Using An Employee Referral Program Effectively

In this guide, we’ll break down 11 steps to build a killer employee referral program to help you attract top talent. Read on!

Businesses will do everything in their power to attract competent professionals and use every trick in the book to strengthen their talent pool. Traditionally, HR solely assumed responsibility for this function, but as new technologies, mindsets, and practices (such as crowdsourcing and user-generated content) recast the workplace, more unique and more responsive methods for recruiting talent emerge.

In recent years, Employee Referral Programs (ERP) have become a competitive advantage in the talent-sourcing market. According to reports, it has surpassed conventional talent acquisition and recruitment practices as the top method for finding and hiring new employees.

What is an Employee Referral Program?

An employee referral program is an in-house system for finding, qualifying, and hiring candidates for vacant roles and functions in the company. ERPs incentivize employees to submit personal referrals from their social and professional networks who may qualify for open positions in the company. Incentives and rewards may include monetary bonuses and non-monetary prizes such as vacations and concert tickets.

Benefits of Employee Referral Programs

Numerous studies have already established the case for ERPs. Here are some of the most persuasive arguments for its adoption:

• Employee referral programs significantly reduce recruitment costs, with a study finding that businesses can save $3000 or more per hire using referrals.
• ERPs improve candidate quality, culture fit, and retention rate.
• Candidates sourced via an employee referral program get hired much faster than candidates sourced through traditional channels.
• Candidates sourced via ERP make it to onboarding stage (3 to 4 times) more compared to candidates sourced via traditional methods
• ERP-sourced candidates deliver the highest ROI compared to other methods.

And here are some figures from LinkedIn:

• Employee referrals rank as the number 1 method for people to discover a new job.
• Companies can expand their talent pool by as much as ten times if they leverage their employees’ social and professional networks via an effective referral program.
• While rewards motivate employees to submit referrals, 35% do so primarily to help friends, 32% to help their organization, and 26% to be recognized as a valuable colleague. Only 6% submit referrals for the rewards.
• Candidates are 46% more likely to accept your messages when these messages are associated or tagged with employees they personally know.
• Along with online job boards and social media, employee referral programs are among the top source of high-quality talent.

11 Steps To Turbo-Charge Your Employee Referral Program

1) Set clear objectives.

Only embark on a journey with a clear destination in mind. Ideal employee referral programs go beyond getting as many candidates as possible in your talent pool. While across-the-board recruitment is obviously the overarching goal of ERPs, you can still fine-tune the program for specific campaign-based objectives such as improving workforce diversity, populating a freshly minted customer success unit, or expediting the search for a crucial software developer position specializing in a particular programming language or development framework.

Once specific objectives have been set for time-bound referral campaigns, get the entire organization in the loop. Communicate the goals, explain the need, and mention the rewards. Again, transparency, immediacy, and relevance will help drive and sustain employee involvement.

2) Make everything simple and easy.

Even when employees want to participate in your ERP, engagement and results will ultimately depend on how simple and effective your referral process is. Conversely, tedious, convoluted, and inconsistent ERP processes may generate buzz at the onset but tend to fizzle out much sooner than everyone expected.

Never complicate the process. Don’t require employees and referred candidates to exert more effort than is necessary. Remember, your people have primary functions they need to focus on. An ERP solution that requires too much time and effort will keep them from delivering high performance in the roles they were hired for in the first place. So make it ridiculously easy to attract, submit, monitor, evaluate, and conclude referrals.

One way is to adopt ERP and applicant tracking solutions (ATS) that are intuitive, easily accessible, and engaging. Go for mobile-ready packages that are integrable to networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Embrace solutions that virtually anyone in the company can access anytime and enjoy using.

3) Let everyone know.

You might have the best ERP, but nothing happens if no one knows about it. Communication is the glue that keeps effective referral programs together. ERP awareness and involvement should pervade the organization from top to bottom and from the ground up. Make it everyone’s business to find and attract talent because it is the only resource to make things happen.

Advertise your referral program and bang the gong each time you launch specific referral campaigns. (Some companies even go beyond the organization to include customers, suppliers, and vendors in their incentives program). Information about vacancies, job requirements, role qualifications, corporate culture, benefits, candidate status, incentives for efforts, and successful referral rewards should be easily accessible.

Establish a communication, feedback, and tracking system that keeps all stakeholders in the loop and enables them to advance referrals from start to finish easily. Form a team or assign a coordinator to ensure ERP communications are clear, complete, and pervasive.

4) Use technology.

In virtually every aspect of business, technology serves as the ultimate enabler. However, the way technology is used can also make a big difference. The baseline is to have a centralized ERP platform that makes it extremely easy for employees to submit referrals, for HR to evaluate candidates, for referred candidates to track their status, and for everyone in the loop to communicate.

Some applicant tracking systems (ATS) have native ERP functionalities, while others allow for equivalent plugins or extensions. Determine what is best for your organization. In the new economy, relying on mere emails or spreadsheets to manage referrals and talent acquisition will no longer make the cut.

5) Train your people.

The processes and technologies that comprise your employee referral program may be intuitive. However, it would be best if you still educated everyone about more innovative ways to use the system and the rationale and rewards behind the program.

Articulate the program’s overall goal of attracting competent — if not top-notch — professionals to the company. Establish quality benchmarks. Because candidate screening takes time, dissuade employees from referring known shenanigans at the onset.

Walk everyone through the process from start to finish, so they know what to expect regarding feedback frequency, documentary requirements, and screening parameters. Finally, clarify how incentives and rewards will be implemented.

6) Speed up the process.

Few things are more frustrating than having to wait longer than you should. Employees who were initially excited to a) help friends get onboard, b) help the company solve its talent shortage, or c) help themselves to the ERP’s excellent incentives will eventually lose steam when left to keep wondering whatever happened to their referrals.

Establish a reasonable timeline for processing employee referrals. Always send timely feedback each time a milestone has been reached. Respond to employee or candidate queries and clarifications within 24 hours.

Consider screening and interviewing candidates within one week before giving a job offer or terminating their candidacy for the specific role they were referred to. One way to do this is to provide remote interview and assessment options.

7) Provide an excellent candidate experience.

Make your brand as an employer stand out. Start by giving job applicants a smooth, flexible, responsive, and stress-free experience. This way, candidates who don’t get on board will still remember the good experience and share it with their friends. Remember, online reputation matters.

8) Recognize efforts, and reward results.

Without motivation, people will hardly move. Sure, helping friends land a job or being loyal to a good company may incentivize employees to submit referrals, but that won’t be enough to sustain an ambitious talent acquisition strategy. People exert effort because they expect something out of it.

That being said, rewards entail costs, and a good employee referral program should have a well-thought-out budget and reward strategy. The key is to have compelling but sustainable rewards for good results and adequate incentives for keeping employees involved in the ERP.

Having creative, unique, or original rewards will go a long way. In addition to monetary prizes, you should also consider vacations, gadgets, free enrollment to a popular certifications program, and tickets to concerts, sporting events, or health spas. Acknowledge and incentivize active ERP participants even when their referrals are not hired. You can, for example, use a point-based gamification system that entitles active ERP participants to free breaks and treats at the nearest cafe.

Bottomline: make your rewards and incentives system so fun, compelling, and sustainable that employees will enjoy being involved in ERP for the long haul.

9) Try every method. Explore all channels.

There are countless ways to implement an employee referral program. However, you’ll limit your talent acquisition potential if you keep yourself from trying more than a few. Worse, you may not discover what works perfectly for your organization if you adopt the same methods repeatedly.

Some of the techniques used by smart talent acquisition teams include the following —

• Gamification of incentives to sustain employee engagement
• Linking ERP with performance assessments
• Referral sprints (extremely short but focused campaigns to create a shortlist of candidates)
• Quarterly referral contests (most referrals, most successful hires, funniest candidates, etc.) between groups, teams, or departments with significant rewards to the ultimate winner
• Head-turning rewards such as cars, home entertainment systems, and exotic travel packages to be awarded during special company events.

10) Make onboarding memorable.

Greet new hires via the referral program with a warm welcome. This extends their great experience during the recruiting process and reinforces the impression that your company truly values its talent. Provide relevant training and responsive coaching that will prepare new hires for the specific challenges associated with their functions and immerse them in the corporate culture.

Make a case for your brand throughout the employee journey. Make new hires feel at home and happy about joining your company so they’ll gladly participate in the referral program immediately.

11) Assess program performance. Improve. Repeat.

A functioning employee referral program that reels decent talent from the job market is terrific. But that is not enough. You always have to think long-term and consider emerging changes in the workplace. That entails making a self-assessment on whether the ERP is as successful as it can possibly be.

Establish your criteria for success. These could be metrics such as —

• Employee Engagement (percentage of employees participating in the ERP)
• Share of Referrals to the Number of Total Hires per Period
• Percentage of Good Referrals to Total Number of Referrals
• Performance of Employees Hired via ERP

Use other data-driven metrics to measure the success of your ERP implementation. When results do not meet your expectations, adopt other techniques, approaches, and technologies that may improve performance.

Reboot. Repeat.

Conclusion

Whether you are just starting to build an employee referral program or have been running one for a while, getting the results you expect don’t happen automatically. You may use the best HR technologies on the market but cannot automate success.

Talent is about humans, and recruiting talent into your company takes a team of motivated humans on the other side of the equation. By making your company a stakeholder in talent acquisition, you give everyone a proactive role in your company’s success.

Valuing people is the first step in strengthening an employer’s brand. If your brand sticks, your employees will more than gladly submit candidate referrals to a company they are proud of.

Need help getting started? Contact the team at Rainmakers to help with your recruiting efforts!

Attract Better Talent

Need help attracting talent to your company, particularly in the sales department? You’re not alone. Finding top sales talent is a significant pain for startups and larger companies, especially in 2018.

Without the right people to ideate, build, and sell your product, profit will be less than optimal. According to comprehensive research cited by McKinsey, superior talent is up to eight times (800%) more productive than average performers.

That is why the most valuable and successful organizations fiercely compete against each other in a relentless war for talent to find, hire, and retain elite professionals. Yet, 82% of Fortune 500 companies still believe they need to be more successful at hiring highly skilled people. Only two out of ten HR leaders from these big players think their recruitment and retention strategies work as planned.

Finding, attracting, and keeping such high performers on your roster will likely be a moonshot, especially if you’re running a fresh startup with bootstrapped resources. In contrast, the likelihood of attracting mediocre, unreliable, and crappy job applicants claiming to be competent sales professionals can go off the scales.

You wouldn’t want to waste time, money, and energy on these shenanigans, but if you send the wrong signals, hordes of these unwanted sales candidates can swarm your recruitment process like a plague. So make an honest assessment of your brand messaging, talent culture, and recruitment journey. You might be inadvertently drawing the wrong types of talent (e.g., good at making excuses, excellent at being mediocre, highly skilled in job hopping) under your banner.

7 Reasons Why Startups Are Not Attracting Talent (Especially in Tech Sales):

1. You’re looking for sales talent in the wrong places.
2. You’re using outdated recruitment practices.
3. You project a corporate brand that lacks excitement.
4. Your job ads are horrendous.
5. Your comp plans do not give reps enough incentives.
6. You convey a boring, tedious workplace reinforced by a gloomier career path.
7. You provide a poor recruitment experience for applicants.

1) You’re looking for sales talent in the wrong places.

The job market is in flux. Skills and talent are in dire shortage, and workplace demographics are also shifting. Baby boomers are retiring in droves, while millennials and younger generations are steadily taking over the reins. Moreover, competent sales practitioners are often busy doing what they’re good at — closing deals or successfully building rapport with clients without actively looking for jobs. As a result, you won’t reach them through traditional job boards or online postings. If you stick with conventional ways employers search for candidates, you’ll be left with the dregs of the job market.

TIP: Establish your company’s ideal sales candidate personas. Study the behavior of these personas and understand where you might reach potential candidates and how best to catch their attention. Use indirect but consequential messaging on social media channels (such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn) during industry events, conferences, and specialist sites that provide content, training, and other resources for sales professionals.

2) You’re using outdated recruitment practices.

The process is key to efficiency, but only when it evolves with emerging market realities. If you were to rely on snail-mailed resumes or posting job ads in the Sunday paper, for example, your competitors would have already onboarded a few good candidates well before you can set a job interview with the sub-par applicants they’ve already rejected. Implementing a one-size-fits-all recruitment strategy would also short-change your team, especially when you deploy specialized roles in your sales organization.

TIP: The world has gone digital, and you’ll lose out if you don’t have a catchy, upbeat presence on online job boards and other channels. But even that is just the bare minimum. As mentioned previously, don’t rely solely on conventional postings. There are other tools, such as applicant tracking systems (ATS) and cloud-based talent management platforms, that you should try out. Build a virtual talent pool on social media channels by publishing thought leadership articles relevant to sales practitioners.

3) You project a corporate brand that flat-out lacks excitement.

When you accept that your niche is unsexy, you doom your team to a mindset of irrelevance—your brand matters. If you go far afield with a brand and a disposition that shouts “boring,” you’ll repel excellent sales professionals who demand the best from employers in exchange for delivering outstanding performance. These elite sellers won’t settle for a timid, lackluster brand that doesn’t seem to care about the people behind it.

TIP: Millennials and younger generations place a high premium on “experience” and online reputation. Your corporate culture and “employer rating” will be at least as necessary to this subset of professionals as the compensation package you’ll offer them. The first step is establishing an open environment that values people and provides systemic support for their careers, health, and happiness. Doing this equips HR or a public relations team with solid authenticity to present a workplace culture worth thriving in. Next, aim for audience mindshare by which your company comes top-of-mind each time an excellent sales practitioner begins looking for a new employer.

4) Your job ads are horrendous.

Your job posts say a lot about how much you value your advertising role. Avoid using run-of-the-mill templates that don’t differentiate your brand, your needs, and the benefits you offer from other recruiters. Ambiguity, long-windedness, ridiculously high qualifications, triteness, grammatical errors, excessively formal tone, and disproportionate focus on the company can dissuade job seekers from further considering your post.

TIP: Be accurate, error-free, and upbeat when creating the copy for your job posts. Focus on what the job entails but fine-tune the message along a job seeker’s vantage point and emotional lens. Clarify both the requirements and the benefits. Don’t use a copy that sounds too formal or demanding. That will scare half of the job market. But don’t make it sound too easy either because that turns off achievers looking for challenging roles.

5) Your compensation plans need to give reps more incentives.

This is where the rubber hits the road. Most professionals place compensation near the top of their priorities, and any recruiter playing scrooge on compensation risks discouraging good sales candidates from applying. Worse than scrimping is creating the impression that you offer generous packages but can deliver a much smaller paycheck. Doing so causes major candidate frustration when they realize the truth and tarnishes their reputation.

TIP: Be honest when it comes to compensation. If you offer above-market rates, it’s better to mention the package in your post to draw more applicants. Otherwise, hold off disclosing your hand and focus on non-monetary benefits such as free training, a flexible schedule, and other perks you offer. The bottom line is to persuade excellent candidates that your company is worth working for without resorting to dirty tricks.

6) You convey a boring, tedious workplace reinforced by a gloomier career path.

Compensation is a significant part of the employment agreement, but it is not everything. If your organization seems peculiar, like the company parodied in Dilbert and other satirical comic strips/television series, you have a lot of house-cleaning. Tedious labor without the possibility of achieving a healthy work-life balance or getting sensible promotions drains motivation and productivity like a leaky faucet.

TIP: Make working with you both fun and fulfilling. Whenever applicable, send a clear message that salespeople are valued in your organization. Highlight advantages such as company-subsidized professional development programs, travel incentives, generous commissions, job meaning, impact, and clear career paths and growth avenues for sellers. If these are still on the wish list, think of other tangible ways to make your company worth working for.

7) You provide a poor recruitment experience for applicants.

Your hiring process provides a window to your workplace’s actual day-to-day conditions. A poor experience for applicants during this process portends a poor experience working for your company. If your recruitment process seems disorganized, unnecessarily takes a lot of time, and feels too convoluted, applicants will quickly lose the appetite to see the whole thing through.

TIP: Create a clear and effective recruitment plan. Map out each step and set expectations at the onset of the hiring process. Hence, candidates are always transparent and updated about their application status at any point in the process. Streamline interview questions and bridge any gap in communication across the engagement.

Key Takeaway: Good recruiters attract good candidates

You need competent salespeople to grow your startup. But they are hard to find and rarely come cheap. For highly skilled and motivated sellers to join your team, you must do your part as a responsible employer that values its people. And it all starts with the applicant journey as sales candidates go through the stages of your recruitment process. To hire the best people, offer the best value you can.

Are you looking to fill tech sales jobs and need help? Click here to get started with Rainmakers!

Avoiding Costly Mistakes

The cost of hiring the wrong sales candidate can be excruciating. In this article, we’ll explain how to avoid that.

A full roster is a standard to aim for, but that doesn’t guarantee you’re getting an optimal salesforce. New sales hires can either make or break your team’s performance. Good hires certainly will help you sustain growth and even improve overall performance down the road, but onboarding bad candidates can cause problems much worse than a simple headache.

In any business organization, recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and training job candidates entails substantial costs of time, money, and effort. A recent CareerBuilder survey estimates that the average price of one bad hire in the U.S. is $15,000. That barely includes severe business impacts such as reduced productivity, lost time to hire and train more deserving candidates, tarnished output quality (your brand!), and spikes in customer attrition rate.

Bad hires — especially those with harmful emotional baggage — can also cause team morale to plummet and significantly undercut the team’s ability to maintain standards, comply with timelines, and achieve goals. Finally, bad hires rarely stay put, forcing you to go through the recruitment cycle again (sigh) and spend even more precious resources in the process.

In the case of a sales organization, hiring bad candidates directly impacts revenues and your bottom line. Indeed, you wouldn’t want anything to mess up those figures. But, unfortunately, bad sales hires come and go more often than expected. That’s because of several factors inherent in sales recruitment:

1. Most people think sales are straightforward. However, desperate job seekers would try their luck applying for a sales opening even if they prefer another role.
2. Selling is not for everyone. A successful sales career requires unique skills, experience, personality, and mindset combinations.
3. Sales-related certifications exist, but these are rare and are seldom industry-mandated or required as qualifications in job ads.

Given this scenario, sales recruiters need the right tools and awareness that will help them prevent mediocre candidates from ever getting a foothold. Detecting red flags well before handing out a job offer is an excellent place to start.

To help you do that, here are some of the most common telltale signs of a wrong sales candidate:

1) Low interest, enthusiasm, or motivation.

An applicant who doesn’t demonstrate enthusiasm about the role she is aiming for may show the same disinterest when making pitches on the sales floor. Of course, it is possible that your initial impression is inaccurate or that the applicant is only momentarily unmotivated. Still, even minor optics and small lapses can become real disadvantages later. As a sales recruiter, you’ll always want (visibly and genuinely) passionate, driven professionals on board.

2) Hates doing homework.

Did the candidate research your company, services, and critical movers before sending his application or attending an interview? If not, ignore the fool. If a candidate chooses not to spend time preparing, he is not worth your time. After all, selling success primarily depends on how prepared you are when engaging prospects. Only sales professionals willing to do their homework can dare hope to achieve targets.

3) Lacks basic sales competency.

Selling techniques and advanced methodologies can be learned. But don’t settle for candidates who lack even the rudimentary skill to sell themselves — especially when better candidates are around. For example, if a candidate can’t formulate a decent elevator speech to get noticed, hiring one will short-change your team.

Moreover, avoid candidates who can’t seem to listen and those who ask senseless questions. Conversely, block anyone who doesn’t ask any questions at all. Selling is a conversation; active listening and asking the right questions are essential to successful customer engagement.

4) Unprofessional behavior.

Excessive spelling/grammatical errors, sharing sensitive information about former employers, immature mannerisms, disturbing posts on social media, coarse/impolite language, and dressing way off the norm are some signs of unprofessional behavior. You’re not running a police state and have a reasonable tolerance for deviant behavior, but there’s a limit to what a competent sales organization can take. Sales is methodical and adheres to norms and best practices, primarily in B2B. Going well beyond acceptable thresholds will cause an unwanted impact on your brand or performance.

5) Bad punctuality and time management.

Managing time and respecting other people’s schedules may seem so old school, but punctuality remains high on the list of critical selling skills. You will always want sales professionals who meet timelines and rarely need to cram at the very last leg of the quarter to meet quotas.

Showing up late during client engagements shows that you lack motivation and respect for other people’s time. Few customers will be willing to wait for perennially delayed demos when a rival vendor can deliver the goods immediately. After all, the digital economy unfolds in an age of instant gratification.

6) Excessive job hopping.

Frequently switching roles or employers shows candidates struggle to follow a coherent, focused career track. Think twice before investing time and money to hire and train this type of applicant. The costs of hiring and losing workers are becoming prohibitive in highly competitive markets like B2B tech sales. In addition, frequent job hopping may also be a sign of personality flaws in the candidate that you wouldn’t want to deal with as a sales leader.

7) Underperforming career track.

On the other hand, you also need to flag candidates who have more or less held the same role and pay grade in the same company for many years. Something is wrong if a professional struggles to get a promotion for a long time and still chooses to stay. You would want highly driven sales professionals who care about their career advancement and possess reasonable ambition.

8) Lies during the interview.

Perform due diligence if a sales candidate’s online profile or submitted resume seems too good to be true. Of course, you want excellent and highly motivated sellers on your team, but you want the real deal, not counterfeit con artists. Understandably, people would like to show you their best foot forward, but excessive self-promotion to misleading and lying to recruiters is a glaring red flag.

Validate claimed certifications, degrees, and sales achievements, especially when dollar signs and other verifiable metrics accompany these. Lying about relevant experiences, even in minor aspects such as the number of months an applicant worked in a particular company, is a big deal for companies with high ethical standards. Remember, trust is the most valuable currency in sales.

9) High levels of negativity and vibes of disgruntlement.

Happy, well-balanced, and passionate people are what you need for your salesforce. Your door should be locked for candidates who demonstrate toxic levels of negativity and emotional baggage even at the onset. Applicants who regularly bad-mouth former employers and co-workers shouldn’t find a way to join your team. Candidates who think they are always the best, show excessive aggression, and take credit even for achievements for which they have minimal contributions should be shown the nearest exit. Finally, chronic complainers and whiners won’t thrive in sales — a world where getting rejected multiple times is just part of the daily grind.

10) Lack of legitimate references.

You want candidates who are proud of their professional or academic achievements and who can readily have someone authorized to verify their credentials. Sometimes, the standard practice is to provide character or professional references only upon a recruiter’s request. That is understandable, but what amounts to a red flag is when the only connection submitted is the candidate’s cousin. Always prefer candidates whose applications are backed by solid and relevant references, especially when you know or can readily reach out to these persons.

Avoid Making Bad Sales Hires… Once And For All

Having incompetent or unmotivated sellers in your team wastes valuable resources and negatively impacts morale and performance. Of course, the ideal scenario is to have a reliable system that prevents sub-par applicants from ever getting on board. However, the preceding red flags should at least alert you of common types of unwanted candidates.

Here are some final tips to remember/implement:

1. Don’t be desperate. Don’t settle for candidates you feel will cause headaches later on.
2. Create and adopt an Ideal Candidate Profile for each role in your sales team.
3. Do your homework. Perform background checks. Go beyond online profiles and resumes and snoop around to verify what candidates claim in their applications.
4. Conduct preliminary phone interviews to spare yourself the agony of actual, in-person interviews with behaviorally flawed or unprofessional candidates.
5. Partner with specialist recruiters or reliable talent scouts in your particular field.

Ready to find top candidates for your organization? Let Rainmakers help! Contact us to get started!

How To Be A Top Salesperson

When running a sales organization, every manager knows that there are different kinds of players you can have on your team. They usually come in 3 categories: the A-Players, the B-Players, and the C-Players. For the most part, people seem to agree on what defines a C-player and a B-player. In this article, we’ll uncover what makes an A-Player in sales and why they tend to get the best opportunities in sales.

C-Players

The C-players are the people that are usually a little lower in the ranks because, as we’d expect, they do the bare minimum to get by. They’re the ones who seem to get their work done just barely one time. They also tend to make excuses and need more attention/coaching during 1 on 1’s and quarterly reviews than others to get their performance up to a satisfactory level.

As a manager, these are the players you want to avoid because they’ll be the ones that can turn into time sinks and even negatively impact your team’s culture and productivity. As an individual contributor, this is the category you want to avoid falling into. It will destroy your chances at upward mobility, and even more so, if things happen to take a turn for the worst, you’ll likely be among the first on the chopping block.

B-Players

B-Players are consistent and reliable performers. You can rely on them to get the job done correctly and in a timely fashion when something needs to get done. They have a solid understanding of what is expected of them and do what it takes to deliver on that expectation. B-players need little to no coaching but can keep their productivity at the level it needs.

However, there may be a little pushback when something requires them to go above and beyond their job description or put in more hours than is necessary. Regardless, these are still people you want to keep on your team as they are essential for maintaining a well-run and organized business.

A-Players

It’s well accepted that these individuals go above and beyond duty. These are the “5-star recruits” that you want to attract and hold onto as long as you possibly can because they are the ones that can truly help move your business forward.

The qualities of an A-player are more widely debated because different characteristics are more important depending on the manager and industry the individual is working. That said, here’s a short list of qualities that would apply universally to an A player regardless of someone’s industry.

1. They reach for stretch goals and hold themselves to a higher standard.

Stretch goals are those objectives that are just beyond our reach, and so many of us choose not to set them. Instead, we may opt for something more achievable to feel good about ourselves when we meet our goals. A-players, however, do not share this same restraint. Instead, they put aside all fears and purposefully push themselves beyond their limits, understanding that it’s only when they are forced out of their comfort zone that they can grow the most.

Another reason A players are so valuable is the higher standard they hold for themselves. Unlike a B-player whose lack of motivation may influence what they see in a C-player colleague and ultimately have their productivity drop, the A player will keep chugging at their average pace. They are utterly undeterred by others and entirely motivated by their desire to succeed. Best of all, they have the complete opposite effect on the team’s culture and productivity that a C-player has. Where a C-player may negatively impact a B-player’s productiveness, an A-player can bring up the motivational energy in both the B-players and C-players.

2. They understand the importance of teamwork and communication.

It’s probably not uncommon for an A-player to prefer getting work done independently as they usually see themselves as the most capable people for the job. Still, at the same time, they’ll recognize when something is beyond their bandwidth and will effectively employ the help of their colleagues to get the job done. For example, in an organization that has a role for a Solutions Consultant (SC) or Solutions Engineer (SE), an A-player Sales Rep will recognize that they don’t need to invest all their time and effort in preparing for an upcoming demo. Instead, they’ll make more effective use of their time by focusing on managing the relationship with their prospect and effectively communicating the wants, needs, and pains to their SC/SE so that they can be topics of focus during the presentation.

They’re also the ones who often make that extra effort to ensure everyone is on the same page.

When dealing with prospects, they ask questions like

“Am I understanding that correctly?” or “So you’re telling me x, y and z. Did I hear that right?”.

They understand that sometimes you need to slow things down to speed things up, so they put in the extra effort to make sure that they are as straightforward as possible in their communication to avoid any confusion and issues down the line.

Jon Miller, Co-founder of both Marketo and Engagio, once said,

“The most successful reps are often the most paranoid. They are always on the lookout for what could go wrong and take proactive measures to prevent them.”

A-players also understand that recognition for good work does not have to be a zero-sum game. When the team works towards a successful endeavor, they readily give credit where credit is due, understanding that this builds trust and more effective collaboration amongst the group in the future. They truly embody what the definition of a “team player” is.

3. They are in tune with the company’s vision and take initiative.

A-players don’t need to be told what to do. At any given point, they understand the company’s goals and objectives and take action towards these goals of their own accord. They don’t worry about the minimum metrics required of them by the company and instead keep their focus on results and the bigger picture. They understand that reaching their hundred dials or two hundred emails will ultimately amount to almost nothing if they’re not being sent to the right people with the right message and towards the right objectives.

Additionally, these people aren’t afraid to act on their own and don’t feel the need to always ask for permission. These individuals have the confidence to do so because they can put themselves in management’s shoes and understand what the best courses of action are moving forward. This is mainly what makes them attractive to their managers in the future as candidates for promotions and is usually why they’re even considered in the first place.

4. They can put the good of the company before their own.

This doesn’t mean that A-players are people you can easily take advantage of. On the contrary, that’s a surefire way to ensure you lose these A-players. Since A-players are so capable, they’re usually brilliant people with a strong level of intuition. Therefore, once they sense that they’re being treated or paid unfairly, they’ll be quick to find another opportunity that better suits their standards. A-players may choose to focus on their careers over their personal lives, but they won’t stand to have it imposed on them.

Instead, what this means is that A players are those who can take a look at a situation and play through in their heads what the repercussions of their decisions will be. For example, they may understand they could make a false promise to a potential customer to make the sale and make a quick buck quickly. However, they’re able to foresee that in doing so, they are setting the company and customer success team up for failure and therefore opt for the high road of doing right by the customer, even if it means offering a discount or preceding the deal altogether if there truly isn’t a good fit.

They’re also the ones that aren’t afraid to lend a helping hand to those in need. If a teammate is struggling to fill their pipeline and actively voices a request for help, these guys are willing to take a moment to provide some advice on how to get their colleagues back on the right track. I’ve seen many A-players take the time to help their colleagues practice their pitches and demos, even offering to join them on their following calls as support, often without expecting anything in return.

Find an A-Player

A-players in sales stand out not just for their ability to achieve impressive results, but more importantly, for their foresight, integrity, and commitment to the long-term success of both their company and their customers. By prioritizing ethical practices and thoughtful decision-making over short-term gains, these top performers ensure sustainable growth and foster trust, both within their teams and in the relationships they build with clients.

Their approach goes beyond mere sales tactics; it reflects a deeper understanding of the value of honesty and strategic thinking in creating lasting business success and strong customer relationships. Ultimately, these A-players embody the ideal blend of skill, ethics, and vision that sets the benchmark for excellence in the sales industry.

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