I want you to think about some salespeople that you may have encountered as a consumer. Some of these folks may have been really good where you ended up as a very satisfied consumer. Others, at least from your perspective, might not have been so good, and left you somewhat dissatisfied. Have you ever wondered what makes a really good salesperson? Or perhaps more importantly, what makes for that bad salesperson? This is something that a sales manager has to think about. A sales manager is paid to identify and hire well-qualified individuals who can profitably serve a firm's customers. Recruiting sales professionals cannot be a hit or miss proposition or you run the risk of having dissatisfied customers. But if you use a disciplined approach, you can be successful in hiring decisions. It's more than just picking someone from a pool of applicants, rather, it is the result of a disciplined process. This process is best described by the following graphic which gives a good overview of the process. So, what is the first thing you notice? Hopefully, you said that it's a circle, and that means that this is a never ending process, starting with analysis and ending with selection, which in turn influences future hiring. So, let's go through the processes and make sure you understand each step. We'll begin with the upper right-hand corner. Any job recruitment should begin with what we call a job analysis. So, here, a sales manager collects information about the duties, responsibilities, skills, and work environment of a particular job. This information should be based on those who are presently performing the job, and we usually obtain it through observation and talking to the present salespeople. The next step is developing a job description. This is such an important document. It guides not only the hiring decisions but also performance evaluation decisions. A job description usually describes the duties, purpose, responsibilities, scope, and working conditions of a job, along with the job's title and the name or designation of whom the person that the employee reports to. After this, a sales manager should identify sales job qualifications. So, when you are hiring a sales professional, it's important to know up front any special skill or type of experience or knowledge that is necessary to do a particular job or activity. This information helps you to evaluate possible job candidates. The next step is attracting a pool of candidates, and we call this step recruitment, and it is the process of searching for prospective employees and stimulating and encouraging them to apply for jobs in an organization. This involves various techniques like advertising, word of mouth, networking, social media, and job fairs. The last step in the process is selecting the best recruits. This step is done through screening, interviewing, and in some occasions, testing applicants. The sales manager has to decide on a candidate from a pool of potential candidates. As I said before, notice that this is a continuous process. Each new hire influences future hiring decisions. That's why organizations need to begin fresh with each new hire. Okay. Let's now take a deeper dive into the first step in the circle, the job analysis.
