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Finding and recruiting top talent in sales is difficult. Since selling is the most vital component of every organisation, hiring outstanding salespeople is challenging for most businesses. Perhaps the graph of difficulty starts getting steeper as you move up the ladder when hiring.
If you plan to hire a sales director for your company in the Nordic countries, it’s vital for you to decide right. Not sure what the right decision involves? To find the best professional, you need to look beyond the mere qualifications and certificates.
Your focus should be on finding a person who fits your company culture and vision and shares the same core values. But there’s more to consider. It pays to know what characteristics to look for in a sales director to hire right. We bring you the top five ones to consider so you can make a better and more informed decision.
1. Ability to Lead > Ability to Sell
An excellent salesperson isn’t necessarily the best choice for the sales director’s post. You will do well to remember that the ability to sell isn’t equal to the ability to lead. For a sales director, the latter is far more important than the former.
The right candidate for the position of a sales director should understand the sales process but it’s more crucial that the person has the ability to lead, inspire and motivate your company’s people, and can back it up with adequate managerial and industry experience.
2. Team-Player
A cricket team can’t succeed despite having a brilliant captain unless the players too are equally good. The same applies to a sales director. An exceptional sales director alone can’t bring you the desired results unless he or she has a stellar team to lead. Even when there’s no stellar team, how well the professional can lead the people on board the team to accomplish the targeted goals is what matters.
A top sales director will always stay focused on the overall success of the company and view the sales team as a collective unit. From mentoring the people on this team to coaching them and boosting their morale, an excellent sales director will do them all and much more.
3. Customer-Focused
For any business to grow and thrive, focusing on meeting the clients’ needs is imperative. Since your clients are at the core of your business, it’s important for your sales director to focus on what they need, want, and may require in the future but don’t know yet. The professional should also be able to plan ahead based on how to alleviate their pain points and develop solutions that will help make their lives better.
Sales directors who work with this approach can go much deeper than simply focusing on the immediate benefits of their sales team’s actions or the features of their products and/or services. They make the most of in-house data and insights to strengthen relationship-building to better serve a business’s existing and potential customers’ needs.
4. Tapping into the Creative Reserves of Self
Every customer and sales campaign is unique. Instead of trying to use a blanket template for all, your sales director should understand that sales processes need to be flexible and mouldable according to changing client needs and industry trends.
Your sales honcho should be able to tap into his or her creativity to meet unique customer requests and battle unforeseen circumstances, obstacles, and issues to come up with creative solutions that can help seal the deal and get the work done. Logic, structure, data, etc., are all useful but at times, creativity and flexibility could be just what your sales team may need and the sales director who can act fast and creatively will be the one who brings you laurels, results, and more paying customers.
5. A Good Fit for Your Company
You can approach sales in different ways. Even for two clients in a similar business, the sales campaigns could be different based on their unique goals and needs. When hiring for the position of a sales director, it will be wiser to look for a person with experience and success in sales environments and projects similar to yours. However, success in a similar setting doesn’t always transfer to another.
You should ensure your candidate shares the same values and approach to sales as followed by your company. Evaluating the cultural fit of your potential sales director is also vital because a professional, no matter how successful and experienced, with core values, beliefs, and attitudes starkly different from your company’s culture and core values, would struggle to succeed.
Wrapping Up
Hiring top talent as your company’s sales director can help set up your company for success. But it’s easier said than done. You can use the above characteristics to shortlist and find the crème de la crème and bring the professional into the fold.
In case your hiring process doesn’t yield the desired results, you can always count on us at InHunt World to find you the best-fit sales director. Reach us today!
This article was written by Sonali