Sales Advocate Newsletter

Hiring Strategies: Is Experience All that Important?

August 2005

When building a new inside sales team, the question of optimal hiring profile always comes up. When you hire senior, experienced reps, you can get a pro that typically knows your industry, has a shorter ramp-up time, and has a track record of success that should translate to faster revenue results. But with an inexperienced or junior rep, you can sometimes find a star-in-the-making who doesn’t have pre-conceived notions about what’s possible and what isn’t and hasn’t had a chance to develop bad habits.

Hiring budgets also are a key factor. You usually have to pay more, at least in guaranteed income, when you hire someone with experience. That can make hiring a team of junior reps that you can train and mold pretty tempting.

The Down Side of Hiring Inexperienced Reps

Whether you are building a sales development or telesales team, you have either sales or qualified lead goals and a timeframe. Your investment in sales resources has to take into consideration the results you need to deliver and by when. Paying twenty-five percent less for a team of junior reps may seem like a great idea when you are starting out, but if no one is up to speed three months later, your cost per lead or sale will be way higher than if you had hired experienced reps to begin with.

Inexperienced reps also require more management attention and time to develop structured training programs for various topics, such as industry, product, competitive and sales. If you don’t have a dedicated Trainer/Coach for inside sales or an inside sales manager that isn’t busy implementing CRM systems, drafting compensation plans, and other start-up-related tasks, you won’t likely be able to give the new team the attention it needs to succeed.

Experienced reps need training, too, of course, but they are more likely to know how to find the information they need on their own.

What Experienced Reps Bring to the Table

Experienced reps often bring maturity, initiative, common sense and flexibility to your start-up environment. Instead of looking to you for constant guidance, a senior rep is typically self-motivated and can help you figure out how to structure the program by reporting what is working and what isn’t. When you can take sales experience out of the equation, it is easier to determine what needs to change in order to improve your inside sales program’s operations and results.

Senior reps who have worked in start-up departments before know to expect changes in the program early on, such as sales message, metrics, revenue or lead objectives, systems, and even compensation. They understand that program development takes time and they won’t be thrown off by the constant refinement that occurs in the first quarters.

When Hiring Inexperienced Reps Makes Sense

Once you have at least six months’ experience, you should be ready to start integrating some less experienced reps into the team. By this time, you will have a baseline of expected productivity metrics and results, tested sales messages and systems. You’ll also know what kinds of questions come up on sales calls and can plan training programs and tools such as FAQ’s around them. Finally, you’ll have a founding team of experienced reps that can help answer questions and advise the newer, less inexperienced members of the group. Keep this in mind for your group’s compensation plan: if you plan to call on your senior reps for help, make sure there is some kind of incentive for reaching team objectives.

As you expand your team over time and have standard training programs in place, it makes a lot of sense to have a blend of experienced and less-experienced reps. Not only is this a smart budgetary move, given the lower cost of junior reps, but also it is motivating for your reps. Newer team members look to the experienced ones as mentors. Senior professionals typically feel great about this role, while benefiting from the energy and enthusiasm that junior reps bring to the table.

 

This newsletter is provided as a complimentary service from Phone Works, LLC, the San Francisco Bay Area's leading sales consulting firm. Phone Works helps technology firms increase revenue, shorten sales cycles and implement successful, repeatable sales models. Phone Works has multi-lingual consultants based in London and southern France that build and restructure lead-generation, lead-qualification, telesales and sales-productivity programs on the European continent.

You can reach Phone Works at 510.749.9073.