1. Be Prepared: Research salaries for your industry and role on sites like Indeed.com and Glassdoor.com. Don’t rely on this alone though – talk to your peers and industry contacts; also speak to recruitment professionals in your space.

2. Decide On Your Range: Consider your experience, expertise, the value that you can deliver, sales track record and qualifications to determine the salary range that’s right for you.

3. Aim High: When asked about salary expectations, start on the high end of your range to give room for negotiation.

4. Quantify Your Value: Turn your experience into clear statements of value and cite specific successes and sales numbers that prove your success. Be prepared to discuss your salary with confidence.

5. Provide Evidence: Show past P60’s, testimonials from clients, examples of pursuits that you have worked on, examples of account plans that you have developed – anything that adds weight to your position.

6. Be Clear & Specific: If you get an offer that is below what you want, be prepared to counter, but be specific.  Say something like “I really like what I’ve seen and I’d love to join your team.  The offer is a bit below what I’m looking for, if you could increase the basic salary by £5K, then I would be happy to accept”.

A high-quality sales recruitment agency will greatly reduce your risk of a mis-hire, improve your time to hire and provide you access to passive sales talent.  Here are five customer-backed reasons to work with us:

#1 Dramatically Reduce Risk of a Mis-Hire

Even poor and average sales performers are likely to interview well, and it can be tough to figure out who just talks a good game versus those who can really deliver.  Our team are from sales management and sales consulting backgrounds, with deep expertise in effective sales process, practices and how to identify top sales talent.

#2 Cut Your Time-To-Hire 

Working with a specialist means that all the heavy lifting will be done for you.  Candidates will be robustly qualified and only those capable of delivering in your environment will be put forward.  This will save endless time in screening and interviewing unsuitable candidates.  Working with us can help to reduce your time to hire by up to 80%

#3 Get Exclusive Access to Top Talent

Finding sales talent is hard – we know because that’s what we do every day.  We dig deep to uncover the top performers.  Whether that’s from your competitors people or candidates from outside your industry, our targeted search finds the hidden talent you’ll want to hire.

#4 Gain Market Insights

Doing a deep dive and talking to the sales professionals in your market enables us to provide insight into how your company is perceived, how you are perceived as a potential employer and what are seen as your relative competitive strengths and weaknesses.

We tend to work on a fixed fee basis, removing the potential bias towards positioning the most expensive candidates, or to focus purely on getting the best deal for the candidate.  When you fully leverage our unbiased and experienced perspective, you and your candidate will have a more satisfying negotiation experience.

We took time out to talk about why our clients keep coming back to us …

“Sorry, we don’t work with recruitment consultancies, our HR Dept handles recruitment for all sales positions.”

“Ah, ok, and are you happy with the candidates they deliver?”

“Yeah, pretty much. They usually manage to find me a few good candidates.”

“Ok, that’s good.  I’m curious though, what is your average tenure for new sales people?”

“We usually work on the basis that one in three will make it through the first year?”

“Why only one in three?”

“We find they are just not able to cut it in our highly competitive market.”

“Surely that’s a huge cost to your business in recruitment costs, onboarding and salary…not to mention the cost of lost opportunities?”

“Absolutely!”

“What if I told you we could massively de-risk your sales hiring.  Over 95% of the candidates that we place are still with their employer at the 12-month mark.”

“I’d say, ok let’s talk!”

In competitive B2B markets a company’s ability to identify, attract and recruit high performing sales professionals can have a material impact on its’ success. It’s therefore surprising that having done the hard work of finding the ideal candidate businesses can sabotage their efforts by making fatal mistakes at the closing stage.

Here are some common mistakes that we have seen along with suggestions for best practice.

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This is an issue that comes up semi-regularly on assignments that I work on.  The cost of hiring a very experienced and proven BD person can be significant.  Not necessarily in terms of their basic salary, but in terms of their overall On Target Earnings (OTE), which can be double or more of basic salary.

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First point to make is that this is in the context of b2b sales.

I’m disheartened by the amount of posts recently by people either complaining about sales calls or explaining why they don’t take ANY sales calls, so thought I’d write a short blog on this to perhaps offer a different perspective.

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I’ve probably said this before but I honestly can’t think of anyone that meets with more sales people than I do.  I should do – it is pretty much what I do for a living!

Lucky me right?  Listening to all the bullsh*t, bravado and bluster of a sales person attempting to sell their most valuable product… themselves.  Tales of massive deals landed, targets smashed and big bonus payments.  Well, that at least seems to be the perception of many of my friends and people in my network – at least those who are not in sales.

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When a sales leadership position opens up in a business it’s relatively common that the top performing sales person in that business will be earmarked for the role.  I suppose it may seem the obvious thing to do.  Why not reward your star performer with a promotion – and after all, who better to lead the sales team than someone who has a proven track record in hitting their numbers.

However, all too often, this can lead to disaster.  There is a very real possibility that you will end up with not just a poorly performing and demotivated sales team, but also lose your top performer.  Here are a couple of reasons why: Continue Reading

“Your talent is not enough you’ve got to put in the work”

The title of this post is taken from a Gary Vaynerchuk video – and the word in question is ‘hustle’.  You can view the video here, it’s worth a look – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIJElPStJpg

I’ve been consuming some of Gary Vee’s online content after reading one of his books whilst on holiday recently.  His brash, ultra-confident style and New Yorker attitude may not be for everyone but I actually quite like it (in small doses) and, importantly, some of the key messages in his narrative really ring true for me.  The one that I want to focus on here is ‘hustle’. Continue Reading