As a sales organization, if you’re not starting with qualified leads at the top of your sales funnel, hitting your sales goals might be the impossible dream. The same goes for your recruiting for sales positions, where your ability to put the right who in the right seat always begins with the talent going into the hiring funnel. If you’re not sourcing the A and B talent to begin with, your chances of hiring such talent are nonexistent.

But there’s also a definite science behind effective sourcing, making it the great white whale for many recruiting directors and hiring specialists. Fortunately, companies don’t have to navigate those choppy waters alone, as long as they partner with sourcing specialists that understand the landscape and precisely what you’re looking for in sales talent. And that’s where Pursuit enters the equation.

Think of the Right Who as a Qualified Lead

To put it in sales terms, think of A-players as a qualified sales opportunity. In your sales funnel, you’re looking for quantity and quality, where qualified leads come from your target market – usually a particular industry, company size, dollar amount, or some combination of them.

However, most companies don’t see A or B players in their hiring funnel because they’re too reactive in their sourcing. Yes, in a tight jobs market, you don’t always have the opportunity to identify top talent and channel it into your hiring funnel, at least if you’re sourcing from the same places as everyone else. But that doesn’t mean you should adopt a “take what you can get” approach.

Reactive vs. Proactive Sourcing

This is the area where most companies struggle. By relegating your sourcing to the typical job posts on a website and inbound leads, you’re simply reacting to the candidates that happen to find those posts and respond to them.

Of course, there are plenty of good candidates searching through those job posts, so using such a reactive approach doesn’t necessarily mean you’re missing out on all the talent. It does mean, however, that you’re limiting yourself to a fraction of top talent for your open seats.

That’s what makes a more proactive approach to sourcing – something we specialize in at Pursuit – such a powerful tool for filling your hiring funnel with the ideal players. Remember, passive candidates aren’t actively looking for a new job, so you’re not going to find them on a typical job board. But from our experience, the passive candidates are usually the ones that fit best within a sales organization’s team, core values, and goals.

Let Pursuit Handle Your Sales Candidate Sourcing

According to recent research, companies more than double their chances of hiring a candidate that’s proactively sourced versus one through a posting or inbound channel. And that’s just the average.

When I described sourcing as a science up top, I was really alluding to the way we go about it here at Pursuit. Although I don’t want to completely reveal the lengthy list of best practices, processes, and tools that make us such a unique partner for sales organizations, I want to highlight a few specific areas where Pursuit adds value, particularly for sourcing sales candidates.

1. Tapping the Full Spectrum of Candidates

While we don’t completely disregard inbound channels for sourcing, our priority is going out and finding the passive candidates that aren’t actively looking for a job and, thus, aren’t on many – if any – company radars.

2. Filling the Hiring Funnel With the Right Players

Rather than filling the funnel with a high volume of C and D players, Pursuit provides enough A and B players to not only fill the funnel, but also leave you with choices at the end. Naturally, this significantly increases your odds of filling the right seat with the right who – top performing talent that also meshes well with your core values.

3. Free Time For Your Team, From Leadership on Down

Recruiting(specifically sales recruiting) is extremely time-consuming, so if your team already has a full plate of other responsibilities, something is going to give. Unfortunately, that something is usually the talent you’re feeding into the hiring funnel. Partnering with a sales recruiting company like Pursuit, however, addresses these issues by:

• Providing a scalable sourcing solution, equally effective for one, five, or 25 open seats
• Freeing time for your team and leadership that you can devote to value-driving activities
• Significantly improving the chances of identifying and hiring the right candidate, therefore minimizing turnover and the costs associated with it
• Using a modern, technology-driven approach to increase speed, reliability, and scalability

I understand what sales organizations go through because we hear about it every day here at Pursuit. You’re not seeing enough quality candidates, you needed to make a hire yesterday, and you’re filling your empty seats with the best of what’s in front of you instead of the top talent out there.

By partnering with Pursuit for your sales candidate sourcing, though, you’re finally putting an end to that vicious cycle of hiring people that just don’t fit, letting them go a few months down the road, and then looking for their replacement. Just as importantly, after we source the right volume and candidates for the top of your hiring funnel, we’ll then screen them as well. But I’ll leave that topic for another day.