A short talk by Cameron Herold offering a practical strategy to reduce sales hiring attrition and improve recruiter/manager performance. He emphasizes rigorous interviewer training, multi-week onboarding and ongoing sales/product culture training, and protecting employer brand; proposes a brainstorming challenge to limit new hire failure to 20% by creating 10 obstacles and two countermeasures each (a 20-point plan).
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And if you execute on 10 to 15 or even all 20 of those points, you will absolutely be better at recruiting solid salespeople, paying solid salespeople, and actually not having anywhere near the attrition that you have in your company. Try it out. I guarantee it works. I've done it multiple times before. So here's the thing. There's some really smart people on this thread, like a lot of really smart people on this thread. And there's some really smart comments on this thread as well. I'm going to approach this from a completely different perspective. What if we could change the numbers? What if we could actually change the percentages? Because in my world, in all the companies that I've built, I've had very different percentages than what you're listing here. I think the reason is a couple fold and I'd like you all to answer the question after I post this video. Number one, have you actually trained all of your managers and leadership team on how to do proper interviews? Right? Like really trained them? Not like they've read one book or they've all done 20 or 30 interviews. Have you put them through training on how to do proper job interviews? Do they know how to select? Do they know how to look for behavioral traits? Do they know how to use the pregnant pause and open and close questions? Do they know how to use torque? Do they know how to do proper reference checks? Like do they properly understand the group interview process? And do they really understand how to interview and select people to come into the sales roles? That's number one. Number two, do you have a really strong onboarding and training process or do you merely throw people into the fire? I and by a really strong onboarding and training process, I'm talking about a minimum one week, probably better, two weeks to truly integrate people into your culture, into the systems, into the processes, and then do run ongoing training in sales as well. Most people will run sales training but they miss on a lot of the product and the company and the culture side of things. And then they really throw people into the fire to see who will sink or who will swim. And then number three is have you considered the negative impact on your brand, on your company culture, on the press that you get, on your indeed and glassdoor ratings? Have you considered that you're actually creating scorched earth around your company by allowing yourself to have so many salespeople fail when you have 20 or 30 or 40 or even 100% failure rate over salespeople over the course of 12 months? I think you can do better. In fact, I know you can do better because we've done better in the past in building out 1-800-got junk college pro painters, Gerber Auto Collision, and then even in coaching. A lot of the really highly successful companies that I've coached coach two companies that want to rank as number one to work for in Australia. One company is number one to work for in Florida. One that went on number work for in Cincinnati. One that went on to become number two to work for in the United States on Glassdoor. Same year, one went on to become number 12 to work for in the United States on Glassdoor. Another one that was number one to work for in British Columbia. In the same year, a second company it was number two to work for in British Columbia. All of these companies had salespeople with much, much lower percentage of CAC and percentage of failure rate on their salespeople. So I want you to really consider, what could you do differently? So here's the challenge I'm going to put in front of all of you and I'd like you to try this out. What if you decided to set yourself a goal? And the goal was, and I know this is gonna sound crazy, but run this as a kind of a one hour brainstorming session with your leadership team. Cause you all have smart people and smart teams. So get some coaches involved, consultants involved, whatever. But sit down and say the goal is we're gonna hire 10 people or 20 people in sales over the next 12 months and we're not gonna allow more than 20% of these people to fail. What are the 10 reasons why this is impossible? And come up with the 10 obstacles as to why that goal is crazy, why it can't, why Cameron is nuts, why that goal of hiring 10 or 20 people with a maximum of 20% failure rate is possible. Come up with 10 obstacles. After you come up with 10, and don't stop at 6, don't stop at 7. Push yourself to come up with 10 reasons why that's impossible. And it might take you 20 minutes to come up with the 10 reasons, but come up with 10 reasons why it's impossible. Then go back to reason number one and come up with two things you can do to counter reason number one. Two things you can do to erase reason number one, it can't happen. Come up with two things to erase reason number two, and so on until you come up with two ways to get rid of each of the 10 things. You now have a 20 point plan. And if you execute on 10 to 15 or even all 20 of those points, you will absolutely be better at recruiting solid salespeople, paying solid salespeople, and actually not having anywhere near the attrition that you have in your company. Try it out. I guarantee it works. I've done it multiple times before. Don't allow yourself to have the excuses. And you need to stop saying to yourself, oh, I've got the expertise and I've done it this way. Because there's lots of other ways to try things and there's lots of other examples in the business world of people that have tried it. You know, if somebody said that you always need to have car dealerships as a way to grow a car company, Elon Musk would have never opened Tesla because he has no car dealerships. Sometimes we need to reinvent the way that we're doing things. We need to break the way that we're doing things, and we need to see it from a completely different perspective or paradigm than we're seeing it now. Try it out a hundred percent. Absolutely guarantee it'll work. So don't stop now. Click here. There's more great videos that you can keep learning from, and together we're unlocking amazing leadership lessons together.
