Recruitment and Selection of Sales personnel (Part 2)

The qualities that are needed to be a good sales person are

• A sales person should be a good problem solver. That is solving the problems faced by the customers.

• He should be a good listener

• He should be an active learner. That is learning on his feet.

• He should possess persistence and should be ready to wok for long periods of time. That too when results are not too apparent or forth coming

• He should be a good net worker that is should have an ability to develop and maintain healthy and beneficial contacts.

• He should posses excellent product knowledge

• He should posses Empathy that is should be able to put himself into the shoes of the customers. In other words he should have the ability to understand the customer by thinking like a customer.

There are definite advantages of choosing selling as a career. The advantages being

• No formal degree/s are needed to be a sales person

• Only smartness, presentability and good communication skills are needed

• Indian economy opening up and fields like information, communication, entertainment, retail and insurance require a large number of sales people

• There is a possibility to earn very high incomes, as incentives given are huge and very attractive.

• Sales men enjoy flexible working hours

Along with the above advantages selling has some disadvantages. The disadvantages being

• Sales men have untimely working hours

• Sales people might have to travel for long periods of time

• Time can be wasted in waiting to meet customers

• Sales men have to work alone

• There is unending pressure of meeting deadlines and targets

• Often sales men meet customers who rudely reject them and their products

Recruitment of Sales people: Recruitment is the process of attracting a large number of potential applicants to apply for the job that has to be filled up. Infact the success of the selection process depends on the quality of the recruitment process. In other words if the recruitment process is successful it will attract a large number of applicants to apply. Once a large number of applicants apply for the job it is easy to filter and pick up the ideal candidates through the selection process.

The sources of recruitment for an organization can be classified as internal sources and external sources. The internal sources of recruitment include:

• Acquaintances and friends of the employees of the company. This method is often called as employee referrals

• Recommendations from senior company executives.

• Internal transfers

• Internal promotions.

The advantages of internal sources of recruitment are loyalty can be maintained and rewarded, only people known and recommended will be considered and some amount of secrecy can be maintained. But internal source of recruitment also has some disadvantages: it leads to inbreeding, new ideas and fresh blood is not given a chance to flourish and it can lead to complacency among the existing employees, as there is no sense of competition