It’s great to see so many recruitments advert out for Sales and Business Development professionals but, everyone I’ve seen recently is missing something crucial...

These are all real line item requirements from recruiter ads for Senior Sales and BD professionals in the past week:

• Managing the full circle customer experience in line with the company sales model, including engagement, qualification of customer and deal closing
• Commercial acumen and strong interpersonal skills.
• Generating high quality leads, developing a robust sales funnel, converting leads into opportunities and bring them to contract.
• Responsible for driving sales and revenue
• Undertaking account management activities of existing clients as assigned, as well as managing leads and following up on them in a timely and structured manner.
• Previous experience in new business field sales and/or commercial activities.
• A proven track record of building a new business pipeline of potential opportunities to further generate and exceed a given sales target is also required.
• A history of managing key accounts
• Experience in new business development
• Be able to develop market strategies and initiatives
• Experience in growing market share
• Negotiation skills
• Good working knowledge of the sector
• Strong external relationships builder

See anything missing..?

Digital skills……The most significant evolution of B2B buying and selling of the last 25 years is right on our doorstep. It affects all industries and sectors, its grown hugely in the last 2 years across all sectors, yet it’s ignored by hirers...!

 The same flat, uninspiring list of basic requirements from Sales job adverts for the last 30 years…

“House wanted, must have door, roof and windows…”

If we are hiring Sales & BD people in the 2022, we must be sure and hire people who have the digital skills to network, prospect, grow relationships and create commercial interaction online. If not, we are hiring yet more people who will plug into our organisation and fail to deliver, all whilst happily increasing your overhead.

Hiring the digital first Sales and Business development professionals is a leadership imperative now and for the future.

But where do you start?

You start at the beginning and put everything under a lens...

We need to change the internal process and quickly rewrite it.

Perform a full Commercial Risk Assessment of where your Sales and Marketing is right now.  Not half an hour at the end of a Sales meeting, this is important.  Make this an improvement project and make sure you have Quality, HR, Ops and Finance involved.  Its time we opened up Sales, Marketing and Business Development to same level of improvement scrutiny we give our other critical business processes.

Bring a Social Selling & Influence expert into the mix if you don’t you will go round the houses with legacy Sales and Marketing trying to advise you on something they don’t understand.  

Get into the real nuts and bolts of this and be bold, this is important so treat it like an incident investigation. We must understand how to navigate to where our buyers and prospects are on digital and how they want to interact with us.

From this Risk Assessment will come a series of actions but, we are looking at hiring new Sales and BD people in this example.

What do we all need?

If you are anything like all of our client base you will come down to 4 key things that you need:

Access to markets

"We have established we have useful products and services and now need to take them to market.  Where can we take them and who are the businesses we should target?"

. This is the market analysis piece and working out how we get into those markets. 

Credibility in those markets

Once we have established where and who, how do we show them that we are a credible player? "How to we demonstrate this in ways that get them interested in us?".

Meaningful connection with prospects

We now have their attention; "how do we establish trust and build relationships within those new accounts?".

Create Commercial Integration

It all hinges on this. If we do well in the first 3 elements it should position us perfectly to take advantage of this crucial next step.

4 key areas that any business leaders should be asking.

As we try to answer these questions moving into 2022, it’s impossible to avoid Digital and Social regardless of our sector.

No matter how complex we make it sound, not matter how many techniques and methods are employed at each stage…these are the basic elements we all need to be good at and, as we move into 2022, it’s impossible to have this level of analysis and conversation without turning to digital. In fact, these days its front and centre.

So, it makes sense that all of the people in our team that are responsible for generating demand, generating leads and closing business should be expert at working Digital and Social…

Back to the hiring process…

For the advert:

We are looking for someone who can demonstrate they have all the skills required to win work digitally, people that are going to elevate us, so let’s lead with that.

Candidates should be able to demonstrate that they have all the digital skills required to prospect, network and close commercial interactions in an online environment.

Next, look at training. 

We are looking for people who have gone the extra step and educated themselves in this art and science of Social Selling & Influence.

Candidates should be trained in Social Selling & Influence and Strategic Social Media in the B2B space.

Have they taken a training course on digital transformation, are they trained in Social Seling & Influence…?  Have they even read a book on the modern evolution of Sales and Business development in Digital?

Next, look for evidence. 

We need to check that they can do what they say they can.

Candidates should be able to show evidence of how they built digital verticals, created demand and generated qualified leads via Social Media.

These are a few of the sample question we’ve already developed for Sales and BD search. 

These are just the start...

Then we are off to interview.

....start with their Social network.

If the candidate has a small LinkedIn network, ask why. This is a red flag.

If they have a reasonably sized LinkedIn network, ask them what percentage of that network is relevant to your industry and your business. If the answer is low, it’s a red flag but, it might be a work around.

Investigate the content…

“Could you outline your content plan on specific platforms and why that important to you in your role?”

“How would you say your content outlines your digital identity…?”

 “your content for the last year has been focussed on ‘X’, outline how you will you convince your network that you are now into ‘Y’ and how will you gain credibility and relevance…?”

What have they done to take advantage of the new digital landscape in Sales and BD?  

Here you are looking for answers that support someone’s claim that they know they way around Social and realise things have changed. Such as,

• “I found my content want delivering for me, so I constructed a new plan and incorporated more articles and video…”
• “I run a podcast interviewing senior people from this industry”
• “I’ve grown my social network by 2000 people in this sector in the past 6 months”
• “I do a regular live stream with 2 other people focussing on elements of this industry with special guests many of whom would be prospects for this organisation”.
• “I write a weekly blog on this industry topic which is posted across multiple channels and has quite a good following”

Yes, these are they kind of indicators we are looking for from ‘New Sales’.

Check out the difference between old and new Sales interviews....

We can ask how this person would create a digital capture plan to allow us to take prime position in a tender scenario.

We can ask how this person would create a Social Media territory access plan that would allow us to take our products and services into new countries without having to travel.

Again, these are just the start of where we should be focussed and what we should be doing to ensure we are bringing the right people into the organisation. 

People that can help us deliver today and prepare for the future.

Gartner put it well in their ‘Panel Discussion: 8 Questions to Prepare CSOs for Post pandemic Success’ last year…

“When you set your expectation, people will self-select out of you organisation, you need to let them go, even though this is a really hard time to find talent, you are better off letting people go if they don’t have the skills they need to compete in this environment and won’t learn it”.

Willingness to adapt, be coached and be bold is required.Digital Dexterity and Learning Agility is what is needed.

We meet with Heads of Sales from across industry and the globe, we haven’t met one yet who isn’t staring at significant change in how their clients buy, the leadership team are looking at them and expecting answers…

One of the answers is creating an environment where to whole team has the digital skills they need to network, prospect and close business in a digital buyer’s world.

If you need any assistance with modern Sales & BD candidate selection, let’s talk.

 I’ll leave the closing line of this article to Maria Boulden of Gartner.

“You’re sending a 2019 seller into a 2021 firestorm and that’s a kill box for them…”

“You need to look in non-tradition places for filling open positions and assess them on the skills you need for today’s selling versus experience. Because there is nothing about the past that is teaching us how to sell today…”.

The ‘Firestorm’ is still raging in 2022, we must make sure we are hiring Sales and BD people who are ready to operate in a world that has moved to Digital.

Live Social ‘22

Eric Doyle

CruxDLA Ignite

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