Hiring Outside of Your Industry

Using Customer Buying Patterns To Identify Top Sales Talent

By Jeremy Miller

Sourcing sales talent from the competition is a tried and true recruiting strategy. The primary advantage of recruiting sales people from your industry is it expands your company's sales funnel by capturing new hires' Rolodex of customers and prospects. The next advantage is sales people from your industry already know how to sell to your customers. Finally, industry recruiting can dramatically reduce the cost and time of onboarding. Yet what do you do when the pool of candidates from your industry is sub-par at best? This is a challenge frequently faced by sales managers. The strategy to recruit from the competition does not improve the odds of hiring a star – rather it propagates mediocrity through inbreeding.

If you are facing a shortage of top sales talent to recruit from your industry, what do you do? For most positions hiring outside of the industry is not a major headache. Accountants, software developers and engineers are technical experts – people with clearly defined job skills that work within standard operating procedures regardless of the industry. Sure technical experts may need to have experience in the finance sector or the manufacturing sector, but these are huge industry categories that do not limit hiring managers. With a well defined job description and a little creativity HR can source talented techs. Sales on the other hand has a hidden variable: the customer.

In every industry customers follow predictable purchasing patterns. The predictability of customers' behaviors drives our ability to develop sales processes and sales training programs. It also provides the key insights to develop cross-industry recruiting strategies. Sales people are tuned to respond to their customers. By mapping the purchasing behaviors of your customer base you can identify similar industries where sales people are trained, experienced and focused on selling to a similar set of customer needs and behaviors.

How do your customers select your products and services? Is it a simple transaction based on price, or a process of needs assessment and hedging options? Software sales people thrive in the complex sale. Their solutions are intangible, impact multiple business units and are large capital expenses. They have a knack for uncovering the key challenges faced by their prospects and building a compelling business case to invest in their solution. On the other side, sales people in highly commoditized industries such as waste management, industrial products or office supplies are tuned towards canvassing for business. For them, sales is more of a numbers game to identify companies that are in a shopping mode. Their weapons of choice to influence the sale are price and convenience.

In every industry customers go through four primary buying stages, we call these Selling Dimensions:

The Awareness phase is the universe of companies that can be targeted. It is the process of how your customers become aware of your company, products and services. How do your sales people gain access to their customers? Typical awareness activities include generating leads, responding to inbound requests for information, cold calling, advertising campaigns and providing introductory information on your products. Traditionally much of the awareness phase is conducted by marketing, but it is critical to identify the point of handoff from marketing to sales and the activities the sales people undertake to fill their sales funnels.
The Pre-purchase phase is the traditional view of driving an opportunity through the sales funnel. What steps do your sales reps take to move a prospect to a customer? Are they working with existing customers trying to up-sell services? Do they take prospects through extensive discovery and value creation phases to build the business case to purchase? Selling activities in the Pre-purchase phase include explaining features and benefits, identifying customer needs, product presentations and comparing solutions with competitive offerings.
The Purchase phase is the steps a customer takes to make their final decision: choose the solution, negotiate and complete the appropriate buying commitments. In a tendering process the sales people may not have any influence on the purchasing phase, while in a more competitive environment the sales person might be negotiating heavily over price and deliverables. Many of the critical incidents for the position will be defined by how your customers make their final decision. Complex solutions and large ticket items may require detailed responses to requests for proposals (RFPs). The ability of the sales person to assess the customer's needs and clearly articulate the solution may be the defining factor in the customer's buying decision. In competitive environments sales people with high persuasive drive and a persistent approach may do a better job of managing the sale and blocking competitive threats.
The Implementation phase is the delivery and implementation of the solution. This is the stage that is most critical for the customer, because they bought your service not a contract. In defining the requirements for the position, what responsibilities do the sales people have with the customer once the contract is signed? In many organizations there is a defined hand-off from sales to operations, but in industries such as consumer packaged goods the sales people are constantly involved with the customer: monitoring inventory, developing joint marketing programs and performing market analysis.

The Selling Dimensions provide the foundational information to develop sourcing and selection strategies for sales talent outside of your industry. When you match the duties of a sales manager from one industry to the next they largely say the same thing: achieve objectives through others; recruit and retain top performing sales people; coach and develop reps to achieve their goals. You could also add in key elements of your sales environment such as the average size deal, length of sales cycle, method of developing leads and the size of the sales team. Again this is useful information, but the critical incidents that shape the sourcing and selection strategies exist in the Selling Dimensions.

Let's look at an example. The waste management industry is a well-established, commodity service. The industry grooms talent from within, starting with truck drivers and moving them progressively towards the top. The movement of people from one competitor to the next is one that facilitates comfort and security for all involved, and it breeds complacency. Sales managers bring along their baggage, pardon the pun, and innovative selling techniques never get implemented because they challenge the status quo.

To expand the pool of sales management talent in the waste management industry a primary critical incident emerges from the Selling Dimensions: density selling. Density selling, also known as route selling, is the process of maximizing customers on a specific truck route. A company can increase profitability by increasing the number of pick-ups for each of its routes. It requires sales managers that are strategic in their distribution of sales resources by developing blitzes, pricing strategies and competitive offerings to saturate a route. The challenge is identifying management talent with the strategic focus to operate in density selling, which could come from industries such as food vending services, cafeteria services or uniform rental services.

Sales managers are constantly trying to expand their pools of available talent. It makes a lot of sense to source from the competition, but if that is the only strategy it can be very limiting. You will be able to dramatically expand your pool of sales talent as well as sharply focus your sourcing efforts by matching sales skills to your customers' buying habits. Selling Dimensions provide a powerful roadmap to identify sales skills attuned to the purchasing patterns of your customers. They provide that critical layer of knowledge to develop behavioral questions, industry sourcing strategies and selection criteria.

Jeremy Miller (Jeremy.Miller@LEAPJob.com) is a Partner with LEAPJob (www.LEAPJob.com). LEAPJob is a sales force consulting and sales recruiting firm that helps companies achieve their growth targets by building top performing sales organizations. You can reach Jeremy at 905.281.3090, Ext. 22