A Sales Talent Network Like No Other

Our vast network of sales talent allows our clients exclusive access to off-market candidates who are not active in their sales search. This means that we are able to access top talent in current roles that are high performers not actively applying to new sales positions. Our sales recruiters build relationships with sales professionals that deliver a compounding value effect to our clients who benefit from the social connections our team shares. These relationships drive referrals, serve as endorsements, and allow our team to uncover impactful and diverse talent opportunities.

In today’s dynamic talent environment, preserving sales talent is crucial, and compensation alone is no longer enough. In this ultra competitive environment, making employees feel special and valued as individuals, and recognizing their unique contributions are among the most-important aspects of mitigating attrition. In a recent report by Harvard Business Review in it's Talent management segment, Roger Martin explains that fostering a culture of open communication is key to retaining star performers.

Not only are these aspects crucial for retaining existing talent, but they also play a key role in building an attractive and supportive environment for potential recruits, thereby boosting the overall effectiveness of the recruiting process.

As the foundation of every successful sales team, salespeople are the most-critical component of any growing enterprise. With unique talent acquisition capabilities, Edison & Black is a truly differentiated sales recruiting solution. We build high performing sales forces that possess and embody the fundamental traits that we have determined to be most-important when building effective sales teams. We value every connection we make at Edison & Black; valuing real connections allows our team to build trust and rapport with our sales talent that leads to lasting relationships that the competition lacks. These networks are the single most important piece of what makes our sales talent acquisition practice so effective.

A Highly Selective Sales Recruiting Process

Edison & Black’s sales talent acquisition team focused on a highly selective recruiting process. With a highly stringent screening process, typically only one out of every five candidates pass through first-round interviews and make it to our clients for submission. By following a strict candidate profile, we only submit sales candidates who meet our pre-defined criteria for each role. This ensures that our clients’ time is best spent on candidates who we can be confident are a close match to the criteria that has been established.

Our team of sales recruiters prioritizes quality over quantity when sourcing for top sales talent. With a refined process for identifying candidates who closely align with our clients sales goals, we’re able to zero-in on the qualities that most-closely fit with the most critical traits defined for each role. What makes Edison & Black’s sales recruiting process unique is an attention to detail. While some sales staffing agencies will place a high importance on categorical or industry experience, we believe that also including a strong weight on transferable skill-sets or qualities yields a more effective candidate pool.

The Mentality of Effective Sales Candidates

Top sales talent understands that sales can be a challenging but rewarding career. Inherent to effective salespeople is understanding that rejection is part of sales. We look for talent that is comfortable with this and can speak to experiences that are demonstrative to this notion. According to Gartner, today's sales leaders face significant challenges in identifying and attracting talent. This is especially true when limited to traditional hiring criteria. This prompts the need for our clients to evaluate and diversify their talent pools. It's also important to consider alternative recruiting profiles, and to recognize the potential of candidates from diverse industries.

Resilience is key, and Edison & Black believes that mentality is likely to be a predominant piece of what will indicate the candidate’s likeness to succeed in a challenging or fast-paced sales environment such as our clients often operate within. Whether it be an entry-level sales role or a sales management position, we believe that mentality is key. Leveraging a unique interview process, we seek to understand our candidates’ mindset and sales philosophies as we work to identify their ideal fit in terms of a role where both the client and the candidate can succeed.

By uncovering both active and passive candidate qualities that indicate their thought processes, sales styles, or methodologies, we’re able to uncover insights that are beyond what could be obtained from a resume. These attributes are the foremost indicator of a candidate’s likelihood to succeed in a corresponding sales role.

Crafting an Elite Sales Team

Our sales talent acquisitions team is fully dedicated to sales staffing. By working with some of the top performers in sales ranging from venture growth startups to large enterprise organizations, our team has a unique insight as to what drives a high functioning sales environment.

Situational screening is one of our most-effective tools for sorting through the highest quality of sales candidates. This method of interviewing uncovers how potential candidates think, problem-solve and react to real-world situations. By asking experience-based questions, we are also able to parse through the difference in implied skills to demonstrative experience. This technique also provides an opportunity to understand how talent would fit into an organization from a cultural perspective. By working with sales teams who have strong definitions of what success looks like in their organization currently, we’re able to better align soft-skills and behavioral traits of sales leaders by matching them to talent that fits these characteristics – all of which are uncovered during this stage in the interview process.

Sales Staffing for Dynamic Teams

Edison & Black is deeply committed to architecting elite sales teams; a notion that extends far - beyond what could be otherwise expected from traditional hiring practices. Our sales talent division knows that modern sales teams move quickly and that change should always be anticipated. Finding adaptable sales talent is critical to ensuring success and that prospective candidates can thrive in fast-moving or changing environments. Research by McKinsey & Company shows that the landscape of sales professionals is quickly changing – and that companies need to adapt their talent acquisition strategies accordingly. Sales roles with multiple or hybrid functions are likely to become more common. With that, companies need to place greater attention on creating environments where the sourcing methods and channels for identifying sales talent are more flexible. This is why we believe that recruiting today’s talent is more critical than ever.

Sales staffing inherently requires a special attention on people. Our in-depth assessment of talent considers multiple facets of combined relevant experience, culture fit, and adaptability. With no less than three steps in each candidate’s interview process, we ensure that when speaking to prospective hires, we can be confident that the time our clients spend with each individual is going to be both productive and worthwhile.

By approaching prospective sales talent with an alternative perspective using proprietary interview and screening techniques, Edison & Black produces a more refined talent pool that more narrowly matches our preferred candidate traits. We follow a repeatable and proven process to determine a ratio that measures relevant candidate experience and the potential to adapt into a role of which has applicable or transferable experience. This ensures that we make the most of the addressable talent pool and avoid overlooking highly capable and qualified candidates who may adapt well to new and challenging sales environments. While taking into consideration each candidate's unique ability to sell, we will often take a deep dive with our applicants and source candidates to understand their unique metrics including but not limited to, quota attainment, sales growth, client retention, time-to-close, sales cycle durations and other KPIs that demonstrate an effective selling ability.

An Immense Dedication to Candidate Experience

With an extreme emphasis on the candidate experience, we deeply value each candidate’s interaction with both our recruiters and the client. We place a high value on ensuring that each prospective sales candidate we speak to is highly informed throughout the interview process and that each touch point is an opportunity to build strong rapport. By ensuring that our candidates have positive interactions, we’re able to build stronger and more meaningful relationships, which in return help us build and solidify our sales talent network.

Referrals and relationships are where the majority of our talent derives from when seeking to fill the sales roles we take on. By relying on our network as opposed to pure sourcing channels, we are able to find talent that is not active on their job search, ensuring we’re finding high-caliber sales candidates who are finding success in their current roles, but may simply be seeking new challenges or opportunities. By combining candidate experience with client experience, we hold true to our core value of building people-first relationships. An added component to providing positive candidate fostering experience is more engaged client-to-candidate relationships, leading to a higher qualified candidate output and greater efficiency in the talent acquisition process.

High Velocity Sales Recruiting

When it comes to scaling sales teams, speed is critical. With many of our clients operating in fast-growing environments, sourcing sales talent is often one of the greatest impediments to achieving growth targets. We believe that by deploying a proven and repeatable sales staffing process, we can ensure that our clients remain ahead of their targets by utilizing Edison & Black’s highly-effective sales talent solutions. Our team of dedicated sales recruiters are highly-effective at building quality pipelines that enable effective sourcing for high-volume sales roles. Capable of supporting large and complex sales organizations, we have the ability to source for multiple sales roles and functions in high numbers simultaneously. With a deep understanding of the complexities involved in staffing multiple geographies or disciplines, Edison & Black has diverse expertise in achieving successful outcomes in dynamic environments.

Embedded Sales Talent Offerings

With the ability to dynamically adapt to the unique needs of our client’s organizations, Edison & Black offers highly-customized talent and sourcing capabilities conducive to our clients objectives. Our recruiters are highly adept at embedding into our client’s organizations and adapting to their processes to ensure a seamless staffing experience for both clients and candidates alike. With the ability and experience to utilize various technologies, applicant tracking systems and other talent enablement tools we make working with our recruiting teams simple and easy.