How to Hire the Best Sales People Without the Unnecessary Steps

A simple 4-step process for hiring a salesperson for your company:

Wanna be excited about hiring rather than afraid? Read this 👇🏽

See how you can 300 profiles and hire the three best people for your sales team with just one hour of work.

Our targets are steep for the next month, the leads are coming in thick and heavy we need at least three more sales people within a week.

RMG (My cofounder @TeleCRM)

One year ago this statement would have paralyzed me.

It would have definitely caused a fight.

Hire 3 new salespeople in a week and get them ready for targets of next month? Are you nuts?

• Hiring takes months.
• Going through hundreds of resumes and filtering the right candidate alone can take weeks.
• Plus, I’m not available full-time as I’ve got a marketing department to run, and we don’t have an HR!
• Good people have notice periods.
• People accept the offers and don’t turn up.

If you are a business owner running a small business and looking to establish a sales team, and if you have actually tried to hire good capable qualified people to run your sales for you then your feelings would be no different.

But this time all I said… was

Ok! Sure!

How?

Why was I not panicked?

How can I be so overconfident that I can hire 2 to 3 great salespeople within a week?

Do I not have to run a marketing department anymore?

All those challenges are still there.

But now I have a system in place!

A system that can –

1. Quickly (almost immediately) attract – good, qualified candidates.
2. Automatically filter based on our criteria.
3. Get these candidates tested and invested.
4. After that get them into a direct interview with me.

And the best part about the system,

It’s almost entirely automated, and the only time it takes from me is one hour.

We recently filtered 300 aplication and hired 3 digital marketing executive within three days by using this system

And today I’m gonna give you a step-by-step answer to the big question

How can you filter out 300 candidates and hire the 3 best salespeople by spending just one hour of your time?

This means first you have to discard all the unnecessary steps in conventional HR processes.

Things like

1. Creating an extensive recruitment plan, dealing with vendors, etc. Remember I promised you the ability to hire the 3 best candidates with just one hour of your time. Recruitment plans and vendors are for people who have all the time in the world.
2. Collecting resumes, most of the information is copied and or fake and you simply don’t have the time for it.
3. Taking 20 follow up with each candidate, you are not an HR who is getting paid to show how much she is working, you just wanna filter and hire the three best candidates out of 300.

Then you have to ask yourself – what are the things that are absolutely essential to finding and hiring the right people?

1. That they are skilled and qualified.
2. That they are interested and available.
3. That they showcase their skills and pass the interview.
   Bonus points if they like what your company is doing

Now that we have the basics sorted – let’s look at the steps to get 300 applications, filter out 20 eligible for an interview, take an interview, and then higher the best three candidates with just one hour of your time!

Step 1: Attracting 300 candidates

If you want to hire 3 candidates right away then you need 300 good candidates.

Because after filtering out all the people who

• Are just exploring
• Are not wiling to relocate
• Have 9 months of notice period to serve
• Not even borderline qualified for the job
• People who are not willing to put in the effort to prove that they can actually fit in

All that remains is about 20-25 candidates whom you can actually interview

And if you call 20 to 25 candidates for the interview then about 10 to 12 of them show up.

Plus you will have to raise about 6 offer letters, to finally hire people and retain 2 to 3.

But don’t worry as promised I’m gonna give you all the solutions and it will be completely automated.

Where to find candidates

1. If you’re looking to hire freshers, post 2 jobs on Internshala!
2. If you are looking to hire experienced people, go to LinkedIn post a job and make it a page posting. Spend about Rs.200 per day, and you will have about 300 candidates in three days.

Pro Tips

1. If you can shoot a quick video on Loom and share it along with the job post on LinkedIn, it helps to get the message across, creates a rapport with the candidates, and creates a good impression about your company. The point is the candidates will be more likely to show up for the interview if they have seen a two-minute video about what your company does and why they should consider joining you.
2. In the job post, don’t just talk about responsibilities and parks, try to show them a preview of what they can learn and how they can grow if they join your organization. Basically, answer the big question of ‘what is the date for them’.
3. LinkedIn job posts look like they’re too expensive in the first couple of hours, but don’t worry. If you are hiring salespeople then within 24 hours you will be flooded with applications.

Step 2: Reach out and automatically filter people who are not the right fit using a google form!

Internshala has an option to send Bulk messages to everyone.

But on LinkedIn, you will have to message each candidate individually!
You can use an intern for this.

Paste this message to all the candidates

Hi Ziya,
This is regarding the Sales Executive role that you have applied for
Please fill out this short form to proceed to the next step: https://telecrm.in/hiring-sales-questioaire

Note: It’s important to create an automated survey/Google form before sending this message.

With the right questions, you can automatically filter out the candidates who are not the right fit.

Here are some of the questions that you can ask in the form/survey

1. What’s your expected CTC?
2. How many years of experience do you have?
3. Are you willing to relocate?
4. Are you available to join immediately?
5. When was the last time you were rejected by a prospect? How did you handle it?
6. What’s your biggest failure as a salesperson? What are you doing about it?
7. Is there any particular conversation with a prospect that you will never forget? Why?

The next step is to filter out all the people who have the basic matching criteria and have answered all the questions in the survey.

These are the people who are eligible for the next step.

IMPORTANT: Don’t filter out anyone other than the basic criteria match.
Out of the 300 candidates to whom you send a message only about 150 to 160 will fill out this survey/form! And when you filter out all the candidates who are not the right fit you will have about 80 to 100 candidates who can pass on to the next round.

Pro Tips

1. Before you start interacting with the candidates, understand the must-have skills and qualities that you will need in your sales executives
2. Do not filter out anyone at this stage, just send a message to everyone. You will see that out of 300 applicants only about 150 to 170 will fill out the survey/google forms
3. Describe the key attributes that are essential for you, and design questions accordingly so that you can use the answers to automatically filter out people who are not relevant. For example questions like expected CTC, years of experience, willingness to relocate, availability to join immediately, etc.
4. If you use TeleCRM along with our Survey system then you can create advanced filters to automatically filter out the candidates who are not relevant.
   
5. If you want to really take it to the next step and filter out all the people who are not the right fit then you can ask some technical questions whose answers they cannot find on Google.
6. If you have a developer on a little bit of development yourself then you can use survey.JS to make the survey time-bound.
7. Note that some of these questions are supposed to bring out their personal experience. These are not questions that they can find on Google. And the answers to these questions will reveal the people who actually have some experience versus the people who are pretending to have experience.
8. Don’t worry too much about reading the answers, because you don’t need to filter out anyone right now.

Step 3: Testing them and filtering out introverts and completely inexperienced people with a video assignment

Take the list of all the relevant candidates from the last step, and send them an assignment on WhatsApp.

You can use this template.

Hi *Ziya*,
This is Rahul from TeleCRM!
*Based on your answers in the last round you have been selected for the next round.*
👉 Create a two minute video of yourself explaining
- Why you are the right fit for the job?
- Why should we choose you over the others? What makes you uniquely suitable for this role?
- Recall one incident when you handed a tough client and still went I had to close the deal! How did you do it?
Important: Please don't reply here unless it's extremely urgent because this is a chatbot number.

Out of the 80 to 100 candidates from the last step, only about 40 to 45 will send a video. You can call all of these candidates for a group interview.

Advantages of this assignment

1. It takes the filtering to the next level and filters out all the non-serious people.
2. It gives you a chance to who are the extreme introverts and hands-on suitable for the sales role (these are the people who will not send you the video).
3. It gives you an idea of the basic present ability and comfort level of the candidate when it comes to talking about himself(which is absolutely required in sales).
4. If he asks you lame questions like how do I host a video on YouTube then you know that this candidate won’t use his mind or Google and hence he is not the right fit for you.

Pro Tips

• If you really want to engage the candidates you can create a video description of the assignment and send it along with the message, this gives you a chance to create a good impression about you and the company

Step 4: Take a group interview to find the 5 to 6 candidates that deserve an offer letter

In the last step, you will receive about 40 videos, you don’t have to actually watch any of the videos yet, just send them an invite to a 40-minute group interview on zoom.

Out of the 40 to 45 people only about 10 to 12 always show up for the actual group interview.

This is the only place where you actually interact with the candidates.

You can ask the following questions and each candidate can take turns answering those questions.

1. What’s your favourite failure as a salesperson? What have you learned from it?
2. How are you convince your grandmother to use WhatsApp?
3. What are three unique ways of researching the prospect that you know that other salespeople usually don’t?

Pro Tips

1. Ask the questions one by one and give everyone the opportunity to speak, before moving on to the next question.
2. You don’t want them to blabber and you want everybody to be able to speak, ask them to make it short. If anyone starts blabbering just remind him of the time limitation.
3. These questions will help you filter out all the people who are smart and have some actual experience in selling.

Some of the answers that you receive in the interview will be lame and you can discard some of these candidates immediately.

Out of the 12 people who passed, the last round around 6 to 7 will be smart enough to move to the next section.

Next

Shortlist these seven people and look at their entire history of the interview process with you.

1. What were their answers in the initial survey from step 2?
2. What does the video look like?
3. What were their answers in the group interview?

You will find about five people who are good enough to get a personal interview with you.

The personal interview

It can be short and will have just one question to figure out whether this guy can actually sell something that’s difficult.

Here’s the question that we ask –

I am grocery store owner, it's summer time!
And you have to convince me to remove the Coke bottles from my display and put water bottles instead!

With this question, the lame candidates can be filtered out immediately

• They will start talking about the benefits of water over Coke..
• Or they will say something like water is good for your customers rather than coke.

The candidates that are smart and actually know how to sell will ask questions and create favourable scenarios instead of pitching.

For example,

1. How much margin do you get from coke?
2. How many bottles do you sell?
3. Your shop is in front of the railway station, the crowd that you get here is mostly travellers and relatively rich people, right?

The moment they ask smart questions you know you have the right candidate. Doesn’t matter what their actual pitch is.

You can use this process to filter about 5 best candidates from the initial 300, and roll out offer letters to all of them!

About four of them should join and you should be able to retain about three of them!

Conclusion

A lot of the hiring process involves pointless and endless talking to the candidates.

Most people follow a standard operating procedure that was designed by cooperates instead of understanding their own needs and figuring out a procedure that will quickly help them filter out candidates who ask for their requirements.

Once you understand your own requirement in complete detail you can simply skip the nonsense talking with the candidates and instead filter out based on your own criteria. In fact, as we saw in this article you can filter out about 20 to 25 right candidates to interview out of 300 applications without having to spend a single minute interacting with any of the candidates.

Once you know exactly what your selection criteria you can design an automated system around that to do the filtering for you instead of having to manually go through each and every application. This is by the way the biggest waste of time because only about 5 to 6 out of 300 candidates are good enough to be actually reviewed by you.

This reverse approach of hiring without actually interacting with the candidates gives you all the information that you need without having to manually spend a single minute with any single candidate before you are absolutely certain that he is highly likely to be the right candidate.

Plus you don’t have to use the exact same hiring process forever. Use it as a starting point, reduce your workload by about 80% and finetune the process as you go. Because running a sales force means people leave no matter what you do to retain them so you will have to keep interviewing and keep hiring from time to time.

Also Read:

• 5 Killer WhatsApp Follow-up Message After a Sales Call
• Top 8 Must-have Skills and Qualities of a Sales Executive in India
• 30 Killer Sales Introductions Used By Top Sales People In India
• 23 Best Inside Sales Interview Questions To Find The Right Candidates