As a Sales leader in a small to mid-size tech company, you play in a different environment than the big tech companies. You lack the large budget and resources that they have. For example, you don’t have the luxury to train and develop inexperienced salespeople who require a long runway to be productive. Nor can you bring in a large class of new employees with the hope of keeping a few who pan out.
Small to mid-size tech companies must prioritize the following goals when hiring salespeople:
- Hire quickly. Every extra month it takes you to hire costs your company critical revenue.
- Minimize bad hires. You require a high success rate with minimal failures since each failed hire delays revenue and diverts your valuable time and resources.
- Hit the ground running. Your salespeople must produce quickly to meet the revenue projections you’re responsible for achieving.
How do you accomplish the above goals? By addressing the four key challenges listed below:
“The Pay Challenge” refers to the potential mismatch between your OTE and what the candidates you want to hire will accept to leave their jobs. It’s common for companies to base their pay on what people are currently earning rather than what would entice them to accept a new position.
Let me give you an example. If I were to call you about an opportunity paying what you are currently earning, how interested would you be in leaving your current employer?
If you wouldn’t be interested in a lateral (unless you were unemployed or desperate), why would the people you want to hire? The solution for most companies is to either increase their comp or lower the required skills.
“The Skill Set Challenge” refers to the mismatch between your desired skills and those of the candidates in the market. There’s a natural tendency to believe that people fall into neat tiers of skills that align with your requirements. Some call this the “Goldilocks Approach” to hiring (not too much or too little, but just right). If only candidates were porridge. 😀
The reality is that most candidates don’t work for companies that have clear-cut tier levels in their sales organizations. So, if you want to downgrade the skills by 10% so you can pay 10% less, there’s no way to clearly identify who these people are in the sourcing process.
To address the skills set challenge, it’s important to proactively reach out to everyone you can identify in your desired space who appears to fit your required skills and those who seem a little overqualified and a little underqualified (or engage a search firm who does this). This approach has three advantages:
- You need to talk to people about what they actually do to know the truth about their skill level.
- You may end up preferring someone whose skills are either a little stronger or weaker than what you originally had in mind.
- If you decide to downgrade your specs to avoid increasing the comp, you’ll have potential candidates to choose from.
The Industry Challenge refers to candidates who don’t have experience in your specific space. This industry knowledge or relationship gap can delay their progress. Sometimes, companies choose this route when paying below the market for their industry. If you can invest the time and effort to train and develop salespeople in your space, the industry challenge may not be an obstacle for you. Otherwise, hiring salespeople who can bring in revenue quickly is usually worth the investment.
Summary
As a tech industry sales leader, you have a lot of pressure on your shoulders to meet challenging revenue goals. You depend upon your sales team to meet these goals and have little margin for error in their performance. You know from experience that hiring salespeople who are likely to succeed in your space is difficult. Navigating the four challenges above sets you up for the hiring success you want and need to achieve.
