Just yesterday I had the opportunity to meet with a very seasoned CEO of a technology service provider who came to us in order to do a recruiting project for a new sales person. He came to us is because hes gone through four sales hires on his own and none of them have actually produced anything for his company. As we sat down to talk about this he sheepishly admitted that this had cost him millions of dollars of lost revenue and opportunity cost as a result of not getting the sales hiring process right.

This week I also had the opportunity to teach a course to a group of CEOs on how to improve their sales hiring process in order to avoid mis-hires. Of the fifteen CEOs in the room, when I asked how many of them had consistently had problems in making the wrong hiring decisions on sales people, three quarters of them raised their hands. We talked about the consequences of those mis-hires to their businesses, and as we went around the room we realized that millions and millions of dollars had been lost as a result of not bringing in the right expertise in order to do sales recruiting within their companies.

So one of the key attributes that Ive found amongst companies that have a hard time hiring sales people is that the hiring manager or the CEO of the company often times has an engineering operations or finance background and without any sales experience themselves, they have a real hard time judging what makes a good sales person and what doesnt as they go through the recruiting and interviewing process. If you are an executive with a non-sales background and youre called upon to try to accelerate your companys sales and take over the management of the hiring of key sales people, you might be prone to this kind of mistake. It might be wise to bring in outside recruiting expertise in order to help improve your hiring and reduce your risk of making mis-hires.

Companies that outsource their hiring function can have a dramatic impact on their top line performance because theyre going to leave the hiring of sales people to the experts and as a result, it becomes easier to bring in "A" players and "A" talent into their company. Yes. youll have to pay some fees along the way in order to bring in that expertise but when you compare the amount youre going to pay in relationship to the amount youre going to gain, the return on investment from that expense is well justified. We know countless CEOs whove gone through that discovery process themselves, who can testify that it really pays to bring in the right experts to do sales recruiting correctly.