The Sales Development Blog

Your place for the latest scoop on sales trends, techniques, and career advice.

Matching Sales Talent with the Right Opportunity

Earlier this year, we debuted memoryBlue Direct Hire, a service aimed squarely at closing the sales talent hiring gap. As technology continues to transform the world we live in, the demand for high-performing sales professionals continues to increase across the board.

But finding skilled professional sellers is no easy task. Unearthing the right individual at the right moment taxes internal resources. Yet using an outside vendor to fill these open sales positions also carries an element of risk for hiring firms.

Reducing that risk and exceeding client expectations is precisely what the memoryBlue Direct Hire practice is designed to accomplish. Specifically, our talent placement model:

  • Creates a 1-year performance guarantee – Payments for our placed candidates take place on a monthly basis and they stop immediately if the new hire departs for any reason at all.
  • Reduces cash flow concerns – the monthly payment component limits upfront costs and it allows clients to manage budgets in a far more “CFO-friendly” way.

How is this new model being received?

The short answer: great!

Direct Hire – By the Numbers

In just six months of existence, memoryBlue Direct Hire has produced some eye-popping results and our clients are reaping the rewards. These numbers don’t surprise us – yet they are figures too good not to share.

Successful Candidate Placement Rate: 76%

memoryBlue’s contingency-based talent acquisition approach currently yields a massive 76% successful candidate placement rate. That is nearly four times higher than the commonly accepted industry average for contingency placements (roughly 20%).

This tells us that the sales professionals we send over as candidates are highly qualified and well-suited for the hiring firm. It makes sense. After all, our talent team hires close to 300 sales pros annually into internal positions and we interview, evaluate and consider hundreds more.

We know a good fit when we see one.

That number is encouraging, but we’re not stopping there in our quest to make perfect matches. We’re close to launching an entire program dedicated specifically to measuring the quality of these candidates in the eyes of our clients. Functioning like the memoryBlue Lead Scoring Program, we’re going to track, measure and continuously improve the Direct Hire practice based on the explicit direction of clients.

Average Time to Fill Open Opportunities: 28 Days

According to this piece from Workable, the average time to fill open sales and business development roles in the U.S. is 48 days.

Our talent team is crushing that number to the tune of a mere 28 days. Why is that metric important?

Open jobs cost big money. Every day an open position sits unfilled costs companies hundreds if not thousands of dollars. And if that position is a sales role, the cost could escalate well beyond those totals.

The memoryBlue Direct Hire program fills open sales roles fast with quality candidates. Everyone involved wins in this equation.

Average Candidate Placements (Per Month, Per Recruiter): 3

The typical recruiter makes 1-2 successful placements per month. Our recruiters are making three. This is mainly because we have a well-oiled talent machine with deep and specific sales expertise. Attention to detail and active listening, to both the candidate and the client, are skills that allow our talent team to achieve success like this.

Finding, hiring and developing sales talent is a core strength of our business. And the rapid Direct Hire success is simply an extension of that strength.

memoryBlue hires sales pros from coast to coast, with offices located in Austin, Boston, Silicon Valley and the DC Metro area. In fact, we hire almost an SDR per day all year long. And our thorough vetting process has been sharpened over nearly two decades of practice. Screening for sales aptitude, frank discussions about short and long-term goals, sales role plays and more are all core components of our internal hiring practice.

In addition to closing the sales talent gap, Direct Hire clients often go the extra mile and take advantage of memoryBlue Academy once a new sales team member is in place. The Academy offers a seamless way to ensure new hires are well-grounded in the fundamental best practices of sales development. Whether the curriculum serves as a sales technique refresher course or fills in knowledge gaps, dedicated professional sales training is the best way to guarantee every new hire hits the ground running.

Our multi-factorial approach and commitment to end-to-end sales talent solutions translates to sales success for our clients. This range of services and level of experience is simply hard to find when it comes to using a third-party source for sales talent acquisition assistance.

If you’re looking for the next big step in your sales career, or if you’re a high-tech firm searching for a qualified addition to your sales team, contact us today and get started.

Kevin Harris is the Director of Marketing at memoryBlue. A seasoned professional with over 23 years of experience in public relations, marketing and content management, Kevin oversees all major internal and external communications programs for the firm. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Communications from James Madison University.

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