assessments and aptitude tests. Your profits will rise if your team performs well. Sales depend almost entirely upon the talent of your employees, unlike other businesses that value a useful or well-made product to be more successful.
The Value of Sales Recruiters
A professional sales recruiter can be hired for the same reason as a baseball team that hires a talent scout. They have the expertise and time to assess candidates to fit your team.
Professional sales agencies can provide you with original candidate assessment strategies, which they have created from scratch. This is one of the most valuable services that they offer. Sales recruiters’ most valuable asset is their ability accurately to identify:
- Qualified sales talent
- Ambitious and motivated employees
- Successive personality traits
- The skills that are most relevant to your company
They need more than intuition to do this – regardless of how well-informed. The best recruiters draw on their years of experience to create more precise assessment strategies that are based on analytic methods.
Spring Training Exercises
Your sales team can benefit, just like baseball players, from some exercises to improve their skills and to help them perform at their best in the coming season. This doesn’t have to be boring.
It doesn’t matter if you are looking for team-building or competitive training, it is a good idea to make the exercise a game to keep things fun. Make sure you are clear about the goals of your teaching.
Engaging Sales Training
Training exercises are a great way to make sure that employees retain and process their training sessions. These are some examples of sales training games that will engage your team and keep them interested.
The Sales Investigator: This game allows you to assign people or teams to investigate a lead you create. Give your team something simple, such as the CEO of a company. Then, suggest a sample product they could pitch.
Each salesperson should gather as much information as possible on the lead within a time limit (10 minutes). Ask them to present the information they have gathered, and which parts will be helpful in selling the client a product.
The Best Pitch in a Room: There are two steps to this game. You create a product idea and give your team time to pitch it. Next, imagine yourself as a potential client. Have each member of your team call you in a mock telephone call. Each member of the team should take notes as they watch the call and note what parts worked well. A checklist can be created for your team. The team can vote for the best pitch at the end.
The Cold Call Game: This game is similar to the previous game but allows your team’s knowledge to be put to good use. You can also make use of your training time by building a sale.
Ask your sales team to call a lead, or fake one, and then play the cold calling game. They can then use the pitches you have previously identified as having the greatest potential to make a call and see how it plays out in real life. You can give points to your employees for each sale, making a call, and other factors. You can award points for things like originality, relevance, making clients laugh and persuasiveness.
Make it fun and engaging
You need to remember that training games are just like baseball and should be fun. Your sales games should be lighthearted and fun. This will encourage your team to think creatively and keep their eyes on the prize. These feelings can be encouraged by giving prizes and offering refreshments. Don’t let your games drag on for too long.
Boosting Attitude
You can make sales training fun and engaging. This will help your team stay engaged in their work, which can lead to higher performance. Attitude and personality are key factors in selling success. The only way out of a slump in sales is to keep positive and bring new talent to the table.
Although sales is not exactly like baseball in many ways, there are some common rules for scouting talent. To give your team an extra push, contact a professional recruiter.
