Skilled Sales Talent Is Hard to Come By, Expensive to Replace

A new study finds that keeping skilled sales talent is a struggle for many employers, and when a skilled sales rep leaves the company, it’s even more expensive to replace him or her.

According to a new report from CSO Insights—the research division of Miller Heiman Group, a sales training and consultancy firm—only 16% of sales leaders believe that they have the talent they need to succeed in the future. However, even with talent concerns widespread, strategies for identifying, recruiting, retaining, and enabling sales talent has remained stagnant.
The 2018 Sales Talent Study, based on a global survey of over 320 sales organizations, finds that despite sales teams’ deep concerns over the future of talent, when asked what changes they’ve made to hiring profiles over the last 12 months, most respondents say there were no changes. The study also suggests that organizations focus on the wrong criteria when developing sales talent, focusing on gut feelings over data-driven insights that can predict higher win rates and more consistent quota attainment.
“Talent gaps are incredibly costly to sales organizations,” said Seleste Lunsford, managing director, CSO Insights. “It takes an average of four months to recruit a new seller, and an additional nine months to train them to full productivity. That’s over a year of productivity lost. But an effective sales leader sees hiring as an opportunity. With the right approach to talent development strategies, sales leaders can accelerate transformation within two years.”
The study finds that sales organizations struggle to replicate successful selling strategies. Instead, they rely heavily on hiring top performers, rather than developing talent as a whole. Sales organizations should instead seek out data-aided solutions to enable their entire workforce, optimizing each seller’s performance rather than searching in a small pool of talent for high performers who can fill in the gaps.
“Talent is an issue for most sales organizations. And, it shouldn’t be the sole responsibility of human resource departments and learning and development teams to address,” said Lunsford. “Chief Sales Officers [CSOs] need to own the identification, recruitment, retention, and enablement of talent as part of an overarching strategy. In order to build an effective sales team, CSOs should look for agility, learning propensity, comfort with technology, and analytical skills in new hires, and to build those same characteristics in their incumbent sales teams.”
According to the study, less than one quarter (22.6%) of respondents claim hiring as an organizational strength. The marketplace itself is changing quickly, but hiring profiles are changing only gradually. The priorities are and have been, business degree, relevant sales experience, and high emotional intelligence.
CSO insights asked sales leaders what they believed led to success, many of the factors in the hiring profile such as education and past experience were not deemed as relevant. Leaders sorted to industry and product knowledge, sales skills, and intangibles as the largest drivers. The latter two can be more challenging to identify in the hiring process.
The problem is that either way (what “we’ve always done” or what “managers see anecdotally”) are fraught with guesswork. Few organizations actually, quantitatively know what the ideal candidate looks like and are rigorously using the tools to hire for those traits.
Surprisingly, when asked how leaders have changed their profiles over the last year, the most common response was “not at all.” In order to see actionable change, leaders need to actually change their approach to hiring and onboarding.

3 Ways to Improve Your Sales Force

Hiring is just the beginning, to help sellers reach their potential, sales organizations need to manage the end-to-end experience of salespeople. CSO Insights offer these three strategies for improving the quality of your sales force:

1. Onboarding and development—Organizations with strong onboarding get new hires to full productivity 17.9% (2 months) faster than those with weaker practices. Once onboarded, continuous coaching and enablement is required
2. Engagement and retention—Salespeople need to feel like the company supports their success. This requires adopting a sell-the-seller approach, developing employee value propositions, creating formal engagement and retention strategies, and offering opportunities for career advancement.
3. Transitions–Of course not all sellers will remain on the team for a variety of reasons. Having a fair and transparent approach for performance management has a marked effect on those staying.

Importantly, the success profile and the information collected during the hiring process should help guide all of these activities.
For more information, or to view the full report, click here.