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    3 Analytics Tools to Find the Best Sales Reps for Hire

    Contents

      “If you want to make good sales, you have to be… honest!” - such was an occasional tip I received from an American taxi driver who happened to be a paint store owner from Mexico in the past. And building a sales team from scratch is a tough row to hoe!

      At that moment, I didn’t have as much search automation experience as I have now. But today I’m here to get you started with some life-altering tools that will change your whole outlook on what hiring sales people is like!

      While reading this easy-to-understand step-by-step walkthrough, you’ll learn:

      • How to export the best sales reps’ CVs from LinkedIn to Excel in bulk
      • How to analyze CV data and make the most of it
      • How to automate the process of building sales teams
      • And how to finally separate the wheat from the chaff!

      Are you a sales company owner looking to hire a competent and energetic sales team or to improve your existing one? Then this article is for you!

      It doesn’t matter what you sell - paint or wallpaper, chocolate or potatoes, smartphones or software, or maybe even not goods but services. You can apply this approach to absolutely any sales sphere!

      I’ll show you what to do exactly by using a paint store that needs qualified salespeople as an example. Feel free to apply my tips to your sales team search!

      All of the tools will come from Botster, which means that to use them you’ll need to create a free account on Botster first:

      Let’s paint an attractive picture of the sales representative hiring process!


      Hiring sales reps on LinkedIn

      The first and most demanded database where the best-performing sales reps hide is for sure LinkedIn. This social network features thousands of sales reps, which makes it too time-consuming and demotivating to browse through all these profiles in an attempt to find the best sales teams for hire.

      Thanks God (or, rather, thanks BOT 🤖), now you can export LinkedIn profile data into a spreadsheet. This will spare you the time for:

      • Browsing tons of LinkedIn accounts
      • Looking for the information that is probably absent from the accounts
      • Sorting the accounts manually
      • Analyzing candidates’ data and choosing the best ones

      I have quite a number of tools that can scrape LinkedIn. I’ll guide you through three bots that are the most suitable ones for the task of hiring a sales team for your company.


      Hiring a sales rep with keyword search

      Tool 1 - Exporting sales reps’ LinkedIn profile URLs

      First, we’ll need relevant people’s LinkedIn profile URLs. The LinkedIn Search Scraper will extract them by keyword.

      Using this bot as well as other bots requires no coding knowledge, no desktop installation and no website implementation.

      Here is a short tutorial on how to hire a sales team using this bot:

      • Open the LinkedIn Search Scraper’s start page:

      • Name your job. I’ll call mine Hiring sales representatives for the Paint Store:

      • In the ‘Search type’ field, select ‘People’:

      • Specify your location:

      • Select your industry. In my case, the ‘Building materials’ category is the closest one to paints:

      • Specify how many LinkedIn profiles you would like the bot to scrape.

      The more profiles you scrape - the broader your opportunities for hiring a sales representative with ideal professional skills.

      • Enter your keyword:

      • Select how you’d like the bot to notify you once the job is done:

      • And start the bot!

      By the way, scraping LinkedIn search results to hire sales representatives cost me just 30 cents:

      Let’s take a look at our first results:

      The bot has exported the first 200 sales reps who are currently selling or are eager to sell building materials like paint 🖌️ Discover more tips on how to search for candidates on LinkedIn and find the best sales reps with the help of this bot.

      You don’t need to save this table: just copy the URLs from column B - we’ll need them for the next step 👇


      Tool 2 - Exporting sales reps’ LinkedIn profile data

      Let’s launch another bot called the Linkedin Profile Scraper. It will perform a LinkedIn search without login and export all-embracing LinkedIn sales rep information that is absolutely indispensable when building sales team force. In particular, the bot will extract:

      • Initial LinkedIn profile URL
      • Avatar URL
      • Background image URL
      • Name
      • Headline
      • Summary
      • Occupation
      • Country
      • City
      • State
      • Languages
      • Connections
      • Accomplishments - honors
      • Accomplishments - organizations
      • School - degree
      • School - field
      • School - school name
      • School - start date
      • School - end date
      • Job - title
      • Job - description
      • Job - company name
      • Job - company URL
      • Job - location
      • Job - start date
      • Job - end date

      Here is what needs to be done to hire sales team force with this smart automation tool:

      • Copy the LinkedIn profile URLs retrieved above:

      • Open the LinkedIn Profile Scraper’s start page and paste the URLs copied into a special field:

      • Specify if you would like to scrape sales reps’ working experience, and if yes, then how many jobs you would like to export.

      For my imaginary paint store, I’ll definitely scrape the sales reps’ latest jobs and analyze them. See my tips below ⬇️ on how to use this valuable information.

      • Specify if you would like the bot to scrape education, volunteer experience, licenses and certificates.

      To my mind, paint sales reps must be well-educated, and having a license is a huge advantage, whereas volunteer experience is less important:

      • You can also scrape other accomplishments if necessary.

      I’ll leave this field empty:

      • Launch the bot.

      Watch me explain how to hire sales reps and people of other professions using this bot:

      Now let’s take a look at the results!

      Ooops… The number of the columns retrieved is so large that they don’t fit into one screenshot (see the full list of the extracted data above ⬆️). The more data we have - the better sales reps we are going to choose!


      Sales team building tips

      Here are some tips on how to select the best sales rep for hire using the data retrieved above:


      Tip 1 - Mind the geography

      If you want to hire sales rep staff to work offline, my first tip will be: sort the table by the columns called ‘State’ and ‘City’ and delete all candidates who live too far away without hesitation.

      For example, if my paint store is located in Texas, there is no sense in reading the CVs of candidates living in Massachusetts:


      Tip 2 - Read summaries

      In the ‘Summary’ column, LinkedIn users describe themselves in a couple of sentences. Read these descriptions carefully - they are a real treasure trove of information for employers hiring sales representative staff!

      While reading your potential sales reps’ summaries, ask yourself the following questions:

      • Does the summary sound positive / negative / neutral?
      • Does the candidate sound motivated and inspired to work in sales?
      • Which industries has this candidate worked for?
      • Has the candidate enlisted any skills that I find important?
      • Does this sales rep seem to be capable of building good relationships with customers?

      To me, Christopher Sledge sounds the most appealing. He is emotional and apparently loves his work:


      Tip 3 - Check education

      Finding your own path doesn’t always come easy. My alleged paint sales reps studied history (like Shawna Johnson), horses (like Matt Hoagland), and even healthcare (like Cristopher Sledge). Some don’t even want to reveal on LinkedIn what they actually studied (like Calvin Coolke). 😏

      But each of them has finally discovered a salesperson’s talent in them!

      So, who am I to choose? While hiring sales team force, I’ll consider:

      • School names: someone who studied at a prestigious university is definitely a more attractive candidate than someone who only graduated from a college. (No offense meant!)
      • Degrees: I will prefer a person with an MBA to a Bachelor. Why? Because learning never exausts the mind!
      • The number of diplomas: the more - the better! Why? Because I have deep respect for lifelong learners!

      Apparently, Christopher Sledge is the leader. He studied in several universities and has 3 diplomas including an MBA whereas everybody else has 1 or 2. The more spheres a person is experienced in - the broader his horizons! So I’m scoring Christopher one more point:


      Tip 4 - Check licenses

      Who of the candidates has the ‘License/Certification’ column filled in? And who has it empty? Sorting the table by this column will help me find the most goal-oriented paint selling pros and hire sales representative staff of the highest quality.

      To my mind, truly devoted professionals are always seeking to improve their skills. Christopher Sledge (again!) and Matt Hoagland are the leaders:


      Tip 5 - Analyze job titles and descriptions

      While building an inside sales team for your company, get to know what your candidates already did in the past.

      Read the ‘Job title’ and especially the ‘Job description’ columns. They speak better than mere skills lists!

      In this round, Shawna Johnson is the winner! She has real (and successful) experience in dealing with customers. A valuable skill!


      Tip 6 - Analyze the candidates’ previous employers

      To hire independent sales reps and win, take a look at the companies that your potential sales rep worked for in the past. Are these well-established trustworthy businesses? Or promising startups? Or… some unreliable fly-by-night organizations? 🧐

      You can either look for each company manually in Google Search or use another bot to automate and speed up this task.


      Tool 3 - Employer analysis

      The bot that is capable of retrieving all-embracing company information from LinkedIn is called the Linkedin Company Info Scraper.

      This bot can easily grab the following details that can be used to hire a sales team, to search for business by phone number and for many other business purposes:

      • Company LinkedIn profile URL
      • Company name
      • Tagline
      • Description
      • Website
      • Phone
      • Industry
      • Company type (e.g. public company)
      • Founded year
      • Funding data
      • Company size (the number of employees)
      • Company size on LinkedIn
      • Follower count
      • Country
      • Geographic area
      • City
      • Postal code
      • Address
      • Universal name ID
      • Profile picture URL
      • Profile background picture URL

      Here is a short guide on how to hire a sales rep effectively with this bot:

      Remember that there are several columns with company LinkedIn profile URLs. That’s because all our candidates worked in several companies, and we want to analyze (and copy) all of them:

      • Open the LinkedIn Company Info Scraper’s start page
      • Paste the LinkedIn company profile URLs and launch the bot:

      Watch me explain how this bot works in detail:

      In the resulting table, the following columns carry the most important information for the employers hiring sales people:

      • ‘Industry’: did your candidates work in the companies that operate in the same branch as yours?
      • ‘Founded year’: the longer the company’s history, the more trustworthy it is.
      • ‘Company size’: is it a large and successful company, or the one that is just starting out?
      • ‘Follower count’: the more followers this company has on LinkedIn - the better its reputation with the people.

      It seems like all our candidates chose reliable employers to work for in the past. One of the companies is over 100 years old! Many of them have over 1000 employees.

      And, which is even more important: all these trustworthy employers were interested in having my potential paint sales reps as part of their team for many years. That’s a good sign!

      In this round, I’m giving one point to everyone 🙂


      Final choice of a sales team for hire

      Basing on all the data we’ve analyzed, who would you choose?

      My favs are Christopher Sledge (since he is the most educated and well-experienced sales rep) and Shawna Johnson (since she has real-life experience in dealing with customers).

      Time to tell them:

      I don’t ask much -
      I just want YOU!

      And send them my irresistibly compelling offer.

      All our candidates are currently employed, meaning that your offer has to be really attractive. You don’t know how much they earn and what working conditions they have. To make them interested, be generous, honest and open to negotiation!

      I wish you to hire a sales team of your dream!