Get Top Sales Professionals With These Awesome Recruitment Messages

What are the challenges in hiring a salesperson?

Before diving into how to recruit a salesperson, let’s first try and understand the stakes.

It’s quite complicated to recruit salespeople, mainly because of these four points:

• Scarcity of Ideal Candidates: Finding individuals who possess the exact skill set and industry knowledge required for sales roles can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. With the specific demands of sales positions, it’s not always easy to come across qualified candidates.
• Intense Competition: Successful salespeople are in high demand. Their ability to drive revenue and close deals makes them coveted assets for any company. As a result, the competition among recruiters and employers to attract them is fierce. Standing out in this competitive landscape is key.
• Evaluating Soft Skills: While technical roles might be easier to evaluate through tests and demonstrations, assessing soft skills such as interpersonal communication and adaptability is a whole different ballgame in sales. The nuances of sales interactions require a unique set of interpersonal skills that traditional methods might miss.
• Timing Is Everything: Recognizing the right moment to approach potential candidates is crucial. Waiting for sales professionals to reach the end of their current cycle can increase the chances of successful recruitment. When they’re open to exploring new opportunities, you’re more likely to get their attention.

How to overcome these challenges?

There is a number of different actions we can take in order to overcome these hurdles, let’s start with the first step: finding the right talent in a very competitive market.

When recruiting, you still want people who are specialized in their sector. However, for the aforementioned reasons, these people are most likely already employed, and depending on the sector, there may not be many of them to begin with.

So, what you can do first is identify the right people.

But even before this, we suggest you use the right tools that will help you with your recruiting process. For instance, you could go with a CRM or an ATS.

In particular, identifying people who are coming to the end of their cycle, for example. Here’s a step-by-step process on how we, at La Growth Machine, might do it:

• Step 1: Fire up LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

• Step 2: Define your target criteria. In this example, we’re looking for an “Account Executive”, who works in our industry so “IT & Internet”, in France. And most importantly, we want them to have 1 to 2 years of experience in their current role.

• Step 3: You can further refine your search by considering other criteria such as company headcount and past companies.

This is the first way to find the right salespeople for your company. Alternatively, you can try recruiting people based on companies that match yours, and so then, you’d simply add your competitors or key players in your industry in the “Current Company” field:

Look at that, we went from 520 potential candidates to 3 most likely very qualified leads since they’ve been at the job for 2 years which is around the time transitions happen.

One more way you can go about it is to use LinkedIn boolean searches:

These are the three most efficient ways to find qualified candidates. The remaining factor is timing and your approach!

Best practices for recruiting a salesperson:

Finding the right candidate is only half the battle. To ensure success in your recruitment efforts, you should also make sure to use the right approach. Let’s have a look at some the best practices used by our experts:

Create a connection:

In order to stand out in a competitive landscape and engage highly sought-after sales professionals effectively, personalization is key.

Creating a human connection is paramount. When reaching out to potential candidates, focus on building a genuine relationship.

Instead of generic messages, take a conversational approach that resonates with their individual experiences and aspirations.

Steer clear of messages that sound automated or overly formal communication, as salespeople value authenticity.

We’ll go into more detail about this in our article on The Most Successful Campaign for Recruiting Salespeople with LaGrowthMachine

Use voice messages:

Speaking of initiating an exchange, to again stand out from the crowd, a strategy that we highly recommend: sending voice messages on LinkedIn. We can’t say this enough, they’re so powerful!

This technique is especially effective in recruitment, and even more so with salespeople.

The reason being that these professionals aren’t developers; they thrive on human interaction as it’s an inherent part of their job.

Hearing the voice of the person reaching out not only captures their interest but also establishes a genuine connection. The approach significantly boosts their willingness to respond.

And bonus points, it stands in stark contrast to the conventional talent recruiters who inundate inboxes with lengthy, impersonal emails.

Use the multi-identity strategy:

When it comes to the realm of sales, a third, riskier avenue worth considering is the possibility of using another account to interact with them, one that’s higher in the hierarchy -while of course maintaining credibility.

This involves leveraging the profile of your team manager instead of recruiting as a “Talent Recruiter”.

This approach fosters deeper connections; potentially, the candidate is engaging directly with their future managers.

This interaction facilitates discussions about professional challenges and creates a more approachable atmosphere, in contrast to the generic approach often associated with talent recruiters.

This is an oversimplification of the true multi-identity strategy, but you get the gist. If you want to learn more about it, follow the link!

Vary the channels for effective outreach:

In addition, a dynamic strategy involves switching channels to match the active presence of potential candidates.

This approach aims to surprise and engage effectively. Initiating communication through direct messages (DMs), using voice messages, or even reaching out via personal emails all have been proven successful.

And eventually, if you’re really short of time and you’ve identified some really good profiles, why not make a phone call, that’s also possible.

Use human-centric communication:

We said it multiple times throughout this article, embracing the human-to-human connection is paramount.

The communication should never resemble the impersonal nature of candidate prospecting:

• It should reflect an exchange between two equals.
• Adopt a respectful and friendly tone.
• Avoid common pitfalls like prematurely asking, “Are you available to discuss?”

Instead of:

In reality, no. If the person doesn’t reply, it’s because they’re not interested, so don’t force their hand.

The ultimate aim of any multi-channel sequence isn’t to sell the job at any price, because if the candidate isn’t interested, you’re not going to convince them.

It’s more about qualifying the candidate, trying to get a response in the first place, and finding out whether they’re open to the market or not.

Try something along these lines:

You see? Something very chill in the approach, not trying to force things. Above all, please don’t put this in the first message:

No, that never works.

The best messages for recruiting a salesperson

We’re finally here! When you’ve done sourcing your candidates, let’s take a look at some of the best messages for recruiting salespeople.

Recruitment emails are very much like prospecting messages, in the sense that you don’t want to close the person right away at all costs. All that does is put them off even more, especially when it’s a person-to-person situation like this.

No one wants to talk to someone who’s being pushy and sending generic messages.

So we write very conversational, very human messages, and we just want to understand where they are in their career before selling the job at all costs.

Now there’s no one-size-fits-all; the following messages are merely ideas to get you started.

You should always tailor your message to the individual. So take these as a starting point, then add your own personal touch! We divided them into four different categories:

• Introduction messages
• Follow-up messages
• Last chance messages
• Closing messages

Introductory message:

The first approach isn’t really to say, “Are you interested in this job?”

but rather try to understand whether the person might be on the lookout or looking for something, so say:

Depending on the type of salesperson you want to recruit: are they digital or not:

• It could be either an initial LinkedIn connection request message to make sure everyone in your campaign sees the message
• Or, if you have your candidates’ personal emails and they’re people who are a little less active on LinkedIn, you can start by email.

Follow-up messages:

If the person doesn’t respond, you can try something to arouse their curiosity a little more. Let them know that the job could be a good fit for them specifically and that they could be successful in the position:

You can further entice them by adding something like a piece of recruitment “social proof”: Share the profile of one of the account managers that you already hired:

We’re still talking about salespeople here, so highlight the fact that they’ll be able to succeed in the position, gradually become excellent at it, make good sales, etc.

Another way you can follow up with your candidate is through voice messages! This is actually the way we do things at La Growth Machine!

See? You kind of flatter them a little bit, you arouse their curiosity, like: “Wow, so apparently my profile fits, I could make a big splash, it could be cool!”

And right after, you share the profile of your current employee who matches theirs.

That can be one way of doing it. The person looks forward to getting the job a little more, compares the people in the position, and sees whether or not it’s a good fit.

At this stage, you can also send the job ad to your candidate so that they can get a better idea of what the position entails.

Last-chance message:

We usually advise against big follow-up sequences, because we’re rather convinced that if the person doesn’t respond, it’s because they’re not interested, but at the same time, you do want to try and qualify the lead.

So, your third contact try could be to promote the company instead of the post itself by saying:

The idea is to leave the door open, without being too forceful, and to try to sell the dream to the candidate and highlight the project at the same time.

Closing messages:

Normally at this stage, you’ve given quite a lot of information so you can:

1. Step 1: Explain to them what stage you’re at in the process and the next steps:

• Step 2: Confirm everything you’ve said:

• Step 3: Give a recruitment deadline:

You’re basically going to give more information like that so that we understand a little bit where you’re at.

• Step 4: Lastly, you can offer to talk to them on the phone, or a virtual meeting, etc.

As the process unfolds, there comes a point where direct verbal exchange is crucial, not so much to provide more information, but to convey the message that you can offer further insights.

If you’ve already shared a substantial amount of information beforehand, you might say:

You could perhaps give them a bit more confidential information in order to add some more human touch to the message. 😉

Final Thoughts:

Recruiting is never easy, but it’s especially tricky when it comes to recruiting salespeople. And it’s not just the copywriting you have to use, what’s the hardest, we believe, is finding a way to test and validate their interpersonal skills, which are arguably the most important in any sales job.

That said, you can’t particularly control that, but what you can control is how you speak to them and the messaging you use.

Basically, the best thing to do is really prioritize a human-to-human approach. Treat them like an equal, flatter them, and maybe even try to have a bit of fun in the process, and never, NEVER be pushy.

Use the tips we outlined above and trust us when we say that you’ll be sure to recruit the best salespeople in no time!

In the meantime, if you want to learn what the best campaign sequence to use for recruiting is, make sure to check our article on that! 🤓

Happy recruiting! 😊