Hiring and retaining talented sales professionals is one of the most important roles for a successful sales leader.  An intelligent hiring system, accurate screening methods and high-quality talent management tools all influence your ability to deliver on revenue goals.

Here are four specific tools that can greatly enhance your ability to attract and manage talented sales professionals.

Talent Analytics

To hire the right people you must first know who they are. A talent analytics solution allows you to avoid following hunches during hiring decisions. Instead, you leverage historical data on the traits and habits of reps that have achieved top performance in your company.

Predictive talent analytics can help you assess capability and potential at the team and individual levels. As a result, you have the data that can help you leverage what’s working and fix what isn’t.

A Structured Sales Management Process

Your front-line managers provide a pivotal component to your managing your sales talent for success. It’s critical that they have a process that enables them to stay on top of hiring and retaining top sales talent. We call that cadence a Talent Management Cadence that outlines the specific steps front-line managers can take on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis to streamline their coaching process.

Assessment and Coaching Tools

Various assessment and coaching tools can help your managers execute effective and consistent coaching. A quarterly assessment is a simple tool for determining the effectiveness of a rep’s current skills, competencies and behaviors. This evaluation serves as a set up for a development plan.

Coaching Plan

Sometimes called a development plan or development action plan, a coaching plan is a list of specific strategies outlined for each stage of the selling process. You use it to match effective coaching strategies to specific needs identified using the assessment tools.

External training, internal training, more regular opportunity reviews and role plays are among possible action steps for addressing performance gaps. The key is to align the development action with the area of need.