New Research From Sciolytix and SellingPower® Suggests 94% of Reps are Open Offers

Sales leaders take notice. Our State of Sales Hiring Research study revealed that a whopping 94% of reps are either actively looking or would consider leaving for the right opportunity. 

Open positions and bad hires are your death knell. Churn leads to neglected accounts and uncovered opportunities, which makes hitting your number even more difficult. And, constant recruiting and onboarding reps saps the life out of your sales managers who you need coaching deals to close this quarter. 

Making bad hires is exceptionally painful. You can hire a good salesperson and equip them with bad technology and lackluster processes, and they’ll still figure it out. But if you hire a bad salesperson, they will still be bad — even with high-end technology and carefully-crafted processes at their fingertips. As a result, your managers spend all of their time trying to coach them up to no avail. By the time they wake up and decide to cut their losses, you’ve lost a year or more of productivity.

Needless to say, sales leaders face mounting pressure to hire fast but also hire well. Achieving these seemingly opposing objectives is possible, but it requires effective sales hiring practices. For this reason, Sciolytix recently partnered with SellingPower® on a survey to identify challenges and best practices in sales hiring. To gain the most comprehensive insight possible, we surveyed sales leaders, recruiters, and sales reps to better understand their unique — and at times opposing — perceptions, expectations, and preferences.

To kick things off, we asked sales representatives a very important question: 

What best describes your job search status?

As you can see from the chart here, 50% of respondents aren’t actively seeking but are open to the right opportunity, and 44% are seeking employment. This should sound the alarm bells for sales leaders because all but 6% of respondents represent an obvious flight risk. That means the Great Resignation is absolutely happening in sales!

There is a shortage of sales talent in many industries, particularly traditional industries because sales reps who have been in their roles for 20 or 30 years are leaving. 

This would normally open the door for younger talent, but sales leaders are finding it increasingly harder to recruit them.

So what’s the answer? 

1. Take this time to check the pulse of your sales team
2. Proactively identify potential problems and shore up your retention efforts 
3. This is especially true for your A and B players

Please check back with us as we share more about this insightful survey. Download the full survey report here!

What are you doing to improve your sales hiring process?

Sciolytix Sales Performance Predictor (S2P2) is an award-winning candidate assessment tool that utilizes 3D avatar-based simulations to measure and predict a candidate’s performance in an unbiased manner. Think of it as a video game — sales candidates play a video game that reflects the real-world selling situations they will face in their new sales role and, through artificial intelligence, predict their effectiveness. This groundbreaking technology helps sales leaders:

1. Hire top-performing reps quickly
2. Minimize the risk of bad hires
3. Position themselves as an employer of choice with applicants 

Bottom line, we are revolutionizing the way organizations hire, onboard, develop talent, and create a fair hiring process for all. Predictive simulations are the latest enhancement we’re adding to that arsenal of products.