Recruitment Strategies for Three Top-Level Sales Positions

by Kristopher Samuels Writer

Senior sales executives present your business to partners and the general public. The story behind your products and services is largely in these executives’ hands. This is why hiring them calls for a sales recruiter with deep ties in your industry and thorough vetting systems in place. It takes a leader to mold a sales team into a results machine, but finding someone to occupy such a role can be exhausting without the right tools to narrow your search.

A professional sales headhunter will be familiar with the hierarchy of sales positions and the expertise required to excel at the very top. They’ll be able to assess intangible qualities, like personality and communication style, alongside tangible numbers, like accounts receivable, to provide you with a holistic picture of the candidates before you.

Read on to learn about three key sales positions and how an experienced recruiter would go about filling them.

Key Account Manager

A Key Account Manager needs to be interested in and comfortable with specialized learning. Only the most dedicated employees can spend their working hours researching and serving the same major client, and only the most confident will be willing to assume responsibility for an account that represents a considerable percentage of your overall sales.

It takes a recruitment agency that knows the client is always right to find you someone selfless who will go the extra mile for your business. The best agencies will have customizable questionnaires and live-action exercises at the ready to test a candidate’s skill set. If a potential hire shows a preference for meticulous work and gets along with the client, you should consider expanding your team.

Territory Manager

A Territory Manager oversees the branches or stores in a given region where you do business. A region tends to include multiple cities and requires regular monthly travel for store inspections.

The individual you hire will ideally respect how each individual branch is run while staying true to company-wide goals. To achieve this balancing act, they’ll need to be a kind and honest communicator, one for whom conflict-management and emotional intelligence are second-nature.

A good recruiter will thoroughly examine a candidate’s authoritativeness, preference for an itinerant lifestyle, and whether they’re single or have a family, before making a recommendation.

VP of Sales

Your VP of Sales is in charge of meeting your business’ revenue and profitability goals while staying on budget. They steer the ship and manage the sales team on-board toward these common ends.

The job requires fortitude to weather any storm, a quality which is generally only evident in hindsight once a VP’s track record has been established. Thankfully, you can bypass this issue by partnering with a sales recruitment agency made up of sales industry veterans. By harnessing their expertise, you’ll narrow in on the person with the right planning and process-management background to elevate your business into the stratosphere.

There’s only one way to maintain your high standard for customer service season after season, and that’s by ensuring that your salespeople—your business’ front lines—have a team of executives to back them up and help them thrive. Assemble that team with your company culture in mind and the sky will be your only limit.