Identifying and hiring the smartest media salespeople can be crucial to growing any business. However, finding those employees is often easier said than done. In today’s ultra-competitive media sales market, sales managers might miss important quotas by hiring underwhelming talent.
If your media sales department is experiencing quality hiring challenges, you are not alone. Many companies are currently breaching marketing budgets, and their salespeople are neither finding new business nor retaining important clients.
Failing to identify key marketing challenges and rethink the hiring process might result in prolonged revenue and opportunity losses.
Key Takeaways
- An evolving digital world means sales managers should consider replacing their traditional sales structures with more modern and tech-friendly ones.
- Sales managers should consider providing detailed lists of candidate qualifications and responsibilities when posting job opportunities.
- Hiring the smartest media salespeople might require looking beyond on-paper qualifications and focusing on a candidate’s drive and attitude.
Three Challenges to Hiring the Smartest Media Salespeople
1. The Industry is Evolving Without You
Sometimes, media sales departments might rely too heavily on traditional, time-tested sales structures and processes. This is often because sales managers are comfortable with their historical sales results.
However, while those strategies might work for the time being, banking on prior success might not lead to future revenue in today’s digital world. In some cases, a media sales department’s ability to adapt to industry evolution might come down to its willingness to hire differently.
Traditionally (i.e., pre-digital sales), managers might have focused primarily on hiring salespeople who could prospect, sell, and collect in a physical, in-person environment. Now, media salespeople might be asked to function more like digital marketing engineers, prospecting via online platforms and collecting digital assets and data.
Sales managers who ignore the rising trend of social media/online platform use and continue to employ outdated sales structures and hiring criteria might continue to fall behind their competitors.
2. Salespeople Roles Are Not Defined
Undefined roles and responsibilities can negatively impact any media sales department within any company.
This might be an unforeseen problem that goes unnoticed for an extended period – and then surfaces suddenly in the form of dwindling sales numbers.
When managers tap media salespeople with undefined and unclear roles, those salespeople might be overwhelmed by a broad range of daily tasks without knowing how to prioritize them. As a result, they might complete tasks their mangers consider relatively unimportant, or focus on so many responsibilities simultaneously that they do not complete any one task sufficiently.
Either way, poorly communicating media salespeople’s roles and responsibilities might be detrimental to a growing business plan.
3. You Have the Right Salespeople, But in the Wrong Positions
Related to the prior concept is the fact that sales managers might be searching for an unrealistic batch of qualifications within a single salesperson. While there are media salespeople who can do it all – track down leads, develop powerful presentations, present those materials, close the customer, and collect fees – they are uncommon.
When a sales manager cannot find that rare talent, they might be forced to place an unqualified or uninterested employee into that role. That might be a drawback to the jack-of-all-trades hiring approach: a sales manager does not place a uniquely qualified salesperson in each role.
Three Tips for Hiring the Smartest Media Salespeople
1. First Identify Your Staffing Needs
To help resolve the issue of hiring out of place, sales managers might first consider reviewing their specific staffing needs and narrowing down their ideal candidate qualifications.
This might help simplify the search process, because you will be looking for specific candidate traits to meet current needs instead of conducting a larger search of loosely qualified candidates.
In some ways, you might view this process as analogous to how a company targets specific customers who might benefit most from their products and services.
Some of those considerations might include:
- Sales growth targets. Are you hitting your quotas and looking to keep the status quo without increasing your budget, or are you looking to expand? This might impact the number of pure media salespeople you hire versus those best qualified to maintain key accounts.
- Organizational changes. As mentioned previously, your media sales department’s structure and process may undergo changes from time to time. You might consider being reactive to those changes by adapting your candidate qualifiers as necessary.
- Turnover rate. If you are experiencing unusually high turnover, you might consider reviewing your hiring methods. It is possible that you are attracting the wrong candidates from the onset.
2. Be Clear About What You Expect
If you are looking to resolve issues surrounding unclear roles, consider including a detailed responsibilities list in your job posting.
You might include the following information when advertising a new job opportunity:
- How you expect the new hire to interact with coworkers.
- To whom they will report directly.
- Their immediate responsibilities when they first walk in the door.
- What type of products and/or services will they be selling?
- To what client base will they be selling?
3. Be Clear About Qualifications, But Look Beyond Them
Like the responsibilities list, you should also consider a detailed qualifications list.
Sales managers often stress on-paper skills when making a new hire, and an effective way of finding those skills might be to help them find you.
The more specific you can be about what skills are critical to the role in question, the more efficient your hiring process can be.
That being said, the smartest media salespeople often demonstrate off-paper characteristics that make them that much more successful, such as their drive, passion, and determination.
These attributes might be found in candidates who demonstrate the following during the interview process:
- A positive attitude. They are resilient and refuse to let setbacks get them down.
- A thirst for achievement. They have goals, and they want to smash them. They feel as though reaching a goal just means it was not set high enough.
- A strong competitive streak. They want to be the best at what they do. They want to beat their colleagues to the highest sales and new client acquisition numbers.
- The confidence to do things their way. While fitting into a company culture is important for many jobs, it is less so for sales positions. That is not to say that you want an employee veering too far off the company’s beaten path or making enemies, but their first job is getting clients.
Contact us today to discuss how we can help you get the most out of your media sales efforts.