Build a world-class sales organization using a rigorous recruitment, training and support process.

By Tim Fleming

I believe that strong organic growth depends on the successful execution of four disciplines. These four disciplines function as pillars that form the structural integrity of your talent development plan. If even one pillar is weak, the entire structure will collapse. Let’s explore how these four pillars support your own organic growth plan.

Pillar 1: Recruitment and hiring

Successfully recruiting a world-class sales force demands a clear understanding of your business goals and the ideal candidate that will help you achieve those goals. As part of your recruitment and hiring strategic planning, you should:

• Create a disciplined three- or four-step hiring process. Challenge yourself to include all key stakeholders in the interviewing process, including your CEO and COO.
• Consider hiring a professional sales recruiter to identify and screen candidates.
• Target the first year salary at a practical level that new sales talent can reasonably validate in three years.
• Develop an assessment tool to benchmark successful behaviors, motivators and attributes. Use this to evaluate candidates.

Target candidates who demonstrate:

• Ability to sell at the C-suite level
• Ability to thrive and persevere in a long sales cycle
• Success with sales activities
• A “hunter” mentality
• Passion for business and the confidence to deliver business solutions

Pillar 2: Onboarding and Training

The second critical pillar is your new sales talent development plan, also called a learning path. Most firms’ learning paths focus on a graduation date that ranges from one week to 90 days, concluding by handing the new graduate the telephone to make cold calls. In contrast, a world-class learning path builds on agreed-upon success metrics and a thorough understanding of your most successful producers’ strategies. To ensure meaningful progress, define proficiency expectations at six, 12, 26, 52, and 104 weeks, and design a detailed training guide to achieve individual results. The most valuable secret to a successful learning path is to make sure your trainees experience the learning objective with a customer or prospect the same week that they learn the concept.

Pillar 3: Sales Methodology

Strive to develop one sales methodology for your entire business development team and hold them accountable to it. Your goal is to teach them how to gain a deeper understanding of their client’s business, discover a business fit, and deliver business solutions. Similar to a professional sports playbook, everyone must run the offensive plan with great precision. Your playbook can offer multiple options to allow for individual creativity, but failure to execute the fundamentals every day should result in bench time and ultimately termination.

Pillar 4: Sales Management

Finding leaders who are fearless, disciplined, confident and selfless is a challenge. Your goal is to uncover an individual who enjoys developing others, building a team, helping others succeed, encourages disciplined sales activities, and is motivated by working with talented people.

Excellent sales talent and leaders are rare, but following the four pillars above will help you attract and retain these valuable employees. In fact, I believe that executing a disciplined approach to achieving the four pillars can result in 10-percent or more increase in organic revenue growth for your organization.