If you need 2 sales guys, hire 3, give them a month and fire the worst one.
That is horrifying to me as a developer, but apparently this is fairly standard for sales.
For an inside sales position, you're not all that far off though.
As I've seen it put in another discussion, "sales managers don't have any trouble firing people."
In other words, is the success of the sales people about spending more time on the phone in total? Or is it about spending more or less time per call?
Thanks in advance!
Our sales process is based on our reps cold calling businesses. We learned after a couple of mishirings that the most difficult part of the job is being able to manage emotion and taking rejection. For example, as a rep it is completely normal to be rejected in some manner 50 times a day. So if you get discouraged or upset after your third rejection, it is unlikely that you would have the motivation or drive to make more calls and therefore, you're likely not the right fit. All of this is usually summed up in the metric time spent talking across all calls.
While ultimately the time on the phone translates into revenue, we like to emphasize factors that is in our control. We can't control whether someone ultimately signs up or not but we do control how much break we take in between calls.
We recently started putting sales candidates on the phone to cold call. The most critical thing we measure is how many minutes they spend on the phone. It's been a pretty strong signal of how they would perform if we were to hire them.