42 Degrees - Business from a different angle

It's hard to overestimate the importance of a sales director to most companies. The sales function is the heart of your enterprise, responsible for generating forward momentum and increasing your top line. So it's crucial to get the very best person for the job.

Yet you would be amazed at how many companies settle for a referral from a contact, or someone local with a bit of sales management experience, or the best of the bad bunch thrown up by an ad in the local paper.

In theory, recruiting the best possible sales director isn't that difficult. You've just got to exercise common sense, do your preparation properly and be aware that the best candidates will have several career options open to them, which means you have to sell your company to them every bit as much as they have to sell themselves to you.

It's the nitty gritty detail that often confounds. Your first step should be to carry out an audit of the role. It will tell you exactly what the job involves and how it relates to various stakeholders in the company, clients, internal systems and other departments such as manufacturing, logistics and finance.

Next step is to ask the question: "What does good look like in this job?" This is absolutely vital if you are to hire the right person. Without it you have no benchmark to measure candidates. You need to be specific here and really think through not only what is expected now but also what is expected in the next few years.

It's not enough simply to say this person is in charge of sales, what exactly do you want them to do? Improve margins, reduce attrition in the sales force or increase the value of existing accounts? Also, what sort of sales experience should the ideal candidate have? What should their management style be? Do they need sector knowledge?

The chances are that there are very few people with exactly the right experience.

To broaden the field you will probably want to consider candidates who don't necessarily have the right experience but do have the ability to do the job. That's why you should also consider desired competencies such as leadership, oral communication skills, strategic thinking or creativity.

Now you are ready to start your search. You can do it yourself, but personally I recommend hiring a large professional recruitment agency. Yes – I would say that wouldn't I? – but they can lift more stones than you, they have more experience, better contacts, impartial judgement and are more likely to find the right candidates for the job.

Hiring a recruiter opens a whole new can of worms, but if you approach it in the same way you would approach hiring any other professional services, you won't go far wrong. Look at their working processes, their areas of expertise and track record. Approach, say, three or four suppliers and take up references and testimonials. Cost can vary from 20 per cent of first year's salary for a smaller local firm to 30 per cent plus for a national/international company.

Their challenge is to draw up a long list of, say, ten candidates for you to consider. To do this they might use advertisements (The Sunday Times and The Telegraph are best for senior roles), trawl their database of contacts or head hunt – approaching potential candidates working for other firms. They will probably examine up to 100 CVs, interview 30 candidates directly and recommend perhaps ten for you to talk to.

At this point, the ball is back in your court and you have to start making judgements and decisions. One of the first is, what form will the interview take, who will attend and where will it be held? Generally it's better to have a panel, preferably even the whole senior management team – it removes the subjectivity of one interviewer and allows you to put candidates under pressure. At least part of the interview should be held on site.

It's such an important post that you may decide to make part of the interview informal – say over dinner or lunch. It's a very effective way of getting at things the office interview won't tell you. How do they handle themselves? Are they good with people? Does their personality match your company culture? This allows you to probe non-business issues such as hobbies and other personal questions.

By their very nature, even bad sales people can talk a good game, so it is especially important to probe behind answers in interviews to find out if they can back up all that talk.

For instance, if they say that they increased sales by 20 per cent, you need to establish whether it was their doing. For this you need proof, which is best gathered by asking detailed open-ended questions such as – how were you personally responsible for the achievement of this increase? Or give me some examples of initiatives that you personally implemented to achieve this increase?

But be very wary if you are not comfortable discussing sales issues in detail. If you, or your questions, come across as too lightweight, it can put off ambitious high-fliers.

Having interviewed your candidates in depth, you should now be ready to move to the next stage, the compilation of a short list of two or three candidates. Rather than simply more interviewing at this stage, I recommend another form of assessment, perhaps psychometric testing, including personality profiling. It allows you to compare candidates more easily, it adds to your knowledge and understanding of the candidates and may reveal potentially problematic character traits.

But just because you have your chosen person doesn't mean the process is over yet. First there is the issue of references – don't just ask one person, take 360-degree references from employers, clients and peers. You would be amazed at the number of companies that skimp on this stage. And, of course, you might want to gently explain to the failed candidates why they didn't succeed. It's only good manners, it creates a good impression and, besides, you never know whether you will want to talk to them in the future.