There is a vicious cycle when it comes to sales talent strategy.

Here’s how to get out of it:

The shortage of sales talent is a huge issue for employers – globally. It is an issue with direct business impact in that it hurts a company’s ability to meet revenue goals and, as a result, directly hinders business performance. This isn’t a sales training issue. It is a strategic Talent issue.

This talent shortage is very real and very ‘live’: it is becoming increasingly difficult to find suitably skilled candidates to fill open sales positions quite simply because they don’t exist. There are good reasons for that: the skills required to sell today are way more complex and sophisticated than they used to be. There aren’t enough people with those skills. Those that do have them may not be attracted to sales as a profession. As a Talent leader, that causes real problems.

Those problems manifest themselves in a relentless and vicious cycle that employers find themselves in all the time. Think about it:

– The business starts recruiting from a limited talent pool to start with.

– Those recruits – almost inevitably lacking some of the skills required – don’t immediately work out.

– Impatient Sales Leaders go back to Talent for an exit & replacement plan.

– Talent goes back to recruiting from the same limited talent pool they originally hired from.

– There is an expectation that this hire will work out better than the last.

 

It never fails to amaze us how many employers are caught in this vicious cycle. It does no stakeholder any good – sales, sales enablement, learning & development, the employee – and costs businesses billions every single year. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Whether this is familiar or not, there is a better way. Diagnosis is as easy as 6 simple steps that can get you out of a vicious and relentless Talent hamster-wheel – and guide you to a more successful high-performance sales organisation. We like to think about it as 6 simple questions:

1. Is high-performance sales important to your business?
2. Does it require a complex and sophisticated skillset?
3. Do our people – existing and new – have these skills?
4. If not, are we going to develop or fire them?
5. If fire, return to step 1.
6. If develop, how are you going to do that?

Here at ESI, we understand the skillsets required to sell today because we looked. We analysed the skills employers globally want from their commercial teams today and built a truly unique curriculum to develop them. We develop those skills online and on the job. Even better, we offer university-grade sales certification and assessment to validate them.

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