How Direct Sales Can Make or Break Your Company: Notes from a Fortune 500 Sales Manager

As a sales manager for a Fortune 500 company, I can personally attest to the fact that hiring the the right direct sales associate can make your team, while hiring the wrong sales associate can break it. Two years ago, right at the height of the great recession, I was managing a team of five direct sales associates that were contributing over $1 million in sales annually. We were on target to meet our goal for the year, and making sales goals during a year when overall sales were down was quite a feat.

In November of that year, I was preparing performance evaluations when I noticed that one member of my team was not pulling his weight. While this person did manage to pull in decent sales figures, his team members were selling double the amount he was. As a manager, I pondered how I could best approach this situation. What were his team members doing that he was not? Were they putting in more hours at work? Were they working smarter, rather than harder? Was it a personality issue? Maybe he just wasn’t a good fit for direct sales, or if he was, maybe he just didn’t belong on our team. So I decided to sit him down and discuss his performance with him.

My lackluster employee explained that his team members were more aggressive when closing deals, and he didn’t feel right about closing a deal that wasn’t in the best interest of the customer. While I appreciated his sense of moral responsibility, I also reminded him that, as salespeople, our job is not to worry about whether the customer makes the best decision possible. Rather, we need to sell them on the opportunities our products and services can afford them. All we should be concerned about is whether or not the customer is satisfied with the transaction.

This employee eventually left the company of his own free will, which I admired. However, I was then left with the daunting task of finding a new sales associate for my team in the middle of a recession. I was definitely not looking forward to finding candidates for the position and sifting through hundreds of resumes from unqualified people. Luckily, one of my friends, a sales manager at another Fortune 500 company, recommended that I hire a direct sales recruiting firm to find highly qualified candidates for me.

I went online to start my search and found a few recruiting firms through a service that connects companies with the firm that is best suited to their hiring needs. This process took about a day, and I set up a phone interview with my selected firm immediately. I interviewed the recruiter over the phone, then set up an in-person meeting. During the meeting, I explained the situation with the former employee. I stressed that the skills and personality of my ideal candidate should complement that of my other team members, which I believe is often the most important factor when hiring a new employee. It’s not difficult to find a highly qualified employee that will do a great job; the real challenge lies in hiring the right person for my particular team. But my recruiting firm managed to do just that. They not only provided a free consultation, they also screened and interviewed prospective candidates before presenting them to me. Within weeks, we had found our new team member. Needless to say, I was very pleased with the process, and within months, my new employee was pulling in the same sales figures as everyone else on the team. Outsourcing the hiring process to a direct sales recruiting firm was the best decision I could have made.

Direct Sales Recruiting