Types of Sales & Marketing Recruiting Engagements

Internet marketing professionals, sales people, lead generation specialists, marketing communications specialists, graphics designers, inside sales, telesales, sales operations, director-level sales or marketing people, strategic marketing talent, product marketing managers, product managers. Those are all the kinds of positions that a good sales and marketing search firm will hire for, and which they will develop candidate pools from. By tapping into these pools you can ensure a much higher level of success in making critical hires for your company, and when it comes to hiring sales and marketing talent, if you don’t hire the best, the risk is too high that you’ll hire people who can not get you the results that you’re looking for. So why compromise when it comes to building the most important asset base of your company, the human capital asset base.

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How To Select A Sales And Marketing Recruiting Firm

There are lots of staffing companies, executive search firms & headhunters in the marketplace. If your company is looking to hire sales or marketing talent, how can you distinguish between these different service providers to determine who will do the best job of finding you the top candidates that you need?

One of the key things to look for…probably the top thing to look for in fact, is a company that specializes only in sales and marketing engagements. Search firms that specialize in sales and marketing are few and far between.

There are a lot of staffing and recruiting firms out there that specialize in finance, accounting, IT, etc, but very few that actually have a focus in the sales and marketing arena. Why is this? Because sales and marketing searches are the most challenging recruiting assignments to do correctly. It’s much more difficult to measure the skills, experience and ability of a salesperson than it is to measure the experience of a programmer or an accounting professional. This is why a lot of companies that are in the staffing business shy away from doing sales & marketing search assignments.

Sales & marketing search specialists are staffed with VP’s of sales, and or sales and marketing executives who have lots of experience in hiring this kind of personnel…so what you’re really doing is hiring their expertise at having done the same thing over and over and over again. They have much more rigorous processes, sales profiling tools and proven techniques to get at the heart of whether or not sales and marketing candidates are really capable of producing the results you need for your company. Likewise they have large databases and pools of talent that they draw from, since they make it their business to track the top candidates and make them available for client searches.

So if you’re considering going outside or outsourcing your sales and marketing recruiting to a search firm, make sure that the one that you select is focused in sales and marketing only. If you do, you have a much better chance of attracting and retaining the kind of top talent that you’ll need in order to accelerate your company’s sales growth.

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Recruiting Fees & Why People Gladly Pay Them

If your company is not used to paying recruiting fees to an outside firm in order to attract talent, you need to ask yourself the following question: can you afford not to pay fees, if you can’t fill a position or make a mis-hire. Not filling key sales and marketing positions when your company is trying to grow will constrain your company’s revenue growth potential. Even worse, if you make the wrong hire and settle for less than the best, you could end up spending lots of money without getting the results that you’re looking for. This is why so many companies in a full employment economy turn to recruiting companies that specialize in finding, recruiting and placing top sales and marketing talent. It doesn’t matter whether your company is looking for VP or executive level sales, marketing or business development people, sales or marketing management or frontline sales or marketing individual contributors. It really makes sense to consider outsourcing to a recruiting firm.

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How To Hire Top Sales And Marketing Talent In A Full Economy

The economy is at full employment levels and it is a real challenge if you are trying to grow your company, to find and attract the best sales and marketing talent in this environment. No longer is it easy to place a Monster ad or put out the word to a couple of friends and expect to find qualified candidates coming to your door.

Today it is a much more challenging proposition. You need to be able to identify, promote and attract A-level talent to your company. This is not an easy task, because all of the top sales and marketing people are already working.

That is why now more than ever, it makes lots of sense to retain the services of a sales and marketing recruiting company that specializes only in sales and marketing. By retaining an executive search firm to find your people, you will have a much better chance of locating the kind of proven performers who can produce top sales results for your company and help you grow.

Many of our clients find that placing ads on Monster, CareerBuilder or other websites is simply not yielding any positive results, so they are looking for new ways to attract talent. Frequently, the best way is to use retained executive search. We are seeing a large increase in the number of sales and marketing recruiting assignments in our company. We are providing a very important service to a variety of different clients.

Other clients outsource the recruiting function simply because they are too busy to follow the rigorous process that is required to hire top sales and marketing talent.


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Why Sales And Marketing Recruiting Is Different From Other Types Of Recruiting

Our company specializes only in hiring sales and marketing people, from front line contributors, to mid-level and all the way up to the executive level. We hire sales representatives, account managers, national accounts executives, directors, and vice presidents of sales and marketing. Through that process, we’ve developed a tremendous amount of expertise in these two functional areas that most recruiters don’t have. In addition to that, our sales and marketing team expertise comes from accumulating over a hundred years in the trenches of sales and marketing, actually working for companies and building and leading many successful sales and marketing organizations. When we approach sales and marketing, we approach it with deep experience. This is what you should look for in a sales & marketing recruiting firm.

Most recruiters don’t have that kind of experience in this particular domain. In fact, a lot of executive recruiters or headhunters are generalists. They hire CFOs, CEOs, CTOs and CIOs and they may be very good at the executive level in performing those duties. But when it comes to hiring sales and marketing talent, there’s nothing like having a recruiting or executive search firm which is focused in sales and marketing. We believe that it offers a powerful advantage to companies that are trying to make sure that they make the absolutely right hires for their company. We hire sales and marketing talent on a national level for clients who seek us out, looking for that special headhunting or recruiting firm who only focuses on making critical sales and marketing hires. They seek us out because many of them have suffered the burden of having made mis-hires.

In our Recruiting Guide, we quote statistics showing that 53% of all sales hires are mis-hires. This number is so high because most people don’t have the skills or the experience to hire sales & marketing employees, and so they get “sold” through the interviewing process, as opposed to determining whether or not a candidate can and will sell for their company. In particular, executives with backgrounds in finance, operations, engineering, manufacturing, or other non-sales and marketing fields are easily duped by slick, well-dressed, smooth-talking sales and marketing folks. While many of those people are actually very capable, often times the smoothest and the slickest ones who are the best at selling themselves in the interview aren’t necessarily the best people to represent and sell for your company. This is why outsourcing your recruiting function to an experienced sales and marketing recruiting company can have huge value for your business.

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Interviewing Salespeople

One of the most common mistakes that I see with employers and recruiters, is taking a person’s résumé at face value. This is particularly fatal when it comes to hiring sales people. Why? Sales people are masters of the spin. When I see a résumé that comes to me full such spin (for example increased pipeline by 82%, doubled bookings, tripled revenue, etc), and I don’t see absolute revenue or booking figures, I become highly suspicious. That’s why one of the first things I do when I interview a sales candidate is to ask them to put together a “sales achievement history”. This is a very simple spreadsheet that recaps a candidate’s actual achievement against goals over the previous number of years, in absolute dollar figures. It’s very easy to ask for, and most successful sales candidates are willing to produce it. Ask them to open up an excel spreadsheet and make a list and table with the year, their annual sales goal, and their actual achievement in columns. Ask them to go back about five years in their history.

As you can imagine, the good candidates are happy to produce this information for you and fully capable of doing it. Why? Because they have built and maintained a track record of success and they’ve tracked those numbers, because it’s part of the badge of honor that they wear as a top sales producer.

Salespeople who have not consistently hit their numbers are not capable of producing this kind of information for you, as a part of the interviewing process. They will usually make excuses and say “Well, I’m not sure if I remember those numbers, I’ll have to dig up and see whether or not I have that data. I didn’t keep those records.” Typically, what that means is that the sales rep who you are interviewing has not had the kind of track record that you’re looking for.

Make sure that you can pull a “sales achievement history” from the candidate as a part of the interviewing process. If you do this, you’ll quickly separate the performers from those people who claim to have performed and have embellished their résumé with lots of fancy sales speak but can’t produce the cold hard facts.


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