A company’s proverbial Achilles Heel -Sales. Let’s pause for a minute. Get salespeople in, and voila, and you are in the game. If only it were that easy.
Finding good salespeople is a tough challenge indeed for any company of repute. They are most visible, most likely to pick up calls or read emails. It’s the curiosity at play. Still, companies find it challenging to hire decent salespeople that can scale the business.
Where can we find such revenue generators?
Let’s demystify the methods a little bit. The most obvious pitstop is Linkedin.
A basic search that most recruiters would employ is:
(“sales executive” OR “sales rep” OR salesperson OR “BD exec” OR “account executive” OR “account manager”)
OR
(BDR OR SDR OR “business development representative” OR “sales development representative”)
This will give a lot of results but are these the people you need?
Typically, salespeople have quotas per quarter. That is one way to find salespeople who have explicitly stated so in their profiles.
(“sales executive” OR “sales rep” OR salesperson OR “BD exec” OR “account executive” OR “account manager”) AND (“quota exceeded” OR “quota attained” OR “exceeded quota” OR “deal quota”)
OR (to make it simple)
(“sales executive” OR “sales rep” OR salesperson OR “BD exec” OR “account executive” OR “account manager”) AND quota
Attaining or exceeding quotas brings its own sets of laurels or awards or incentives.
A modified search that would consider these would look like this:
(“sales executive” OR “sales rep” OR salesperson OR “BD exec” OR “account executive” OR “account manager”) AND (“president’s club” OR “presidents club” OR “president club” OR “president’s circle” OR “champions club” OR mvp OR award OR winner OR “top 1%” OR “top 2%” OR “top 3%” OR “top 5%” OR “top producer” OR “top producers” OR “top-performing” OR “top-performing” OR “new logos” OR platinum OR “sales records” OR “winner’s circle” OR “salesperson of the year” OR “rookie of the year”)
Rocketreach.co
Rocketreach is a great channel to find sales folks. The added advantage is getting their work phone number and/or personal emails (Paid version).
A sample search like this can uncover a lot of prospects.
A simple search like the one below can uncover some prospects:
site:twitter.com “SaaS sales” Bengaluru -inurl:status -job -jobs -careers -hiring
Events / Conferences
Companies may be corporate sponsors at a sales-specific conference or an event or may send salespeople to attend it. This would give you an opportunity to get the list of all the attendees from the said event, which you can work on further.
Some of these conferences that you could review are:
- Dreamforce (From Salesforce)
- Growth hackers conference
- Tenbound Sales Development
- Sales Success Summit
- Canadian Professionals Sales Association – Sales Success Summit
- Sales 3.0
- SaaStr – Annual and Scale Events
- LeadsCon
- Sales team Accelerator Retreat (Frost & Sullivan)
- Unleash
- AA-ISP Leadership Summit (For inside sales)
- TOPO Summit (From Gartner)
- Outbound
Job Boards
An alternative channel to check would be the following Job boards.
- Ladders (Only for $100K+ Jobs)
- Rainmakers
- Salesheads
- Salesjobs
- Salestrax (Software sales)
- Thelions (Startup sales)
- Medreps
- SimplySalesJobs (UK)
Boot camps
Following are some of the sales boot camps that you can explore:
- Salesbootcamp – They have a free (very short term) as well as a payable 12-week sales training.
- Techpoint sales bootcamp – They have a 4-week sales boot camp and claim that 90% of their graduates get placed in tech companies (Mostly Indiana state of US)
- VictoryLap – High-Performance Virtual Sales Training boot camp out of US
Training
Following are some of the Sales training programs that you can review to add as part of your search criteria
- Sales Hacker
- Sandler Solutions
- SPIN® Selling
- Insight Selling (RAIN Group)
- IMPACT Sales Team Training (Brooks Group)
- IBM Signature Selling Method (SSM)
- Microsoft Solution Sales Process (MSSP)
Conclusion
Now after the demystification, you will be confident of sourcing relevant Sales folks for your firm. Sales personnel are not elusive perse, but harder to convince to join your firm. Your Company’s growth prospects, sales leadership, market fit, geo focus, and most importantly, incentive structure play a major role in landing them once you find decent prospects to interview.