Tips for Choosing a Sales Recruitment Agency

What Is A Sales Recruitment Agency For?

Creating a successful sales team relies more on the quality of individuals recruited than we’d like to admit. Because excellent sales reps will forge success despite their context (eg, product, competitive landscape, quality of onboarding and enablement, leadership etc). So how do companies recruit great talent? Typically through direct hiring (internal recruiter or line manager) or partnering with a sales recruitment agency.

A specialist sales recruitment agency is typically boutique, and focuses on connecting qualified sales professionals to companies needing sales talent or building their sales team. They may focus on a particular industry (eg, tech sales) or be multi-industry (eg, pharmaceutical sales, FMCG sales etc).

A good sales recruitment agency will typically have:

• Deep industry expertise and market insights
• Strong understanding of best sales recruitment practices (assessment methodology, ability to align to sales motion etc)
• Great understanding of the talent buyer persona (sales professional or leader)
• Strong sales talent pipelines as a result of working across a breadth of clients
• Strong executive networks – eg, could connect you with a peer who is tackling a similar problem to you
• Deep networks of talent relationships
• A reputation which attracts steady inbound candidate leads
• Proven methodology for finding top sales talent, quickly

This specific expertise is what makes recruitment agencies helpful for companies. Partnering with one can help a company save time and resources, whilst getting access to a highly qualified shortlist of talent that matches their needs.

When to Use a Sales Recruitment Agency

It is not a simple task to fill a sales role and the cost of a failed hire is high. A piece of career advice from LinkedIn mentioned that 76% of hiring managers find recruiting the right talent the most challenging in the hiring process.

Why? Making a mistake in recruiting will cost the company a huge amount of resources. SBI states that at minimum, you’ll be facing $95,000 (AUD 305,500) for just one wrong sales hire. Not to mention the time and effort that hiring managers give when onboarding a new sales representative.

The Amplified group reported that 81% of the surveyed managers believe it takes 6 months to train new hires to reach 100% productivity. The time and effort within those 6 months will be considered wasted when a new employee turns out to be a failed hire. Now imagine the cost we have above doubled because the process needs to be repeated for a new sales rep hire.

It shows the importance of an effective hiring process.  Sometimes it’s feasible for a hiring manager to make a great hire, simply by posting a job on a job site and reaching out to their network for known entities and referrals. Often, the process is more complex and requires more.

Obviously, using a sales recruitment agency is much easier, but more expensive than internal hiring. Knowing when to use an agency is key for companies who are restricted on budget.

Some of the roles you might like to consider recruiting internally could be:

• Sales roles which have a large addressable talent segment to target (eg, SMB account executives where traits and track record are more important than niche industry expertise or complex sales skills)
• High velocity sales roles where it is quick to detect new hire failure (eg, basic lead indicators not being achieved within first 8 weeks) rather than enterprise where it can take much longer due to longer sales cycles
• Roles which don’t have a high degree of criticality to achieving the number (sales support or enablement)
• Roles where you may be able to promote someone internally and back-fill an easier to hire role

Roles where there is high criticality to getting it right, such as a key sales hire where you are looking for specific industry expertise or a highly visible sales leadership role, may be the appropriate ones to partner with an agency on.

Top Tips for Choosing a Sales Recruitment Agency

Define Specific Needs

Companies have to define their goals first before partnering with an agency.

Here are some questions to answer when defining the specific goals for your agency partnership needs.

• What is important to us in a partnership? Things like transparency, industry expertise, speed, candidate quality are often top of mind.
• What business problems/objectives will this role solve?
• What is the criticality of the role and time frame for filling?
• What have been our previous challenges in filling this type of role?
• If we’ve worked with a sales recruitment agency before, what didn’t work/work well?
• Who do I know internally or externally that is a good success profile for the role?
• What are the key selling points of the role/company and likely objections from this talent segment?

Gathering this information will help your sales recruitment agency partner with you more efficiently and find the right talent.

Do Agency Research

After defining what you need, look to identify a sales recruitment agency that most closely aligns. For example, if you are in the SaaS industry, search for SaaS sales recruitment agencies. A specialist agency will have:

• Warm pipelines of sales talent relevant to your space
• Understand the recruitment challenges companies like you face
• Understand the sales talent competition dynamics for your space
• Advise on how similar companies on similar growth journeys have tackled challenges like yours

Once you’ve compiled a few, check their credentials, reviews, placement volume and book a few meetings to assess fit.

Questions to Ask a Potential Sales Recruitment Agency

Meeting with the agency is the best way to figure out if they are the best fit to champion your brand to market and get you the best sales talent available. Here are some key questions, points to assess against:

• How many sales roles have you filled in the past 6 months, similar to this one across your agency?
• What are the typical challenges companies in my industry face when it comes to hiring sales talent?
• What’s your methodology to find me the best available sales talent in the market?
• How would you sell my role/company to potential talent? What objections would they likely have?
• How do you demonstrate transparency in your search process to us as the client?
• What deliverables would we expect over what time frame?

Asking questions like this will give you a great understanding as to the skill level and industry expertise of the agency/consultant you’re working with. Observe their professionalism, how they communicate with you, and how they tap into your needs. Did they offer valuable insights? Understood your needs? Do you trust them?

If they do, and you see a good rapport between you and the agency, this could be your signal to start the partnership.

Understand Their Pricing and Fees

Recruitment agencies have different pricing and fee structures.  For example, some agencies charge a flat fee, while others charge a percentage of the candidate’s annual salary. You should also make sure to clarify with the agency about any additional costs.

Make sure you review these structures thoroughly. Does the price seem too good to be true? Is the price in line with industry standards? Is it feasible based on your company journey and standing?

Hiring with the Salient Team

Founded in 2008, we are the first and largest SaaS recruitment agency in the APAC region. At Salient, we have committed ourselves to helping both candidates and companies succeed in their fields of tech and sales expertise.

Are we the right sales recruitment agency for you? It all depends on what’s important to you from an engagement perspective and your current business needs. What we can say is that we’ll be transparent on where our strengths are, our body of past work, and the process we’d undertake to support you. Reach us here and let’s see if we’re the right fit to build your next sales team.