What does a highly motivated salesperson look like?

The first rule in running your own business is that your time is valuable. Learning to delegate, and learning to outsource tasks is important. The second major bump on the head for most business owners is realizing that other people’s time is valuable too. One of the critical places to demonstrate this is in hiring and recruiting the best sales staff for your firm.

You need to be able to get top talent for sales, and while sales skills can be learned, matching sales skills to work flow and company objectives takes time – and it takes time that you don’t have as you run your company. However, it also takes money. It’s not the money that you pay your sales reps that makes the difference. Getting the right sales person means you need to be a sales person yourself – and you need a good recruiter.

Remember that your recruiter gets his fee as a percentage of what you’re paying the candidates you hire – so the recruiter has a double incentive to feed the best talent to the people who not only pay him the most, but to the people who pay the talent the most.

So the first piece of advice is to not be cheap.

The second piece of advice is “Focus on selling”. You need to sell your company to the sales talent. Understand what motivates sales talent – they want to believe in their product, they want to have fun making the sales, making the deals and sealing the contracts. A good sales rep understands that he is providing solutions to problems.

Your job is to sell the environment of your firm. Explain how your firm benefits the sales talent for joining up. Explain how your company works, what your company is looking for, the products you sell, and make the sales talent understand the kinds of problems they’ll be helping customers with.

Making sure the candidate is the right fit – flip the tables on them!

All sales people see themselves as facilitators and problem solvers. Let them do some of the work on an interview – let them interview you when you’ve asked them your questions. This makes it easier to determine of there’s a mismatch between them and you before the hiring process starts – and it gets them enthused about working for you.