Page 38 - The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million - PDFDrive.com

candidates?

LinkedIn proved to be an exceptional source of strong passive sales candidates.
There are four steps I followed in order to source quality candidates. As of the
writing of this book, all four can be accomplished with the free version of
LinkedIn.

Step 1: Leverage the Search Capability within LinkedIn to
Source a List of Qualified Candidates

Using the advanced search functionality of LinkedIn, I was able to generate a list
of qualified candidates to start screening. Here are a few filters I played with that
improved search results:

Zip code: This one is pretty obvious. For me, all the hiring occurred in
Boston, so filtering by the geographic location of candidates was critical in
all searches.

Job title: For the most part, I was looking for people already in sales.
Including “sales” or “account executive” in the “Title” field helped me filter
results down to candidates already working in the function.

School: Remember “intelligence” was a strong predictor of sales success for
me at HubSpot. Screening based on the quality of the undergraduate school
helped me limit results to candidates who would likely score high on the
intelligence spectrum.

Company: As you hire in your geographic market, you start to identify local
companies that have large sales teams with quality training programs.

One of my most effective searches was to look for former employees of
companies where I had relationships with the head of sales. Over the years, I
have helped and/or networked with many heads of sales, especially in Boston.
You might say that many of them “owed me a favor.” What I would do is choose
one of those heads of sales and conduct a LinkedIn search for salespeople who
had worked at her company but had since left. Within 15 minutes, I was able to
generate a solid list of people that used to work for her. I would then email this
list to her and ask if she recommended any of the candidates as standout
performers. Ninety-nine percent of the time, my head of sales contact would be
happy to respond with recommendations on who to go after. Often, they would
even bring up a few additional names once they were aware of the type of people
we were looking for.