The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

You have found the perfect candidate with the right blend of talents, skills, and experience. You have reviewed their assessment with a talent analyst and know what to expect.

It’s time to have them hired and jumping right in, right?

Not so fast. Now it’s the time to take those talents and create an onboarding plan customized to your new hire.

Succession planning isn’t just a buzzword—it’s the cornerstone of survival. Identifying and developing future sales leaders ensures an organization's long-term health.

Remember, effective succession planning is not just about filling positions but also about fostering a culture of growth and preparedness that aligns with the company’s long-term strategy and goals. It’s a strategic process that ensures leadership continuity, preserves organizational knowledge, and contributes to overall business resilience.

Unfortunately, succession planning is also often set aside or even forgotten. Makes sense. It’s easy to get caught up in the here and now and fail to put plans in place for the future when your leaders leave. But it’s a big mistake!

Electronics come with user manuals, food packaging comes with cooking instructions, furniture comes with assembly instructions, and clothing comes with care instructions. People are much more complex than the items you buy, yet people don’t come with instructions on how to get the best out of them.

What if you knew how a person was wired before hiring or coaching them?

We know that top-performing salespeople are extremely driven to meet and exceed their goals. With that drive also comes the desire to continue to move up the ladder.

As a leader, it’s natural to have these salespeople “next on this list” to move up when a position becomes available. But are all top-performing salespeople destined to become top-performing managers?

Scenario: A team member comes to you, excited because a former coworker, a Top Performer, has just let them know that they are looking for a new position.

They are perfect for an opening on your team! You become excited because that opening has been hard to fill. Finding quality candidates has been hard and the competitive job market brutal.

So you can’t wait to hire this person. But before you meet with them, you have them take the Sales Talent Assessment, confident that their talents will match the glowing description by your AE.

Then comes that email. Not recommended to move forward in your process.

What?! How can this happen? And what do you do next?

Wouldn’t it be lovely if each sales candidate that you interviewed came holding a sign? “I’m Coachable.” “I’m a Hard Worker.” “I’m disorganized.” “You can’t trust me!”

Think of the time savings if everyone summed up their best strengths and their worst weaknesses for you and handed them over before an interview. You could come prepared with questions to find out how those strengths work for them (or trip them up) and if/how they work around those weaknesses.

Too good to be true? It’s not. All you need is a validated talent assessment like the Sales Talent Assessment (STA) and a conversation with a Talent Analyst.

Have you ever met a kid and know what kind of career they were made for?

I bet the answer is YES if you really think about it.

In a tight job market, finding candidates, qualifying them, conducting interviews, and hiring are all rushed and stressful.

Many managers are in the position of having open positions on their teams that they're desperate to fill and having candidates enter and leave the job market quickly, so having a well-thought-out interviewing plan is vital. Equally important is learning to look and listen for the talents necessary for success in sales.

Trigger Warning... If you get easily offended by brutally honest feedback that might seem harsh and mean, you might want to skip today's blog post.

Ok, now; that we've gotten that out of the way, here's that brutally honest and possibly mean content:

You should NOT invest resources into poor-performing salespeople!

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.

You’ve probably heard that wise Chinese proverb before. In the business world, the best time to start recruiting was before you had a job opening, but the second-best time is now.   

If you're a hiring manager, recruiter, or HR professional tasked with recruitment and selection for a sales team, your number one priority involves making sure you have the most talented people in the right places on your team. There is no doubt that matching talent to a task in this way will determine the success, or failure, of your sales organization.